Fanon Between Syria and Argentina: Amiralay, Third Cinema, and the Looming Horizon of the Anticolonial Imperative

Syrian documentary filmmaker and visionary Omar Amiralay ends his 1974 film

Everyday Life in a Syrian Village with a piercing repudiation, and a harsh call to action. After an

hour and 20 minutes of footage depicting the debilitating conditions of the Syrian peasantry,

Amiralay refuses to let the film go to black without having the last word. Evoking Franz Fanon,

a subtitle before the final credits reads: “We must involve ourselves in the struggle for our

common liberation. There are no clean hands, no innocents, no spectators. We must all plunge

our hands into the soil of our land. Every spectator is a coward, or a traitor.”1

In the aftermath of

the 1970 “corrective movement” that brought Hafez Al-Assad to power, Amiralay’s invocation

of Fanon comes across as a militant call to action against a compromised Ba’ath party now ruling

Syria. Yet, interestingly enough, Amiralay’s prophetic call finds a rather curious culprit: an

unnamed spectator.

Over the course of this essay, I aim to historicize the lingering presence of Fanon’s

spectator in Amiralay’s film through the lens of the Fanonian project of creating an anti-colonial

national culture. In the Syrian context, anticolonial national culture had necessarily transnational

aesthetic links. For one, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village’s ending quote not only borrows from

Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, but specifically from Fanon’s invocation throughout the

Argentinian guerilla film The Hour of the Furnaces, a key film from the Latin American Third

Cinema movement. These films took part in a project of reframing notions of spectatorship, via

the medium of film, as a tool with the purpose of creating a revolutionary actor committed to

Third Worldist national liberation. I argue that the Syrian National Film Organization (NFO)

1

also participated in the project of creating a revolutionary actor via film, prior to the hardening of

a censorship regime by the Ba’ath Party in 1973. After 1973, the NFO banned most Syrian films

from collective screenings within Syria, turning these films into export commodities while

ossifying revolutionary aesthetics as a tool at the hands of a decidedly counter-revolutionary

regime. Syrian filmmakers, such as Amiralay, had to respond to these conditions, which rendered

the political projects of their cinema impossible. Yet, at stake in this paper is not merely

describing how Amiralay’s film functioned as a historically grounded critique of a hijacked

Ba’ath Party. Rather, I am invested in how the film’s afterlife speaks to a post-2011 moment by

expanding Fanon’s project towards its unfulfilled horizons. Third Cinema and Syrian Cinema, I

argue, stretch Fanonian anticolonialism through their stubborn material existence as films with

long shelf lives, speaking near one another across differentiated colonial peripheries to new

revolutionary actors: a coalition of fugitive spectators.

By bringing the Middle East and the Americas in conversation through my approach to

Syrian cinema and Third cinema, I aim to write against an analytical frame of enclosure:

analyzing Syria as a self-contained autocratic nation-state, or doing Middle East Studies as a

rigidly bordered field of study. Yasin al-Haj Saleh argues that it is impossible to think about

Syria today as anything but a global question, at a time where millions of Syrians are globally

displaced at the crosshairs of various geopolitical interventions.2 However, this insight does not

seem to accompany most studies of Syria, which remain tethered to the nation-state form as a

principle site of inquiry. Even approaches that think of Syria as a “neoliberal autocracy” tend to

analyze neoliberalism as the encouragement of “the good life” within Syria, policies and

branding aesthetics that begin and end in an autocratic nation-state rather than being strategically

positioned within an expansive global political economy of dispossession, with the US empire as

2

reigning hegemon.3 Similarly, the theoretical tools of area studies and even postcolonial studies

largely take the Middle East as a self-contained problem-space, a generic colonial periphery

replaceable with other colonial peripheries.4 These analytical frameworks potentially further

justify interventionist political solutions to Syria and to the region as a whole, rather than

carefully scrutinizing where the region fits historically within a differentiated capitalist-colonial

totality in order to arrive at a politics of coalition.5 By thinking about the transit of Fanonian

anticolonialism across Syrian cinema and Third cinema, I hope to move further towards a

deprovincialization of Syria, and of the region as a whole.

Moreover, my focus on the relationship between Syrian cinema and Third cinema arises

from a post-2011 juncture, where images of a self-contained Syria have become a ubiquitous,

commodifiable object of spectatorship. Over the past decade since millions took to the streets in

2011, the image of Syrian suffering became a hypervisible object to be known through a

commodified market of NGOs, artists, TV networks, social media platforms, and film festival

circuits, under the auspices of humanitarianism.6 As an example of a response to to this

marketplace, film collective Abounaddara articulated a “right to image,” a politics of

self-determination through ownership of the image.7 By arguing for an “emergency cinema,”

Abounaddara insists on creating “images based on dignity,” as opposed to “property.”8 An

“undignified image,” for Abounaddara, takes for granted the spectator watching the image, and

the looking relations between spectator and image structured by an extractive political economy.

9

Interestingly, Abounaddara directly traces their approach back to Omar Amiralay, who spent

much of his filmmaking career problematizing the relationship between the spectator and the

image.10 More importantly, Abounaddara’s conscious invocation of Amiralay directly places

their concerns of a “right to image” in dialogue with the politics of the cinema of decolonization.

