From uncanny to sensible pasts: Temporal reorderings in Syrian documentaries

ABSTRACT

While the physical battle over Syria has receded, a critical battle that remains is the battle of the narrative. This battle is at once highly public and political, while it also intervenes in deeply personal and often traumatizing memories. One important arena where this battle is played out is documentary films, mainly made in exile. This article is based on viewings of numerous Syrian documentary films and conversations and interviews with directors, producers, cinematographers, and others engaged in the facilitation, production, and curation of these films, yet focuses specifically on three of these documentaries, The War Show, For Sama, and Our Memory Belongs to Us. Engaging with theories of temporalities of crisis, we argue that these Syrian documentaries perform a teleological reordering that serves to turn an uncanny past into a sensible past, allowing for new orientations towards the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Syria; documentaries; uncanny pasts; temporalities of crisis; memory

Introduction

Those who control the present control the past. Those who control the past control the future.

Syrian director Rami Farah opens his documentary, Our Memory Belongs to Us, with this quote by George Orwell, thus evocatively setting the stage for the ongoing battle of the narrative about what is taking and has taken place in Syria. In public and private conversations, Farah has repeatedly contended, conceding that the physical battle over Syria has been lost, ‘when I have lost everything, all that I have left is my memories'. In this way, Farah takes us to the heart of the one battle that remains after the battles over land have mainly been settled for now: the battle of the narrative. This battle is at once highly public and political, while it also intervenes in deeply personal and often traumatizing memories. Our Memory Belongs to Us is one of the many poignant and widely celebrated Syrian documentaries that has come out in recent years. These films negotiate how images of hope and despair should be used to remember – or forget – the past. They strongly contest the narrative put forward by the Syrian state and its allies which not only seeks to restrict certain memories, but also to create others (Crone 2023). As such, a strong motivation for the making of these films is the acute conflict many Syrians experience between official Syrian state narratives and their own, personal experiences. We thus see these documentaries as a fertile entry point to understand how Syrian collective memory is constructed and contested. This is, as Bandak points out in the introduction to this special issue, drawing on Hirsch and Stewart’s (2005) concept of historicity, these documentaries can be read as a matter of ‘engaging the ways people inhabit and locate themselves in relation to their past'.

While in this article we focus particularly on the three documentaries, The War Show (2016, directed by Andreas Dalsgaard and Obaidah Zytoon), For Sama (2019, directed by Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts), and Our Memory Belongs to Us (2021, directed by Rami Farah and co-directed by Signe Byrge Sørensen), our insights are also based on viewings of numerous Syrian documentary films as well as on conversations and interviews with directors, producers, cinematographers, and others engaged in the facilitation, production, and curation of these films. We have watched films collectively in the research project, ‘Archiving the Future: Re-Collections of Syria in War and Peace' and at public screenings with Q&As with directors (see also Bandak, Crone, and Mollerup 2024). Some directors and other cultural producers have been guests in our research project and visited us in Copenhagen; moreover, they participated in a workshop organized by the project, allowing for sustained conversation over a longer period.¹ Lastly, this research also draws on our long-term engagement with media in Syria, which has allowed for an intermittent ethnography where connections between field activities are established over time.

Engaging with theories of temporalities of crisis, we argue that these Syrian documentaries perform a teleological reordering that serves to turn an uncanny past into a sensible past, allowing for new orientations towards the future. The three Syrian documentaries are examples of this work to put time back in place and, in this way, turn an uncanny past into a sensible past. By a sensible past, we understand a narrative which makes the past clarified, settled, meaningful, and usable in the present, allowing for what Bryant and Knight (2019) term ‘orientations towards the future'. We build on Bryant’s (2016) notion of ‘uncanny present'. In Bryant’s terms, an uncanny present is a moment of crisis that has brought about a severing of the links between past, present, and future that ordinarily allow us to anticipate the future. We see an uncanny past as such a moment of crisis which has become past without being resolved. What is key to uncanny pasts, then, is that the previous lack of ability to anticipate the future has left the past unreconciled. Decisions made at that time can therefore seem incomprehensible at later times. Resolving an uncanny past, then, is not only a matter of addressing the uncertainty of the past, but also necessitates an engagement with one’s own decisions in navigating this uncertainty in order to put the past back in its place. We perceive the uncanny present to pertinently describe the situation in Syria from 2011, not only due to the escalating violence at the time, but also due to the uncertainty and inability to anticipate the future. Recognizing this past time in Syria as an uncanny present at the time, we ask what happens when time passes, and the uncanny present is left unresolved. Or maybe rather, how to deal with the loss of teleological ordering brought about by the uprising at a later time.

