Rabih Mroué The Pixelated Revolution

” Syrians are filming their own death” – that is how the Pixelated Revolution begins- with this text. A few images are available on this photostream.  Rabih Mroué is seated on a bare stage in front of a table with a computer. A large wall looms behind him.  The projection combines succinct quotes about the “rules” of pure film which he has altered to make more pertinent to Syria: “Shoot from the back and do not show faces in order to avoid recognition, pursuit and subsequent arrest by security thugs ” with  live footage from cell phones held by citizen journalists in Syria  that he has downloaded off the internet.

The footage is carefully selected to focus on the extraordinary fact that as Syrian citizen journalists are recording the horrible violence in Syria, they are themselves being shot and often killed. The recent case of  Rami al-Sayed, who posted over 900 videos on the Syria Pioneer  site   His cousin Basil al-Sayed also a citizen journalist was shot and killed in late December;  had been filming in Homs before he was killed, posting on the same site. The piece that Mroué focused on the most was an 83 second clip of a “double shooting”, a man holding a camera phone is filming a sniper, and then the sniper takes aim and shoots at him. We do not know if he died.

The drama of this exchange, why didn’t the photographer move away from the sniper, the fact that he must have felt invisible, although he wasn’t, the point blank shooting, are all subject of discussion in Mroué’s piece. In Beirut where it was shown there were other issues raised as well, issues also raised by Mroué’s piece shown at INIVA last spring, “On Three Posters, Reflections of a Video Performance”, only it is much more intense in The Pixelated revolution. The three posters refer to three “takes” of a suicide bomber’s video -” Reflections” are Mroué’s analysis of whether he is exploiting the videos for his own ends.

In selecting and downloading footage taken by citizen journalists in the ongoing horror of the Civil war in Syria, Mroué is doing something even more questionable according to the art critic Kaelen Wilson-Goldie:

” Should they be making art in their studios or joining protesters on the streets? Should they be agitating as artists, activists or day-to-day citizens? If artists have already been dealing with subjects such as corruption, injustice or social inequity for years, then how can they avoid having their work co-opted by the new fervor for revolutionary fare? And if they decide to take on and work through the uprisings in their art, then how can they do so without coming across as naïve, belated, opportunistic, callous or crass?

“For me these are very intriguing questions,” says Mroué, “and they’re also a kind of trap. One of the things we always say is that art needs distance, and that art needs a kind of peace. But at the same time, with the revolution in Tunisia, or the revolution in Egypt, or the violence in Syria, when are we allowed to talk about it? How long do we have to wait before we can make a work? I think there are no limits, no defined times.”

So the immediacy of these works is overpowering, and yet we see these dramatic videos in the safety of a performance space in Seattle. Is the artist making a shallow exploitation of violence?  He has said that he is not an activist, he only wants to “provoke himself” not other people. So does that mean that his distance reflects neutrality, a cold intellectuality.

Definately not, it is a stance that protects him from despair and enables him to respond to a tragic ongoing nightmare in the country right next door to his own. Damascus is closer to Beirut than Portland is to Seattle. And keep in mind that civil war raged in Lebanon for a very long time, and he lived through that first hand. How would we be responding to such murder and mayhem that nearby, by fleeing, by remaining mute, by speaking?  Mroué  has chosen to speak, but with a formal framework loosely ( and sometimes even humorously) based on ten rules of “unvarnished cinema” the so called Dogme 95. 

So the fact that he can take on Syria at all is an indication of the depth of his commitment. The use of immediate documentary is part of a now established tradition in Beirut that began during the 2006 Israeli bombardment as discussed in another Wilson-Goldie article “The War Works, Videos under Siege, Online and in the Aftermath, Again”  in Art Journal Summer 2007 (apparently not available online.)  But in that case it was the artists themselves as well as the citizens of Beirut who were filming their own war. In the case of Syria, Mroué is looking from the outside.

Mroué pointed out that there have been virtually no outside journalists in Syria ( that was not quite true- recently several incredibly courageous journalists  smuggled themselves in and have been both shot and killed. Jon Lee Anderson has just published a piece in the New Yorker based on his courageous interviews with both sides of the conflict.

The footage that we see on syria pioneer is a lot of bombing and gunfire, as well as terrified and injured children, women, men. It is very hard to look at, hard to assimilate. So Mroué has done us a favor, he has created a distance from which we can understand and think. We are introduced to thinking about what is happening.

That is a crucial first step. Mroué has said he doesn’t “want to be a martyr for the sake of art” but the reality is that he does succeed in giving a news ignorant US audience one dimension of the nightmare that is going on for the average person in Syria. The “Syrians are filming their own death.” Very sadly, on the very day that I was writing this 13 activists were killed smuggling one photographer, Paul Conroy, out of Syria. Paul Conroy was with Marie Colvin when she was killed in Homs.