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"Chaos": Making Visible Syrian Women’s Experiences of War
Abstract
How does Syrian migrant cinema counter the visual regime of the so-called refugee crisis? More specifically, what are some of the creative processes and aesthetic strategies mobilized by Syrian filmmakers to disrupt the dominant discourse of the “crisis,” to generate alternative narratives and representations, and to activate new modalities of political engagement? In this paper, I engage with Chaos (2018), an essay film by Syrian filmmaker Sara Fattahi as an instance of countervisualization that bring to visibility other realities of forced migration that make up Syrian refugees’ lived and embodied experiences: memories, narratives, feelings, and claims that have otherwise been denied or concealed by the dominant discourse of the “crisis.” Through a qualitative interpretive analysis of the film, and drawing on translator and writer Lina Mounzer’s reflection on the process of bearing witness to and translating experiences of war, I argue that Fattahi’s film bears witness to Syrian women’s experiences of war and exile, and translates their oral testimonies into cinematic images that engage the viewers as co-witnesses and solicit a different mode of relating. Fattahi combines an observational sensibility with an aesthetic of extreme close-ups and poetic imagery to generate a new politico-aesthetic language that makes visible and sensible the physical, emotional, and psychological effects of violence, loss, and displacement, creating a sense of proximate intimacy for the viewers and immersing them in these realities in ways that are sensorially, viscerally, and affectively engaging. In addition to foregrounding the voices of women, Chaos privileges the lived, felt, and embodied aspect of forced migration and exile—thoughts, feelings, dreams, inner worlds—which are usually absented, making the women’s stories, and the memories they hold, endure in the face of erasure and forgetting, while also disrupting media’s dominant frame and discourse on war and refugeehood. My broader argument is that this cinematic intervention constitutes an aesthetic and political contribution to a growing body/archive of films created by Syrians on the move as they attempt to (self)represent their lived experiences of war and displacement, to engage the world outside through the moving image, and to offer a collective response to the visual war waged by nation-states and global mainstream media on migrants and refugees. Such films rupture the visualization of the crisis and challenge the politics of hyper- and in-visibility onto which it is founded.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Syria
Sub Area
None