The Eye, The Shooter and the Viewer: Representation, Reception and Deception in RabihMroué’sThe Fall of a Hair
In a series of works titled The Fall of a Hair, artist, playwright, actor and directorRabihMroué dwells on video footage from the early phases of the Syrian Revolution recorded by cell phone cameras and made accessible through the internet. Including a performative lecture, a 16mm film, an interactive installation with flipbooks and sound, as well as still photography, this series of works, which were first shown together at dOCUMENTA (13) in 2012 not only present the artist’s insight into the scopic regimes that are at work within the diverse representations of a current political conflict, but also expose the artifice of the moving image by orchestrating phenomenological encounters between the work and the viewer.
I will argue that the experience created by encountering this particular series of works in the gallery space falls into the category of cinema as a stopover, a meeting point for moving images and moving spectators, as described by Casetti. I also propose that an analysis of the selected works in these series by Mrouéthatphenomenologicallyengage with the construction of the filmic imagereveals the production of an invested, implicated and hence self-aware and skeptic viewer. In addition to selected works from the particular series The Fall of a Hair, the analysis will include Double Shooting, another installation work by the artist that developed out of this series and was presented together in later exhibitions.
The non-academic lecture Pixelated Revolutionbegins with RabihMroué bringing up something a friend of his said to him a few months after the uprisings in Syria had started in 2011: “The Syrians protestors are recording their own deaths.”
The phrase “To record one’s own death” appears on the projection screen next to the small desk he is sitting behind, positioned to the left of the stage, in a darkened auditorium. The verb “record” is highlighted in red on the screen. As he continues to explain how this sentence stuck with him, the verb in the phrase changes, from “record” to “document” and thenfrom “document” to “shoot” when he asks: “Are they really shooting their own deaths?” He says that unlike all the other protests during the Arab uprisings, in Syria, journalists were entirely absent from the scene of the event. For those of us not physically present during the demonstrations, including the artist himself, who was in his hometown Beirut in Lebanon, there were only two ways through which the events could be accessed, either through the official Syrian news channels, or through the protestors’ own images and videos that were uploaded to the internet. Mrouésaysthat he, of course, chose the second option; he was not only interested in getting the news, but also in how the protestors were documenting the event, the artist was especially fascinated by the filmic characteristics of their videos. Mroué notes that the world of the internet is a world of rumors, of temptation and seduction, and flooded by low quality images. Perhaps with a nod to HitoSteyrl’s defense of the poor image[1], he says that most of these images found on the internet are pixelated, because they exist outside official or institutional frameworks. Mroué’s project here is to make sure that these images are seen in light of the conditions of their production. For Mroué, the pixelated images are not “illicit, fifth generation bastards”[2] of the original image, rather they are poor originals. They are not the afterlife of a higher quality image, but they might act as the afterlife of their makers.
As a sample of online video footage from the uprisings play in the background,Mroué’stries to explain his interest in them. Why and how these images were incessantly being shared despite the evident risks that they posed to the protestors and especially to the producers of these images led him toquestion whether there was an exchange of tactics that were being used in filming these videos. He came across numerous websites, blogs and Facebook posts detailing advice by protestors for protestors in how to film and share these videos. He started to compile a list of these strategic recommendations, and came to the realization that what this list resembled the most was a cinematographic manifesto: in fact, Mroué had a specific one in mind:Dogme 95, the avant-garde Danish movement started by Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg. Dogme 95 aimed at a kind of purified filmmaking to restore artistic license to directors and actors alike by denying special effects, post-production and other gimmicks of the film trade. Mrouétook Dogme 95’s “vows of Chastity,” a list of ten rules that required a hand-held camera, shooting on location, and forbadefilters, temporal or geographical alienation, and sound produced apart from the images, etc. and combined these with the advice shared by Syrian protestors that he had found online. He offers this combined set of principles as pragmatic outlines on “how to film a demonstration in a secure manner.”[3]The list is a fictional collaboration between the protestors and Dogme 95 directors, formulated by RabihMroué himself: this work in progress is for him a tool “to reflect on the meaning of the short films issued by the Syrian protesters, films that document the events, films that the Syrians are creating themselves.”[4] Among the many useful tips compiled by the artist–which includes all ten commands of Dogme95 with slight modifications–are these: shoot from the back so that the faces of the protestors cannot be identified, hold banners in the opposite direction of the march so that the messages they bear are caught on camera, hold a piece of paper with the date and location of the demonstration in front of the camera for documentation before the event, make sure to film faces if there is an assault, be wary of surveillance cameras, and strap your phone/camera to yourself in case you need to move quickly, etc.The list goes on. It contains nineteen items of advice to shoot during demonstrations. While Mroué reads this list, various clips of footage of the protests directly utilizing these tactics illustrate these points, juxtaposed with high-quality clips from mainstream fiction films and backstage footage, with fake blood, use of tripods, sets, and sound effects, to illustrate the stark difference between the two modes of filmmaking. These juxtapositions create a stark contrast between the smooth surfaces of the constructed world of fiction film and the shakily recorded, low-resolution video footage of the protestors, revealing the precarious nature of the online videos that suggest real physical threat to the one recording the event.
