Video Activists from Aleppo and Raqqa As ‘Modern-Day Kinoks’? an Audiovisual Narrative of the Syrian Revolution
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Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 10 (2017) 159–174 MEJCC brill.com/mjcc Video Activists from Aleppo and Raqqa as ‘Modern-Day Kinoks’? An Audiovisual Narrative of the Syrian Revolution Josepha Ivanka Wessels* Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden [email protected] Abstract The popular uprising that began in Syria in 2011 generated an unprecedented number of YouTube videos recording events in Syria; this emphasized how the social media platform had become an important alternative space for news and information, a space beyond the control of the government. In this article, I address the role of Syrian video activism in the Syrian revolution, and pay particular attention to why young Syrian anti- regime protesters started recording and uploading their videos on YouTube. As such, I do not focus on technology or the medium per se, but on the peoples’ motivations— what led them to upload digital video content as testimonies of revolutionary events and violence. Based on observation of verified YouTube clips, field visits to Turkey and Syria and semi-structured interviews with Syrian video activists between the years 2014 and 2016, I suggest that Syrian video activists can be seen as revolutionary filmmakers similar to the twentieth-century ‘Kinoks’, or kino-ki, that formed part of Dziga Vertov’s Soviet filmmakers collective whose radical experiment aimed to bridge social revolution and realist cinematic practice (Tomas 1992) and document reality ‘As It Is’. * This study has been made possible through funding by the Danish Research Council, within the framework of the postdoctoral study “The role of new and innovative Digital Media for Healing and Reconciliation in post-conflict Syria” for the Centre for Resolution of Interna- tional Conflicts (cric) at the University of Copenhagen. I would like to thank all my col- leagues at cric and beyond who provided crucial feedback. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi: 10.1163/18739865-01002005Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 03:59:31PM via free access 160 wessels Keywords YouTube – witnessing – revolution – video activism – realism – Syria Neither the term Orient nor the concept of the West has any ontological stabil- ity; each is made up of human effort, partly affirmation, partly identification of the Other. That these supreme fictions lend themselves easily to manipulation and organization of collective passion has never been more evident than in our time, when the mobilization of fear, hatred, disgust and resurgent self-pride and arrogance—much of it having to do with Islam and the Arabs on one side and Westerners on the other—are very large-scale enterprises. (Said 1997: xvii) Introduction The dominant media narrative about the Syrian uprising-turned-war has broadly simplified the Syrian war into a symmetrical conflict between a long- standing dictatorship and Islamist extremists, and thus denied ordinary Syri- ans a voice and visibility in this narrative. Since the Syrian uprising began in March 2011, a counter-narrative of revolution, humanity, suffering and resis- tance against oppression by the Assad regime and other extremist groups has emerged.This counter-narrative has become visible in a variety of ways, includ- ing the productions of grassroots video activists working in decentralized forms of organization and civil resistance (Yassin-Kassab and al-Shami 2016; Khalaf, Ramadan and Stolleis 2014; Wessels 2014). Several scholars have argued that Syrian video activists have contributed to making a different ‘Other’ visible and audible, one that is opposed to that promoted by the Syrian regime and Islamist groups. At the same time, these activists have also established a new revolu- tionary media ecology in the conflict-torn country (Della Ratta 2016; Elias and Omareen 2014; Andén-Papadopoulos and Pantti 2013; Boëx 2012). In this arti- cle, based on this scholarship, I am more concerned with the motivations of young Syrian anti-regime protesters; what led them to start video-recording and uploading their clips to YouTube (Wessels 2011) and why have they con- tinued, despite mortal danger and what some scholars have called, the apathy of passive armchair spectators, those who watch the misery and suffering of others (Andén-Papadopoulos 2013; Chouliaraki 2013; 2006). Much of the literature on this type of activism or on political participation by ordinary people in situations of conflict and oppression, refers to such actors as citizen journalists. However, as Omar al-Ghazzi (2014) argues, the Middle East Journal of Culture and CommunicationDownloaded from 10 Brill.com10/01/2021 (2017) 159–174 03:59:31PM via free access video activists from aleppo and raqqa as ‘modern-day kinoks’? 