In the following, we first give an overview of the environment for the production of Syrian documentaries and other visual engagements with writing history. We then introduce the three films. Subsequently, we engage the literature on temporality of crisis in order to develop our notion of uncanny past, which we then use to investigate how visual documentation of Syrians’ lives over the past decade, with the death, violence, and sorrow this has entailed, has been used in documentaries as methods for selective, collective remembrance and forgetting, and for temporal reorderings that enable orientations towards the future.

Syrian documentaries

The war in Syria has arguably for a time been the most visually documented war in history (Deutch 2020), as well as the most networked battleground in the sense of technological infrastructure and human media practices that have been an integral part of the war (Della Ratta 2018). Despite the Syrian state’s systematic attempts to prevent documentation – from closing off the country for international journalists to targeted killings and imprisonments of journalists and anyone carrying cameras – the sustained flow of images documenting violence has not ceased. In the absence of professional media, Syrian citizens took upon themselves to document the war (Al-Ghazzi 2014; Della Ratta 2018; Mollerup and Mortensen 2020; Salama 2012). With the increasing role of the visual in Middle Eastern politics (Khatib 2012), Syrians on the ground initially had high expectations of the influence of this documentation. Images were taken and shared immediately with the hope that it would produce immediate effects – if the world saw what was happening, the war would stop (Mollerup and Mortensen 2020). This motivation for documenting produced what we call urgent archiving – archiving which engaged with the politics of the very near future (Bandak and Anderson 2022, see also Atassi (2020) on the motivations behind documenting). In time, as it became evident that the enormous amount of images documenting the violence unfolding inside Syria did not lead to international intervention against the regime, this not only created great disappointment for many Syrians on the ground, it also led to new uses and understandings of visual documentation. Realizing that the visual documentation would not change the immediate political situation, image activists shifted to long-term strategies focusing on collecting and archiving documentation of crimes, making them available for other times (Boëx 2018; Della Ratta et al 2020; Saber and Long 2020). Thus, the production and use of images have changed from an instinctive drive to urgently document for the present to a more pensive and multitemporal engagement with images.

This urgent archiving has played a significant role in the documentaries that have been produced. Some Syrians who instinctively documented their lives and surrounding events as the uprising broke out later became documentary filmmakers, encouraged by the acuteness of their archives rather than a background as filmmakers.² For example, Obaida Zytoon originally worked with radio, while Waad Al-Kateab became a journalist by necessity. Despite directing the documentary film, For Sama, Al-Kateab maintains that she is a journalist, not a filmmaker. In other cases, archives have been shared with trained filmmakers, as in the case of Rami Farah and the archive which Our Memory Belongs to Us is based upon. Regardless of the background of the filmmakers, images which have often been produced with other intentions in mind have been carried into exile and re-visited with a spatio-temporal distance to Syria that has enabled a slowing down of time and produced different modes of reflection and pensiveness (cf. Bandak 2021).

It is important to be aware of the supportive environment within which Syrian documentary films have developed. Crucial for the Syrian documentary film scene has been Bidayyat (‘Beginnings'), founded by veteran Syrian filmmaker Ali Atassi, which, based in Lebanon, provided young Syrian filmmakers with artistic, professional, and financial support for documentary filmmaking.³ Another key initiative is the Syrian documentary film festival, Dox Box, founded by Diana El Jeiroudi and Orwa Nyrabia, which has since developed into a non-profit organization supporting documentary filmmaking in Syria and beyond.⁴ Another actor in the supportive environment surrounding Syrian documentary films is the Danish-based International Media Support (IMS), which assists the development, production, and post-production of documentary films, particularly in the Middle East. Many other actors have played a significant role in providing training, funding, equipment, and more. While these films, like other documentary films, mainly reach a rather specialized audience, these films are likely to be seen primarily by Western rather than Syrian audiences. However, the reach of some of these films has been extraordinary, and several have won Academy Awards, BAFTAs, and other prominent awards beyond the documentary film festival scene.

Despite their rather limited reach, Syrian documentaries have contributed significantly to the battle of the narrative, because they offer a collective conversation about what Syria was, is, and is to become that provides an alternative to the attempts by the state to monopolize the writing of history. Furthermore, these documentaries are significant, because they engage with the ongoing stream of transient images in international news reports and on social media platforms about Syria. News reports or single images and footage that are circulated out of context can render conflicts and aspects of conflicts visible while serving to make other things invisible (Blaagaard, Mortensen, and Neumayer 2017, 3). Such images can be read and used within many different frames (Wedeen 2019). Whereas international political structures and media logics set the stage for which images make it into the global media, in the three documentaries other rationalities affect which images are shown and which are left to be forgotten. In contrast to the stream of transient images, a documentary offers footage that is carefully selected and curated to produce an edited account, where the composition of images forms a narrative which invites a certain way of understanding the images. As the three films we present below show, documentary films provide a space for reflection over past events that is at once collective and deeply personal.