Mroué then shows a roughly one and a half minute video that he came across during his research, which he has decided to title “Double Shooting.”
This video is the centerpiece of Mroué’s entire project.He discerns that the footage is filmed by someone on their cellphone, from a residential apartment’s balcony, a few stories off the ground. In the beginning of the video, the person who is holding the video is also narrating what is happening, he says that the security forces are firing their guns without any evident reason, as there are no protests in the vicinity. He states the date, the time and the address of where he is filming in Arabic. Gunshots are heard. The camera searches for the man who is shooting, it locates him on the ground floor, the gaze of the sniper and the gaze of the camera meet. A shot is fired. The camera stumbles, it retreats inside the apartment, and after a series of shaky images, it is steadied on the apartment’s ceiling. We hear who we assume to be the cameraman, shouting: “I am wounded, I am wounded.”Then nothing. The footage ends there. After screening this short but gruesome footage that he stumbled upon on the internet, the artist, evoking his friend’s words, states: “One person is shooting with the camera, and the other one is shooting with the rifle” and follows this chilling statement with a pregnant question: “How can we read this video?”[5]
He attempts an answer:
I assume that what the protesters in Syria are seeing, when they are participating in a demonstration, is the exact same thing that they are filming and watching directly on the tiny screens of their mobile phones that they are using “here and now.” I mean that they are not looking around and then they choose a certain scene or angle to shoot. But they are all the time looking through the camera and shooting at the same time. So the eye and the lens of the camera are practically watching the same thing. And it is the exact same thing that we will see later, on the Internet or on television, but at a different time and place. It is as if the camera and the eye have become united in the same body, I mean, the camera has become an integral part of the body. Its lens and its memory have replaced the retina of the eye and the brain. In other words, their cameras are not cameras, but eyes implanted in their hands – an optical prosthesis. [6]
Is the cameraman dead? We do not know. Mroué wants this video to provide answers. He offers a metaphor for the filmic screen that marks a departure from usual evocations of the window, the mirror, or the frame that are often discussed by film or new media theorists. The artist argues that the screen of the cell phone with a recording camera functions directly as the eye. He mentions practices of optography in the late 19th century, which operated on the premise that images that are registered by the eye are printed on the retina. Some optographers believed that it could be possible toextract the image of the killer from the eye of the dead victim in murder cases. He applies the optimism of the 19th century optographers to the Syrian cameraman’s video. He dissects the video into its frames, looking for an answer in the spool of images. Like the filming eye, RabihMroué wants the sniper to be identified, for the murderer to suffer the consequences of his actions. But the footage doesn’t yield the identity of the sniper. He zooms in on the image until the pixels become nothing more than an abstraction, a field of muddy colors.