161 term assumes that there is, in the role of digital media, some kind of universal hope and belief in democratization; therefore, this term overlooks the specific sociopolitical and historical contexts of the emergence of these practices and fails to fully explain the complex digital output, particularly in Syria since the uprising began. Others, such as Andén-Papadopoulos (2013), use the term citizen camera-witnesses to describe the ‘camera-wielding political activists and dissidents who put their lives at risk to produce incontrovertible public testimony to unjust and disastrous developments around the world, in a critical bid to mobilize global solidarity through the affective power of the visual’ (Andén-Papadopoulos 2013: 754). To break away from the democratization narrative associated with the term citizenjournalist, and explain its dynamics in the evolving Syrian revolutionary process, a more appropriate term for Syrian video activists is needed. Following Andén-Papadopoulos (2013), who combined social justice, change and testimonial observation by witnesses using a digital video-camera, in this paper I draw on an earlier example of the use of the camera in a revo- lutionary context, namely, the cinematic work of the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s Kinoks. Vertov formed a radical filmmakers’ collective in revolution- ary Russia in the 1920s,1 and called these filmmakers Kinoks, that is, those who who use the camera as a tool, an eye, to record reality and life ‘As It Is’ (Brad- shaw 2015) during revolutionary moments. According to their own manifesto, Kinoks are ‘cinema-eye men’ and for them, the central, most essential thing is the sensory exploration of the world through film. As a point of departure, they take the use of the camera as a kino-eye, which is more perfect than the human eye, that lives and moves in time and space; it gathers and records impressions in a manner different from that of the human eye (Michelson 1984;Vertov 1922). The filmwork produced by the Kinoks signified a radical shift from staged theater and fiction in cinema and had a decisive influence on the development of Cinéma Vérité later in the twentieth century. Vertov called it Kino-Pravda (‘truthful-cinema’), an experiment during the Russian revolution. According to their manifesto, Kinoks vehemently despised the false reality of feature films and revolutionized the newsreels at the time by producing an unscripted blend of facts, observations and expression of feelings (Carynnyk 1972; Vertov 1922). Vertov and his Kinoks were convinced of the tranformative use of film, which could be used as a call for action in a revolutionary framework. As such, Kinoks firmly believed that realistic cinema (as opposed to fictional cinema) had 1 Dziga Vertov, the pseudonym of Denis Kaufman, was a convinced communist who believed Marxism was the only objective and scientific tool of analysis. Middle East Journal of Culture and CommunicationDownloaded 10(2017) from Brill.com10/01/2021 159–174 03:59:31PM via free access 162 wessels the power to change people’s consciousness, help them see reality in a more profound way and ultimately improve their lives (Warren 1996; Tomas 1992). Similarly, Syrian anti-regime activists upload their videos on YouTube, with the explicit aim and purpose of calling others to action, social justice and change. Their video cameras are used to document the revolutionary reality as they witness, observe and experience it, or ‘As It Is’. Hence their digital video cameras function as extensions of kino-eyes in much the same way the cameras of Vertov’s Kinoks did; they witness the Syrian revolutionary moment with little to no editing, staying as close to raw footage as possible. Moreover, Syrian video activists, like Kinoks, firmly believe in the transformative power of realistic cinema, in their case as an alternative weapon against oppression and authoritarianism. Prior to 2011, film and media in Syria was state-controlled and censorship was strict (Ziter 2014; Wedeen 1999). Access to YouTube was forbidden and audio- visual media in Syria, whether television or film, was aimed at constructing fictitious propagandistic narratives about reality in Syria (Ziter 2014). In her book on Syria under the late Hafez al-Assad, the father of current president Bashar al-Assad, Lisa Wedeen argues that Syrian society was shaped around the personality cult of the ruling Assad family. This meant that citizens displayed their obedience and loyalty to the leader by acting as if they believed the nar- ratives spread by the propaganda of the authoritarian regime (Wedeen 1999). According to Wedeen, Syrians accepted the regime’s fictitious view on reality, and rather than express their own experience of reality, they acted as if they believed the regime’s narratives (Wedeen 1999). She writes, Citizens in Syria are not required to believe the cult’s flagrantly fictitious statements and, as a rule, do not. But they are required to act as if they do. In Syria, it is impossible not to experience the difference between what social scientists … might conceive as a charismatic, loyalty-producing regime and its anxiety-inducing simulacrum. wedeen 1999: 506 Much like Vertov’s Kinoks, Syrian video activists indicate that they despise the falseness and fiction of Syrian state news and media channels, as well as the fictitious media propaganda of the Islamic State and other jihadi news out- lets.