The war show, for Sama and our memory belongs to us

The War Show is an intimate and moving documentary about how a group of young friends filmed, lived, and died in the Syrian uprising, told by one of the survivors, director Obaidah Zytoon. At once, it is a commemoration of those who were killed while also being a documentation of protests carried out in the beginning of the uprising – not only in the streets, but also through rebellious ways of life. The film consists of seven parts: Revolution, Oppression, Resistance, Siege, Memories, Frontlines, and Extremism. These mainly reflect the temporal development of the intensifying conflict, but also allow for reflection and return to certain memories. While the friends originally lived in Damascus, the film moves between different places in Syria, and eventually Turkey. Part of the footage takes us to the intensifying battles in the streets of Damascus and other parts of Syria; other parts take us into the private spaces of this group of friends as they get high, experience the escalating state violence and militarization of the uprising, adopt an abandoned dog, and enjoy peace and nature during a trip to the countryside. The War Show was released in 2016 and is directed in collaboration between Obaidah Zytoon, whose story is told in the film, and Danish director, Andreas Dalsgaard. It was produced in Denmark with support from, amongst others, International Media Support.

For Sama tells the story of life in opposition-held East Aleppo around the time of the siege and subsequent conquest of the area by the Syrian army supported by the Russian air force in December 2016. For Sama is filmed and narrated by director Waad Al-Kateab who became a journalist in the wake of the uprising. Al-Kateab covered the siege on Aleppo for Channel 4 News and was among the last people to remain in opposition-held Aleppo. In the narration of the film, Al-Kateab addresses her daughter, Sama, who was born during the siege, explaining to her why her parents decided to risk their – and her – life fighting the Syrian regime and staying in Aleppo throughout the deadly battle over the city. The film is mainly filmed from the unique position inside the last functioning hospital in East Aleppo which is led by Sama’s father, one of the last doctors in the besieged city. The film follows a chronology of the siege, but jumps to various times in the years leading up to the siege. The film has won a host of prizes, including an Oscar, a BAFTA and Prix L’Œil d’Or at Cannes, and has reached a vast international audience. For Sama was released in 2019 and co-directed by British director, Edward Watts; it was produced in the UK and supported by Channel 4.

Our Memory Belongs to Us is a reflexive and collective engagement with memories of the Syrian uprising. It has grown out of an archive of over 12,000 pieces of footage which document the early time of the Syrian uprising and war from inside Deraa, where the first significant demonstrations against the regime took place. The archive was smuggled out of the country on a hard drive and given to a friend of the photographers, filmmaker Rami Farah. In the film, Farah has brought three of the photographers, Yadan, Rani, and Odai, together in Paris. All three are today in exile in different countries in Europe. Farah joins the three photographers on a theatre stage in front of a large screen, where footage from the archive is shown. The screened footage follows an overall linear chronology, from the first days of the uprising in Deraa to the time when the uprising had escalated into war. The film moves back and forth from the screening of the footage on the stage and into the footage itself. Along with Farah, the three men watch footage of themselves, their friends, and their city as they laugh, cry, and console each other while reconstructing memories. Our Memory Belongs to Us was released in 2021 and is directed by Rami Farah and co-directed by Danish Signe Byrge Jørgensen. It was produced in Denmark with support from International Media Support, amongst others.

Uncanny temporalities

Before engaging with the temporal reorderings performed through these films, we turn now to introduce our concept of uncanny pasts. In recent years, anthropological work on the temporality of crisis has increasingly engaged with the notion of the uncanny as a means to describe how perceptions of time are disturbed in crisis – or how the very disturbance of perceptions of time can itself constitute crisis (that is, Bandak 2019; Bryant 2016; Knight 2021; Stewart 2017; Turner 2020). With attention towards the past, Stewart (2017, 129) introduces the concept of temporal topologies to describe ‘cases where the past, present, and future may be bent around one another rather than ordered linearly', which may produce uncanny histories. To Stewart (2017, 132), temporal topologies are a form of local non-historicism, which he contrasts with linearly focused historicism, ‘which emphasize objective verification over affective assertion'. Stewart (2017, 140) explains, ‘the tension and instability between local non-historicism and historicism (often purveyed by the state or other authorities) (…) continually produce experiences of uncanny histories' (see also Bryant 2014, 682). Thus, uncanny histories ‘expose the incomplete synthesis between two different genres of history' (Stewart 2017, 140). While Stewart (2017, 140) argues that in time, ‘people bring historicist structures into relation with local, perhaps more topological and affectively driven forms of historicizing', we contend that what is at stake in the three documentaries we focus on here is an attempt to bring local non-historicism into a relation with historicism. Syrian documentaries position themselves exactly within the tension field between local non-historicism and historicism by being highly intimate, personally experienced stories while simultaneously being public contributions to the negotiations of collective history.

