This paper focuses on the Syrian documentary film collective, Abounaddara, to trace a preliminary methodology that not only problematizes treating the art of the Syrian uprising as a ‘new’ genre, but also the thorny nature of using art to represent this uprising as an event with predetermined meaning - one that can be neatly assimilated into broader narratives of change and the ‘Arab Spring.’ As the Syrian uprising continues to unfold, few would dispute that representation – both inside and outside Syria - occupies a central and bitterly contested role in determining the meaning of political change. While a good deal of artistic production since the uprising began has taken a side in this discursive battle, my turn to Abounaddara’s films is an attempt to move away from instrumentalizing art in the service of a single narrative of the uprising and to think about how one group of filmmakers are using art to intervene in the culture of the image in Syria. As Roland Barthes has made amply clear, images ask things of us. And in Syria, from the ubiquitous presence of the ‘eternal’ dictator in Syrian public space over the past four decades to contemporary deployments of charred, mutilated bodies on Youtube, the encounter between viewer and image has been and continues to be heavily weighted toward the interpretive power of the latter. I suggest that Abounaddara’s short films, on the border between narrative and documentary, provide a systematic visual critique of this representational mode – and its implications for politics in Syria – in an effort to open up that interpretive space. While this artistic intervention into the political is well and good, to conclude I dwell on Abounaddara’s self-consciously withdrawn stance from the public sphere of protest art. This reading of Abounaddara not only runs counter to established notions of art’s role in the Arab Spring – in which viral popularity freely propels political change – but suggests that certain artists have explicitly taken their distance from this vision of art in revolution. I connect this stance back to Abounaddara’s broader project and ask how maintaining a prescribed role for art in the Syrian uprising may risk perpetuating, rather than revolutionizing, established representational modes.