Abounaddara and the global visual politics of the “right to the image”
JoscelynJurich
In a 2014 talk at the American University of Beirut published in the online journal Jadiliyya, CharifKiwan, co-founder and spokesperson for the anonymous Syrian film collective Abounadarra, states theimportance of transgression fortheir work. “This is how we discovered cinema in Syria,” referring to Syrian filmmaker Georges Khoury’sJe meursdeuxfoisje t’aime (1975). "In the public space of our society, we discovered that transgression was possible.” In their own work, Abounaddara has translated transgression into generative unsettling of its audience. In Kiwan’s words: “We want the viewer to be disturbed…we chose short format [films] because we wanted to punch people.” Founded in Damascus in 2010, Abounaddara has posted a new short on Vimeo and distributed it via social media every Friday since April 2011, the early days of the Syrian popular uprising. Working with limited equipment, no regular funding and often under very dangerous conditions, Abounaddara has termed its work “emergency cinema”. The term recalls one of the group’s vital influences, Walter Benjamin, who envisioned artistic collectives as necessary and potentially effective responses to political violence. “The idea is…a cinematographic form adapted to the situation that we are living today in Syria,” Kiwan explained. “We’re in a confrontation between society and the state,” he said. “The representation of society is unjust. Unjust because the regime doesn’t recognize society, and the media in general don’t represent society in an accurate and fair way.” Abounaddara’s pointed and visceral form of media criticism is realized through their “emergency” form, produced during the sustained period of emergency that is the Syrian conflict.
This paper will demonstrate how Abounaddara’s work transgresses and subverts international and national media coverage of the Syrian conflict by consciously employing Walter Benjamin’s concept of film as needing to hit “the spectator like a bullet…acquiring a tactile quality” and why their approach in a global media context. For Abounaddara, filmpossesses this rousing potentiality that is both physiological and psychological. In the context of the humanitarian and human rights emergency that is the Syrian conflict, their work seeks to transgress and transform any trace of sentimentality or pity in its viewersand refuses to elicit these affective responses.Following Benjamin, their films aim to“destroy illusion” and “paralyze the audience’s readiness for empathy.”At the same time, the collective has emphasized “the right to the image,” putting forth a manifesto-like call for dignity in images shown from the Syrian conflict, echoed by filmmakers such as LiwaaYazji, filmmaker of “Haunted’ (2014) (Maskoon).
One of Lila Abu-Lughod’s central questions in her classic essay “Writing Culture” (1996) is also Abounadarra’s and Yazji’s concern: “Are there ways to write about lives so as to constitute others as less other?” (Abu-Lughod 1996:473). Like Sekula (Sekula 1978), the collective argues for an active political resistance against the market-driven mainstream media’s use of what Sontag called the “unstoppability” (Sontag 2013) of digital images of violence and especially images of dead and/or injured Arab bodies. This paper will demonstrate how and why this approach is politically vital and ethically complex in the international media context in which their work operates and to which it is responding. It will reveal its larger relevance within the much broader context of global digital still and moving images of state and police violence (such as those of the recent killings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling in the US) that are rousing similar debates about representation and circulation.