Building on the work of Stewart, Bandak (2019) draws attention to the future, while arguing that a loss of teleological ordering where the very relation between past, present, and future is unsettled may not merely arise in relation to the past and present, but that the future itself might also be what turns uncanny. Bandak (2019, 194) contends, ‘it may not be uncertainty of the future that casts temporality as uncanny but rather the opposite: a sense of assurance or even conviction that things will only get worse' and in such situations ‘temporal orientation itself risks collapsing'. With an awareness of the present, Bryant (2016) focuses on how the uncertainty of the future might engender uncanny temporalities. She contends that ‘what makes the present uncannily present in moments of crisis is the inability to anticipate the future. The present becomes uncanny precisely because of the severing or questioning of the links between past, present, and future that ordinarily allow us to anticipate’ (Bryant 2016, 21, emphasis in original). She further evokes the notion of ‘critical thresholds' as moments that are both decisive and liminal, or outside ordinary time. In such moments, ‘we acquire a sense that what we do in this present will be decisive for both the past and the future, giving to the present the status of a threshold' (Bryant 2016, 20). She further argues, ‘a critical threshold leads to an uncanny present, a present that is unfamiliar in its present-ness. It is the present that suddenly seems to hover between past and future, taking on the burden of gathering the past and projecting it into the unknown future when the teleology that would ordinarily shape that temporal relation is lost' (24).

We build on Bryant’s notion of an ‘uncanny present' as a way of conceptualizing the temporal features of ‘times of crisis' to develop the notion, uncanny past. By uncanny past, we seek to draw attention to when time passes and an uncanny present is left unresolved. That is, a bygone time when it was impossible to anticipate the future and where decisions made at that time therefore can seem incomprehensible at later times. Yet also a time where decisions made seemed to be critical for the time that came to pass. An uncanny past, thus, is a past that has not been reconciled.

Before moving on to an analysis of how the three documentaries engage with uncanny pasts, it is necessary to expand on the notion of the uncanny. Drawing on Freud’s play between Heimlich and Unheimlich, Bandak (2019, 192) describes the uncanny as that which evokes fear and dread and which was once well known (see also Freud [1919] 2003). According to Bandak (2019, 192), ‘the uncanny bespeaks a loss of control, where the individual is given over involuntarily to what is inescapable; one is given over to a feeling of helplessness'. In his instrumental text on the uncanny, Freud ([1919]2003) is occupied with expressions of uncanny in different languages. While the original German term evokes the notion of home (‘heim') which connotes unhomeliness or strangeness, this is not transferred to the English translation. Rather, the English translation of unheimlich – uncanny – evokes the notion of the canny, which has quite a different meaning, namely smart. We find a productive dialectic in the English translation to uncanny, exactly because canny, the antagonist of uncanny, means smart, rather than uneerie. Hence, with uncanny pasts there is a sense that decisions made during this time might not feel or appear smart or comprehensible; it is this that emerges in the documentaries, along with the eeriness of temporal disorientation.⁵

Reordering time: turning an uncanny past into a sensible past

In the following four sub-sections, we first establish uncanny temporalities as a crucial aspect of Syrian lives in the past decade. Second, we address how uncanny pasts are negotiated and made sensible through documentary filmmaking in relation to whether personal decisions made in the context of the uprising can be justified on an existential level. Third, we discuss how uncanny pasts are addressed in relation to whether decisions made as a collective part of the uprising were justifiable and legitimate as support of ‘the cause'. Finally, we explore the tension between personal and collective memory-making through image curation.

