Afterlives

Desktop documentary, video essay, forensic documentary, archive film: Kevin B. Lee’s Afterlives is a filmic work that is difficult to categorise and, in this way, it helpfully makes us ask the question: do we necessarily have to categorise? Why are we so dependent on categories? Shouldn’t we better trust a form that appears as different or new? Afterlives is actually a true essay, and as such it ventures into a hybrid language – and the festival DocLisboa has been just smart enough to provide its world premiere.

I find it interesting to discuss its essayistic form, because it challenges some prejudices about documentaries. As media theoretician, Kevin B. Lee accurately studies the complex topic of a relationship between terrorism and the diffusion of images, but does not avoid showing, even staging, his own subjectivity. This mixture of analytical and phenomenological layers is actually the necessary result of two assumptions that are often neglected in cinematic practice: the assumption that the neutrality of the scientific observer is an un-scientific myth, and the assumption that a personal perspective does not have to be reduced to pure emotionality but can be nourished by factual checks and theoretical reflection. How do terrorists handle images? How do these images affect the analysts of terrorism? How do we receive, and reflect on, these handlings and affections? The widespread digital circulation of images entangle these different perspectives; Kevin B. Lee’s task is to disentangle them and deconstruct the illusion of immediacy in the access and the meaning of images. This is why it is important that Afterlives show the instruments of analysis – the desktop, the hands, the puzzled faces of the people working with images: they are all elements of mediation, both analytical and phenomenological.

I insist on the form of Afterlives, because this form is already communicating about the content of the film, which is the question of showing images, of diffusing them, archiving them, remembering them. Kevin B. Lee’s proposal of a hybrid form between analysis and phenomenology, between facts and feelings, is already a form of resistance against the purely spectacular emotionality of terrorist images or the purely factual approach of their analysts. In showing the spectacular functioning of terrorist images and simultaneously showing himself as spectator – sometime as spectator of spectators – Kevin B. Lee makes us aware of our own’s spectatorship. During the entire film, our critical stance is constantly mobilised, which inevitably makes of Afterlives an uncomfortable film.

Now, this uncomfortable dimension is essential as a form of resistance against uncritical spectatorship and therefore against a specific dynamic of spectacle at the core of the connection between image and terror. This is the dynamic of fashion and fetish, of attraction and idolatry, of seduction and captivation. The myth of Medusa, that is placed at the centre of the film as its magnetic pole, is the formidable synthesis of this dynamic. Fascination goes together with petrification, the freezing of our body being the reflection of the power of image as fetish, as equally blocked in rigidity. The terror of the image is contained in its being fascinating and fetishized.

In a way, Medusa is the triumph of the spectacle, of uncritical spectatorship, while at the same time the negation of film as moving image. Resisting Medusa and her terror is probably unfashionable, but it certainly restores the elusiveness of film as moving image. In Afterlives, Kevin B. Lee constantly puts in question the fixity of images, through a nervous editing and a superposition of image layers that render the film restless, anxious. He stages himself as an “affected scientist”, and the visibility of his thinking on and with the images liberates the filmic matter from the traps of the image as fashionable, fetish, spectacular. Restlessness is not only the subjective expression of a critical reflection on the media, but also the medium specificity of film as moving image.

Thanks to this restlessness, Kevin B. Lee’s film is a critical foyer that allows us to expand on several delicate questions: Do preventive measures against terrorism, image censorship included, risk nourishing the spectacular dynamic of terror? Does the attention paid to propaganda images risk becoming (unwillingly) complicit in the propaganda itself? In this regard, is there a specific “violence of care” that should be considered, so putting the almost dogmatic popularity of the notion of care, today, in question? How should we extract forensic evidence from propaganda images that manipulate evidence? Are “operational images” (Harun Farocki) or “working images” (in Volker Pantenburg’s reformulation) under Medusa’s spell too? What is the connection between the datafication of images in surveillance society and the image communication in terrorism?

I like to see Afterlives as a kick-off film, as the starting point of a critical discussion that needs to be continued, as a temporary cinema crystallization that deconstructs the dynamic of spectacle in order to open up a restless, filmic territory where affective intelligence reactivates media theory. Through afterimages, images become moving images; through moving images, afterlives survive the images under Medusa’s spell. Just stay restless.