The 16mm film titled Eye vs. Eye is a fictional illustration of this moment of optographic fantasy that Mroué dwells on in the Pixelated Revolution. The film, shown on a mini-screen placed in front of the 16mm projector, is a filmic reenactment of the found footage of the eye contact between the sniper and the lens of the camera. It is recreated in Beirut by the artist’s friends, with a camera and a plastic toy gun. The 16mm film is an infinite loop between the mobile phone’s camera and the reflection of the sniper in its lens. There is no soundtrack other than the humming of the film projector. It is a spinning mise-en-abyme of the infinite reflection propagated by this dangerous eye contact. The camera zooms in into the eye of the sniper, only to find a reverse image of the Syrian cameraman, shooting the event on his cellphone camera. The zoom continues infinitely, catching the reflection of the other in the eye of the beholder, a film loop of the moment when the cameraman and the gunman lock eyes through their respective intermediators; the lens of the camera and the sniper scope. What is also interesting to note in this reenactment by the artist, which is the only time we are allowed in the world of fiction to see the cameraman as he is shooting, is the visual affinity of the portrayal of the cameraman to well-known images of Soviet filmmaker DzigaVertov and his camera. It is safe to assume that in this fictional reenactment, the way in which the cameraman (Mroué’s friend impersonating the Syrian protestor who is documenting the events) does not necessarily need to hold the cellphone to his eye, but he does; usually when one films with a cellphone camera one extends his arm forward, not needing, in fact, avoiding the eye and the screen of the camera to line-up perfectly in close proximity. The cameraman shooting with a cellphone has a better gage of what he is filming when he has enough distance to see the image on the screen of the cell-phone.Here, the reenactment seems to have been carefully choreographed to suggest this aestheticaffinity to Vertov, at the expense of departing from credibility. The idea of the mise-en-abyme in the famous Vertovphotograph and its animated zoom-in version in the 16mm film, as well as the compositional similarity of the camera lens positioned as the eye in both is uncanny. Perhaps, Mroué’s fictional eye-contact is meant to evoke Vertov’s filmmaking philosophy of the Kino-eye of “life caught unawares,” which, similar to Dogme 95 filmmakers, rejected staged cinema and embraced a belief in the superiority of the camera over the human eye and its ability to capture the real world as the future of cinema.[7]
It is also important to note the artist’s conscious choice to use a 16mm film projector for displayingEye vs. Eye (2012) on a mini screen, both placed on a pedestal. Here, a small cinema is set up to view its two main elements, the projector and the screen, not to mention the deliberate utilization of a near-obsolescent form filmmaking format of the 16mm. The historical reference to film’s craft in relation to the point where shooting with a camera and shooting with a gun locked in perpetual contact gain more poignancy when one considers the technological history of film. As Friedrich E. Kittler points out in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, “the history of the movie camera […] coincides with the history of automatic weapons. The transport of pictures only repeats the transport of bullets. In order to focus and fix objects moving through space, such as people, there are two procedures: to shoot and to film. In the principle of cinema resides mechanized death as it was invented in the nineteenth century…”[8]As Kittler points out, objects in movement were photographed by Muybridge, but only through the help and continuous improvements offered by the work of Étienne-Julienne Marey, a professor of natural history who wanted to analyze the movement of birds in flight. It was Marey who intertwined the fates of film and war with his chronophotographic gun. “With the chronophotographic gun, mechanized death was perfected: its transmission coincided with its storage. What the machine gun annihilated the camera made immortal.”[9]
Let’s return to The Pixelated Revolution for a moment. Why do the Syrian protestors insist on recording? Why do they risk their lives for a few more images? Why do they not stop recording and run away when the gun slowly locks in on its target? Mrouédeliberates on these questions:
Is it because his eye has become an optical prosthesis and is no longer an eye that feels, remembers, forgets, invents some points, and skips some others? I assume that the eye sees more than it can read, analyze, understand, and interpret. For example, when the eye sees the sniper lifting the gun towards it in order to shoot and kill, the eye keeps on watching without really understanding that it might be witnessing its own death. Because, by watching what is going on through a mediator – the little screen of a mobile phone – the eye sees the event as isolated from the real, as if it belongs to the realm of fiction. So, the Syrian cameraman will be watching the sniper directing his rifle towards him as if it is happening inside a film and he is only a spectator. This is why he won’t feel the danger of the gun and won’t run away. Because, as we know, in films the bullet will lose its way and go out of the film. I mean, it will not make a hole in the screen and hit any of the spectators. It will always remain there, in the virtual world, the fictional one. This is why the Syrian cameraman believes that he will not be killed: his death is happening outside the image. It seems that it is a war against the image itself.[10]
Mroué’s work takes a side in the war of images that he describes by championing the amateur videos of the prosthetic eyes.He draws attention to them, not only with a journalistic motivation, but with an intentional aestheticnaiveté that desires to analyze the events shown by the camera lens as well as the conditions that propagated the production of the particular form these images take.Mroué is aware of the historical intertwining of film and guns; and he is counting on the filmic image to part from this symbiotic relationship: “There has always been complicity between war-making and picture-taking. When this complicity is broken, picture-taking becomes a weapon against war-making and vice-versa.”[11]
In his book The Lumiere Galaxy, Francesco Casetti asserts that “we still need public spaces in which to welcome and experience images. However, these spaces can no longer exist as temples dedicated to [the] established rite, [of] the movie theatres. Nor can they continue to host a docile audience, ready to abandon itself to what it sees, as successive theories often described. They can only be meeting points between images and spectators, both of which are in transit, display places if you will.”[12]