The uncanny present in Syria

While life in Syria today can certainly be understood as ordered by uncanny temporalities, this was particularly true for the years following the beginning of the uprising, when the violence escalated, yet the direction of events was still largely open. To establish the uncanniness of Syrian temporalities during this period, we now turn to The War Show, which was the first of the three films to come out and mainly unfolds in the early years of the uprising and war. The film reestablishes the innocence of the early days of the uprising and takes us back to a time when people were fighting for something which seems forgotten or unspoken today, perhaps overshadowed by the brutality that unfolded. In an intimate sequence from the beginning of the film, the viewer joins the young people as they hang out in a private home in the very early days of the uprising. The footage is blurry, the light dim, and the camera is handheld and shaky. One of the women, Amal, is smoking a cigarette, noting that this is her first time doing so. Meanwhile, her friend, who goes by the name, Anonymous, instructs her how to ash the cigarette. The conversation shifts smoothly from the smoke from the cigarette to a discussion of when the footage should be seen, and what the future may bring.

Amal:

First time!

Anonymous:

It came out of her nose. You have to hold it like this [shows how to hold the cigarette].

Amal:

Like this? It is the first time in my life I try this.

Anonymous:

Hold it like this. Between your thumb and your middle finger. Yes, like that. That is how you have to hold it.

Amal:

Go away and let me try then. Give it to me.

Anonymous:

Yes, exactly like this!

Lulu:

This [recording] cannot be shown until 2014. By 2014 we will have achieved freedom.

Zytoon:

Not until 2014? No, it has to be now. Right now!

Anonymous:

Shut up! In 2014 we will probably all be dead. The sun will have crashed into Earth.

This conversation not only shows the uncertainty and inability to anticipate the future of this time; it also shows the extreme ordinariness with which this teleological disturbance is met – a conversation about how to smoke a cigarette easily turns into the sun crashing down and everyone dying. The future seems to be both open to dreams of freedom and fears of annihilation; open to its making and its demise. This openness is important to revisit today in order to understand this particular time as a critical threshold in which the violence and devastation that came after might have been partially envisioned, yet was never seen as the only – or the desired – future. When the film was published in 2016, 2014 was of course no longer open to its own making, but rather a both known and contested past in which some predictions had indeed turned out to become reality, while the initial, hopeful dreams had been sorely abandoned. This scene captures the uncanniness and collapse of temporal orderings in Syrian lives. Now we turn to how temporalities are reordered and made sensible in Syrian documentaries.

Reordering of time as a contribution to the public negotiation of individual pasts

In For Sama, director and narrator Waad Al-Kateab revisits decisions she and her husband made in Syria in the midst of hope, death, and destruction. Al-Kateab crucially addresses certain points in time, such as the beginning of the uprising, the escalation of state violence, the birth of Sama, and their exodus, which we, drawing on Bryant, understand as critical thresholds. In going back to these critical thresholds and reordering them, Al-Kateab establishes that there was only one sensible way to move towards the future at these times, even though looking back, some decisions seem inexplicable. An obvious example of one of these critical thresholds is when al-Kateab and her husband – incomprehensibly, even to themselves – decide to return to opposition-held East Aleppo with Sama after having visited a sick family member in Turkey. At this time, the Russian-backed Syrian military was closing in on the besieged area, and not merely a future, but survival seemed uncertain. Sama’s grandparents pleaded to Al-Kateab and her husband to leave Sama with them in Turkey. Al-Kateab narrates to Sama while we see shifting images of bombings and the family getting closer to the besieged area. ‘Rationally, we knew that they were right. But in our hearts, we felt we had to go back and you had to be with us. We didn’t know why. The truth is that even now, I can’t believe, we did it'. With Sama in a baby carrier, they navigate the last stretch into Aleppo by foot, through the last possible entrance into the city: a narrow corridor through the deadly battle zone. Sama gets fuzzy and the group starts singing a nursery rhyme to keep her calm. As they pause to assess the danger looming in front of them, Al-Khateab assumes her role as a documenter of history to ask her husband in a formal tone: ‘Dr. Hamza, why are you going [into Aleppo] now?' He answers in a manner that is clearly addressed to other times and places, ‘We are going back to Aleppo, because we have been fighting for five years, since the days of the peaceful protests. And each one of us has a big role to play in supporting justice against oppression. Even she has a role to play', he concludes, as he kisses Sama who sits quietly in her carrier.

