Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (Digital Barricades: Interventions in Digital Culture and Politics) - Softcover

Ratta, Donatelle Della

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0745337147 ISBN 13: 9780745337142

Verlag: Pluto Press, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

From ISIS propaganda videos to popular regime-backed soap operas and digital activism, the Syrian conflict has been profoundly affected by visual media. But what are the aesthetic, political, and material implications of this disturbing collusion between war and digital culture?
            Drawing on a decade of ethnographic research conducted in Syria and neighboring countries, Donatella Della Ratta examines here how the networked age shapes contemporary warfare, from conflict on the ground to the performance of violence on the screen. Her findings present a stark parallel to the digital democracy offered by techno-utopians, delving into the dark side of web 2.0 practices, where visual regimes of representation and media production are put in service of modes of destruction.
            A vivid account of the politics of Syria’s visual media, from commercial television to citizen journalism and Daesh propaganda, Shooting a Revolution offers fascinating insight into the media’s role in transforming conflict zones in the digital age. 
 

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donatella Della Ratta is a writer specializing in media and visual cultures in Syria. She has curated many international exhibitions on art and cinema in Syria, and is coeditor of Arab Media Moguls.
 

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Shooting a Revolution

Visual Media and Warfare in Syria

By Donatella Della Ratta

Pluto Press

Copyright © 2018 Donatella Della Ratta
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-7453-3714-2

Contents

List of Illustrations, vi, 
Series Preface, vii, 
Acknowledgements, viii, 
A Note on Transliteration, xii, 
Glossary, xiii, 
Introduction, 1, 
1 Making Media, Making the Nation: Syria's Tanwir in Neoliberal Times, 15, 
2 The Whisper Strategy, 35, 
3 The Death of Tanwir in Real-Time Drama, 58, 
4 The People's 'Raised Hands', 79, 
5 Fear and Loathing on the Internet: The Paradoxes of Arab Networked Activism, 99, 
6 Screen Fighters: Filming and Killing in Contemporary Syria, 125, 
7 Syria's Image-Makers: Daesh Militants and Non-Violent Activists, 149, 
8 Notes on a Theory of Violence and the Visual in the Networked Age, 179, 
Notes, 199, 
Bibliography, 226, 
Index, 249, 

CHAPTER 1

Making Media, Making the Nation: Syria's Tanwir in Neoliberal Times

When freedom knocked at the door, and it was just a TV series

It was sometime in April 2011, a glorious Damascus spring morning.

Not that I was fully aware of the warm jasmine-scented air wafting through the open window as I sat at home, huddled over my laptop, obsessively following my Twitter timeline and trying to make sense of what was going on in the country. I was concerned how events would affect friends and acquaintances, not to mention my PhD research into Syrian musalsalat, the highly popular 30-part TV drama series that traditionally entertained audiences throughout the Arab world during the holy month of Ramadan.

The phone rang. It was a well-known director and good friend. 'Come and celebrate!' 'Celebrate what?' I asked, hesitantly. For over a month, images of street demonstrations and other signs of protests in the poor, run-down outskirts of Damascus and in parts of rural Syria had spread across the internet and forced their way into the consciousness of those enjoying the frenzy of consumerism offered by the elegant cafés, gleaming shopping malls and boutique hotels of the residential areas and the city centre where I also used to live. The well-heeled denizens of central Damascus kept repeating their reassuring mantra: 'It won't last', 'it' being the unrest that had been shaking the suburbs of the capital and a few other cities since 15 March 2011, filling the streets with calls for 'freedom' (hurriyya) and 'dignity' (karama). At first ignoring the street protests, Syrian official media began to refer to them as 'the crisis' (al-azma) or 'the events' (al-ahdath). In a sort of unspoken gentlemen's agreement, neither Syrian TV nor the wealthy elites ever used the word 'uprising' (intifada) or 'revolution' (thawra) to describe the growing unrest.

My director friend – famous for producing edifying TV dramas focusing on taboo-breaking issues with the aim of dragging Syrian society into the present and eventually 'curing it of its own backwardness' – wanted to celebrate the end of filming on his new musalsal. I shut down the computer, got ready and took a cab to the location in the countryside around Damascus. On the way the car was stopped at a checkpoint. I was nervous: this had never happened to me before, but the ruthlessness of mukhabarat, the Syrian intelligence service, was legendary. The security officer just checked my papers, broke the tension by making a joke about Italian football – my emergency exit in several tough situations in the Middle East – and then waved us on.

The location where the crew had been filming was right outside the city, but was not a typical rundown suburb like those in which the protests were escalating – Duma, Harasta, Jobar in the area of Eastern al-Ghouta. It was just a small green area of calm next to a stream, the silence broken by the trill of birdsong. One of the characters in the TV drama, a teenage girl fleeing the injustices of the city where the fictional narrative was set, was supposed to be hiding in this peaceful place. In a previous scene, seized by a fit of adolescent rage, she had scribbled slogans and doodles in large crayons on a wall near the stream. The director was about to shoot a close-up of the writing on the wall, while all around the cast and crew were merrily roasting meat and preparing other food for a celebratory barbecue. The atmosphere was festive. Everyone was enjoying the spring weather, thinking about how much money they had earned and how they were going to spend it, or making plans for their future and that of their families.

As I glanced at the wall I saw the slightly faded Arabic characters that formed the word 'freedom' (hurriyya). Then I silently ran my eyes over the whole sentence the young protagonist had written in pink: 'we want ... freedom' (bidna ... hurriyya). Possibly guessing what I was thinking, the director, who was making the final preparations for the close-up, suddenly said out loud, in a kind of solemn, almost prophetic way, as if he were talking from a sacred place: 'What those marching in the street are asking for is not freedom. Freedom is something you practise every day; something you obtain gradually. Unfortunately, our society isn't ready for it yet.' Then he swung round to his crew and shouted 'Action!', while I sat down and kept my mouth shut.

The close-up of the word 'freedom' written on the wall lasted less than 20 seconds. Then the director declared a wrap and everyone cheered: the party could finally begin.

* * *

After several years of fieldwork on Syrian TV drama, and countless hours of passionate discussions over coffee and cigarettes with its socially engaged makers, this episode struck me as an epiphany, as if it were the first time I fully realized that all those debates about citizenship, gender, religious freedom and the like were, in fact, merely Television. If it were not so, how then was it possible that one of the most prominent, provocative and smart Syrian directors, shooting a TV drama revolving around the quest for freedom of the Syrian youth, had not even stopped for a minute to think about what was happening in the streets in terms of a genuine, homegrown movement? Why was he so quick to dismiss it as a foreign conspiracy rather than a grassroots phenomenon? Why, after decades of pedagogical TV series like those he had himself produced in the belief that they would contribute to society's progress, was he absolutely convinced that the Syrian people were not ready for freedom yet?

My director friend's reaction hints at a widespread attitude among the wider community of Syrian TV drama producers. They describe it using the Arabic word tanwir, which indicates a morally edifying process connected to the firm belief that Syrian society has to be healed of its alleged social backwardness (takhalluf ijtima'i) in order to progress and develop. This process, in their view, cannot be initiated by the people, but has to be gradual, engineered and managed from the top down by an enlightened minority uniquely capable of guiding the country towards progress and development. In order to lead this 'enlightening' process, Syrian musalsalat inspired by the tanwir ideology have adapted all sorts of taboo subjects for the TV screen: from religious extremism to gender discrimination and sexual violence, from terrorism to corruption and the abuse of power among state officials. They have...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Pluto Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2018
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0745337147
• ISBN 13: 9780745337142
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 251
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland