The Right to the Image: Syrian Film Collective Abounaddara’s Emergency Cinema
As part of a research project supported by the CUNY Adjunct Incubator, Jason Fox, an Adjunct Professor in Film & Media at at Hunter College, CUNY is developing a research project, “The Right to the Image: Syrian Film Collective Abounaddara’s Emergency Cinema,” which is a collection of essays that offers a critical introduction to the groundbreaking videos and activism of Abounaddara, the anonymous Syrian film collective.
Abounaddara’s The Battle of Aleppo, 2016.
Emerging alongside the Syrian revolution in 2011 and fueled by the political aspirations of the Arab spring throughout the Middle East, Abounaddara’s “emergency cinema” critiques and revises mainstream war reporting through their impressionistic videos that make use of the wide reach and anonymity afforded by online video platforms.
Abounaddara’s The Fly, 2015.
This project will take the form of a book that frames the ethical, political, and aesthetic insights of their work within the transformative effects of new digital technologies in war reporting and social justice campaigns. Most significantly, the book considers the collective’s videos alongside their demand for the “right to the dignified image,” a call for transnational civil protection to augment the notion of “dignity” as embraced in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Through the lens of Abounaddara’s emergency cinema and rights campaign, this edited collection charts new potentials and consequences for digital (self) representations in human rights and social justice movements.
Click here or below to read an interview “Representational Regimes” with Jason Fox and The Abounaddara Film Collective in World Record Journal, Volume 1.
This project is part of the CUNY Adjunct Incubator and is co-sponsored by the Center for the Humanities and the Gittell Urban Studies Collective at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