Despite Al-Kateab conceding that she, even today, does not understand why they brought Sama back, this clip establishes that they saw their decision as righteous and necessary at the time. However, it is through the relations forged between different times that Al-Kateab most importantly asserts the sensibility of their decisions. Through the weaving of different times, she builds an argument that they could not have oriented themselves towards the future or anticipated the future in any other way at these points in time, even though the time that came to pass did not bring what they were hoping for. Al-Kateab thus proposes that not only is the past important to understand a particular moment, but the events that are to follow are also important for understanding the decisions made before. Towards the end of the film, after we have seen the family evacuate Aleppo along with the remaining civilians as part of an internationally negotiated cease-fire agreement, Al-Kateab revisits the significance of their sacrifices: ‘The one thing I want you to know is that we fought for the most important cause of all. So that you and other children should not live the lives we have lived. I want you to know that everything we did, we did for you. It was all for you, Sama'. These lines explain why Sama’s birth is established in the film before the film returns to the earlier days of the uprising. In this way, Al-Kataeb performs a teleological reordering where things that happened at a later point become key for understanding decisions made at an earlier point. Despite the uprising starting before Sama was born, her existence needed to be established to explain why they went to the streets. Similarly, the violence and ruthlessness that was unleashed by the Syrian state in response to the uprising presents an argument for why they had to go to the streets in the first place, rather than due to the violence and ruthlessness the state displayed before the uprising.

We contend that this temporal reordering – that the birth of Sama was necessary for establishing the righteousness and necessity of what they did before she was born – turns an uncanny past into a sensible past. Having established this – and other – moments as decisive for both the past and the future, she also establishes that despite their decisions being incomprehensible to her, they could not have done anything differently; they could not have oriented themselves towards the future or anticipated the future in any other way at these points in time, even though the time that came to pass did not bring what they were hoping for. That the uncanny past has been turned into a sensible past is confirmed when al-Kateab says ‘if I could turn back time, I would do the same again'. Hence, through the film, Al-Kateab performs a teleological reordering by returning to certain critical thresholds and reordering these events, not as an uncanny past, but as a sensible past where what they did becomes meaningful in relation to the time that followed.

Reordering of time as a contribution to the public negotiation of collective pasts

A similar reordering of the uncanny past takes place in Our Memory Belongs to Us, yet in this film the viewer sees the process of reordering through the discussions between the three friends Yadan, Rani, and Odai and director Rami Farah. Moving back and forth between images on the screen and the conversation between the four men on the stage in front of the screen, the time of the footage is revisited in the conversation, and a temporal relation between the events on the screen and the events on the stage is established. Unlike For Sama, Our Memory Belongs to Us focuses less on the justification of decisions in relation to their personal consequences and more on whether decisions made by revolutionaries were justifiable and legitimate in support of ‘the cause'. That is, should they or could they collectively have done anything differently to influence the outcome of their revolution. As the film moves back and forth between the screening of the footage on the stage and the footage itself, the three friends recall events and people. In this collective, reflective engagement with the past, they not only negotiate what happened but also contest and explain why they did what they did as revolutionaries. Watching the footage together, recollecting and establishing their shared memories, they collectively confirm the integrity of the revolution and of their own role. Doing so, they corroborate that they would not have been able to do anything differently to change the outcome, not as individuals nor as a people.

Revisiting a video clip of a group of local revolutionaries – including themselves – gathered for a live recording for Al Jazeera Mubasher, the friends on stage discuss why they had masked their faces in the clip. This conversation about their masking unravels fundamental and unsettled issues of the revolution. One question that is posed is how the revolution might have been seen by people who were not part of it, whether in or outside of Syria. When one of the revolutionaries in the clip contends that this is a revolution for all Syrians, while standing on the theatre stage in Paris, looking at the image of themselves and their masked comrades, the three friends find the images to present a more unclear message. They not only have difficulties identifying themselves and each other, but also in seeing an image which, when seen at the time of the filming in Paris, can be read in very different ways than how they originally intended it. Farah asks ‘how do you think this image was viewed on Al Jazeera Mubasher? How did people view it?' The question is sensitive as it points to the balancing act between being transparent and legitimate while also surviving the state’s deadly crackdown on any oppositional activity. Yadan immediately answers, ‘it is an ugly image'. This comment seems to upset Odai, who insists that this is a ‘beautiful' image. The disagreement not only revolves around the image of the group of revolutionaries, but also the image or identity of the revolution itself. Yadan regrets the ‘ugly image', arguing that it gives a wrong impression of the revolution and makes it difficult for spectators to differentiate between their revolution and terrorism. Odai, however, disagrees: ‘this was filmed at the end of 2011 when there were no terrorist or extremist groups in Syria. It was called a revolution and everyone knew the revolution’. Odai thus establishes that when they masked their faces in order not to be recognized and persecuted by the state, they were not compromising the image of the revolution at that time. Later in the film, the escalation of violence is discussed, and the three friends reflect over why their revolution developed the way it did. After watching a clip of a group of armed opposition fighters celebrating the conquest of a regime-held area, Farah initiates the conversation asking, ‘Odai, how was the revolutionary perceived after taking up arms?' Odai responds hesitantly, ‘I am not in the mood, I don’t know'. However, Farah continues: ‘Would you like to say why?' This encourages a long and heartfelt monologue by Oday:

I don’t know. I am beyond those details. We are talking about a big thing. How can we, in a 30-second video, reduce how people, how they … No, really, this video speaks a ton of details. Since March 18th, 2011, until this video, we had been asking for international protection. We had been asking for international protection from the world, from the UN, somebody help! (…) For two years, we have been saying, ‘Protect us! We don’t want to carry arms. Hey World! Save us!’ Then what? Should we just die? No, we will defend ourselves. We as the Syrian will defend ourselves. For two years, we have been asking for help from the UN, USA, France, and so on. They didn’t protect us. We were told ‘Here is a rifle, go and get killed' We paid with a lot of blood. A lot!

Odai is clearly upset by the topic, and his frustration over the lack of support from the international society is tangible. In this analysis, he challenges the legitimacy of putting the responsibility of taking up arms on the revolutionaries. Rather, he places this responsibility on the international community. He continues, ‘Every human has a right to freedom and self-defense. Nobody can blame us for it. No matter what we do. We need to defend ourselves (…) How can we reduce all that to one scene and the question, ‘Why carry a rifle?’'

Through his insistence that taking up arms was never a decision made by revolutionaries, he points to an understanding of the Syrian situation that acknowledges its beginning. This is underscored by later sequences showing Rani when he, for a period – as many other revolutionaries – had joined the armed resistance. For Rani, joining the armed opposition and staying in Syria to fight seemed the only plausible way forward when his journalistic work was no longer possible. It was a continuation of his revolutionary engagement though it played out in a way he did not have much control over. This establishes that decisions made by revolutionaries, despite potentially looking unconvincing at the time of the filming on the stage, could not have been made differently. They had to pick up arms and defend themselves because no one else offered protection when they were being killed by the state. Thus, as they reconcile with decisions of a time when they were not able to anticipate the future and explain times that are difficult to understand today, they revisit temporal relations and establish an order that not only puts the past in the past, but also places the relevant past in the present.

Curation of images – on remembering and forgetting

The previous parts of the analysis investigated how uncanny pasts are negotiated and made sensible both in relation to personal lives and to the life of the uprising. We will now turn to an analysis of how the curation of images can function as a personal and collective strategy to create memories and enable forgetting, selectively bringing certain memories into the future. In the three documentaries, decisions of remembering and forgetting are deeply personal while also having collective implications as crucial contributions to the state-critical writing of history. In a central story line in Our Memory Belongs to Us, the brutal but necessary negotiation over what to remember and what to forget – and how to remember and how to forget – is in focus. A contorted voice is heard narrating events, and the three friends try to guess who the narrator is. Eventually, through laughs, they identify the voice as that of their friend, Abou Nimr. Clearly moved by the encounter with their friend, they cheerfully recall precious and funny memories of him and reminisce over his dedication and joyful spirit. They talk about how he, at great risk to himself and his family, continuously shared news from Deraa with the world. As a safety measure, he wore wigs, and at one point he dyed his hair when he did news clips for Aljazeera. With affection and laughter, Yadan explains that, unfortunately, the dye had made him look like his brother. The laughter ends and the mood shifts as the friends discuss how Abou Nimr, in reality, had known that the dye and other safety measures were futile. He knew the risks he was taking. Inevitably, in one of the last scenes of the film, we arrive at the footage of Abou Nimr’s death. The atmosphere at the stage becomes emotional as the three friends understand what is about to be shown. Yadan objects: ‘I’d rather not see that video, okay?' Rani has already diverted his gaze from the screen. Odai has turned around, ‘I turned my back; I don’t want to watch'. The images are stopped on the screen as certain memories and images are carried into the future, others selectively abandoned. However, as the film draws towards the end and we depart from the theatre, Farah asks, ‘How does one survive? By forgetting? By remembering?' He then contends, ‘I don’t want to forget’ as he shows us, the viewers, the footage of Abou Nimr’s death, ensuring that despite personal reservations, the images of both the life and death of Abou Nimr is rendered available to collective memory-making.

In this exchange between the photographers and Farah is a crucial negotiation of the role of images in establishing the past and enabling the future. There is also an engagement of the tension between personal and collective memory. In our conversations with Farah, he told us that the decision whether to include this footage had been difficult. He not only consulted the three photographers on stage, but also the family of Abou Nimr to ensure that the showing of the images was condoned by those with the most personal stakes. As he rhetorically asks in the film, ‘is the collection of the story worth all the violence that memory brings back?' Yet, the film insists on confronting the uncanny past as a – collective – strategy to move on while personally, individuals try to selectively remember and forget. This is, thus, a crucial curation of the role of images in establishing the past and enabling the future, and a reflective engagement with questions of how remembering and forgetting allow ways of moving forward in the wake of the intense pain that many Syrians have lived through during the past decade. While individually people might need to deal differently with their memories, the film insists that collectively, we need to remember both life and death in order for us to put the past in its place.

In The War Show the question of how to remember the dead is also carefully curated. As the film progresses, the initial playful and innocent atmosphere is replaced by disruption, fear, and grief as the uprising turns into a bloody war. By the end of the film, we learn about the death of several of the friends in the group, and we are faced with the gruesome details of how they were killed by the state: Rabie by a gunshot in the head, Houssam by torture, and Anonymous perhaps by starvation, identified by Lulu in one of the many images of dead bodies exposed by state prison photographer and defector, Caesar. In the epilogue, Obaidah Zytoon visits Lulu who is living in exile in Turkey. Together, they remember Anonymous and his devotion to win Lulu’s affection. While showing the Caesar photo of Anonymous, Zytoon narrates how Lulu went through hundreds and hundreds of photos searching for Anonymous, and that she succeeded in identifying him only due to a small beauty spot on his nose. This passage is followed by images of Lulu as she watches old footage of Anonymous, singing and enjoying summer at the beach; footage that was shown earlier in the film, when he – for the viewer – was still alive.

Here, both Lulu and Zytoon agree on the importance of remembering Anonymous by watching and showing footage of him while still alive. At the same time, the film confronts the viewer with the devastating and almost unrecognizable Caesar-image of Anonymous. Meanwhile, other of Caesar’s images are shown, juxtaposed on the screen with images of the same person while alive. However, as one set of images is taken over by another, the position of the death image continually shifts, preventing the viewer from finding sanctity in the images of life. By juxtaposing images of life and death, Zytoon insists that we remember and connect the two – both the hope and innocence of the 2011 uprising and the following dreadful escalation of violence and death – in the writing of Syrian history and in moving forward.

Conclusion

In this article, we have argued that The War Show, For Sama, and Our Memory Belongs to Us perform a teleological reordering that serves to turn an uncanny past into a sensible past, allowing for new orientations towards the future. That is, the revisiting and recollection of images can contribute to the work of putting time back in place. While many Syrians are still living an uncanny present, we contend that for those who have gone into exile, as is the case of the three filmmakers, the spatial as well as temporal distance to the Syrian uncanny present has at least in some respects turned it into an uncanny past. Simultaneously, the state of exile has enabled reflections and pensiveness, and thus provided an opportunity to reorder elements of the uncanny past and make the incomprehensible sensible. Through pensive curation of images, certain memories are consciously carried towards the future and others selectively abandoned.

In The War Show, as so many Syrians have been forced into exile, Zytoon narrates, ‘Syria is no longer within the borders of the country; Syrians have become the new map'. This also means that the conversation about what Syria was, is, and is to become has been pushed well beyond the geographical borders of Syria. But, it has also been pushed beyond the temporal borders of the present, as many Syrians are now raising their children in exile with an uncertainty of what Syria will be for them. Both al-Kataeb and Farah emphasized that a reason for making their films was that they need their children to understand why they are growing up in exile. Meanwhile, the generation of children growing up in Syria are also very much desired future audiences. As Farah pondered, children inside Syria now pass by the re-erected statues of their dictators on their way to school while the state, along with its statues, re-establishes its narrative. In the context of this scattered nation, the three documentaries importantly counter the Syrian state's writing of history and enables an alternative to the state narrative. These films thus engender a collective conversation, aimed both at Syrians in exile (and their host societies) as well as the next generation of Syrians inside and outside of Syria.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Danmarks Frie Forskningsfond [Grant Number ref. 9062-00014B].

Notes

1 The visits by directors were made possible by a University of Copenhagen research-teaching-integration grant received by Andreas Bandak (PI of Archiving the Future) and Christine Crone. The workshop with Syrian cultural producers was made possible by a grant from The Danish Institute in Damascus. All activities have further been supported by the Danish Research Council Sapere Aude grant for Archiving the Future.

2 See Wessels (2019) for a historical overview of the Syrian documentary scene.

3 Bidayyat.org.

4 Dox-box.org.

5 We are grateful to Cameron Warner for pointing us to the significance of this dual connotation.