3

The history of Syrian cinema cannot be separated from the unmet anti-colonial promises

of Ba’athism—namely, the notion of a radical, developmentalist national cinema sponsored by

the state in the form of the National Film Organization (NFO). After a series of

post-independence coup d’etats, Syria’s military wing of the Ba’ath Party, an Arab nationalist

party with deep connections to the peasantry, came into power in 1963.11 The Ba’ath Party

established the NFO to fund Syrian filmmakers to study filmmaking, primarily but not

exclusively in Moscow at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography (VGIK).12 As in many

other nation-states at the moment of decolonization, Syrian-funded filmmakers traveled to

Europe with high ideals of bringing modernization and development to an underdeveloped,

colonized nation.13 These filmmakers returned to Syria throughout the 1970s and 1980s, after the

Hafez Al-Assad counter-coup, to create a collaborative Pan-Arabist cinema with filmmakers

from Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and Algeria.14 By making the NFO the exclusive body for funding

Syrian cinema, the Ba’ath attempted to ensure that cinema could operate as a cog in a broader

project of anti-colonial nation-building.

In using the term “anti-colonial nation-building,” I am explicitly connecting the impulses

of early Syrian cinema to the Fanonian conception of an anti-colonial national culture

intertwined with anti-colonial struggle. For Fanon, the development of a national culture went

hand-in-hand with combat—in his formulation, “national culture... must lie at the very heart of

the liberation struggle these (colonized) countries are waging.”15 This national culture, Fanon

crucially insisted, did not simply aim to “restore... former values and reconfigurations” from a

romantic pre-colonial past.16 Against this restorative register and its “terribly sterile cliches,”17

Fanon argues for a national culture of combat, one constantly articulating “a new reality in

action” in response to a constantly evolving colonial condition.18 The aims of this national

4

culture, Fanon insists, are nothing short of a dialectical struggle “mobilizing every level of

society” towards “a new humanism,” an issue to which we will return at a later point in this

paper.

19 For our current purposes, it is worth noting that Fanonian national culture rejects a static

address by highlighting the constantly evolving nature of the colonial situation. Rather than

ossifying revolutionary rhetoric or relying on romantic pasts, Fanonian national culture remained

committed to constantly forming horizons by attaching itself inexplicably to the long duree of

anti-colonial struggle.

The Third Cinema movement in Latin America materialized Fanon’s project via the

medium of film by theorizing film as an ideological tool in service of creating revolutionary

actors out of viewers. In their infamous 1970 manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” Octavio

Getino and Fernando Solanas understood their “Third Cinema” as existing in direct opposition to

the dominant address of Hollywood commercial cinema, in which cinema as a consumer good

mystifies its ideological impetus. For Getino and Solanas, this “cinema of mystification”

functions as “a spectacle aimed at a digesting object.”20

Instead, Getino and Solanas insisted on a

cinema “at the service of life itself... dissolving aesthetics in the life of society” in service of “ a

cinema fit for a new kind of human being, for what each one of us has the possibility of

becoming.”21 This “new human being” emerges through participating in the screening of the film

as a facet of a broader anti-colonial struggle, transforming the viewer “from spectator to actor.”22

Directly citing Fanon while also taking aesthetic cues from Italian neorealism, Getino and

Solanas’ Third Cinema could only function by immediately and directly politicizing its viewers,

turning them from consuming spectators into revolutionary actors by involving them directly in

the realities unfolding within and beyond the image.

5

Getino and Solanas’s 1968 film, The Hour of the Furnaces, sought to involve an audience

of revolutionary co-conspirators both through its form, and through the collectivity fostered

through a guerilla screening space. The film, completed two years before the manifesto,

demonstrated Getino and Solanas’ manifesto on the relationship between film and Fanonian

anti-colonialism. By attaching itself to the left-wing orientation of Peronism, the ideologically

variegated populist movement named after exiled Argentinian leader Juan Peron, Getino and

Solanas’s film became quite dangerous to view.

23

Indeed, the politicization of the audience began

before the film even began. By making the decision to attend illegal guerilla screenings, the

audience member immediately became a co-conspirator and actor liable to be arrested.24 From

there, the film itself allowed the audience to “see” what Solanas and Getino call “the invisible

hand of neocolonialism” by splicing intertitle quotes by Fanon, Che Guevara, and Peron between

montages of material conditions in Argentina. Moreover, the images are often accompanied by

narration directly addressing the audience, flowing between statistical information and

ideological slogans. Crucially however, Getino and Solanas did not treat the production of the

film itself as a foregone conclusion. The film, for Getino and Solanas, was a “detonator”: the

audience’s role as a participatory actor could only be fully materialized through active discussion

and reflection after the film ended, turning the film screening into “a meeting.”25 As such, the

guerilla screening space became just as crucial to the project of Third Cinema as the formalistic

realism of documentary filmmaking itself. Following Fanon’s national culture, such a project

necessarily refuses foreclosure, responding to an evolving colonial situation through the

audience’s active involvement.

Moving in tandem with Third Cinema, Ba’athist Syria’s earliest forms of cultural

production prior to 1973 participated in a burgeoning movement framed as explicitly

6

anti-colonial.26 Following Fanon’s theorization, many of the earliest NFO-funded fiction and

documentary films dealt with Syria’s past and present not through the lens of restoring a

pre-colonial past, but through a more explicitly combative register of anti-colonial struggle.

Early NFO films such as Nabil Maleh, Kais Al-Zubaidi, and Omar Amiralay’s first films, The

Leopard, Al-Yazerli and Film Essay on the Euphrates Dam narrativized revolution, peasant

suffering at the hands of wealthy landowners, and modernization through different registers of

genre. These themes, along with Palestinian liberation from Zionist settler-colonialism, ran

deeply across not just Syrian cinema, but the theater and literature of writers such as Saadallah

Wannous, Mamdooh Udwan and Mohammad Al-Maghut as well.27 Moreover, prior to 1973, the

NFO existed as a relatively independent institution, allowing filmmakers to collaborate with

other Pan-Arab filmmakers with little control—Omar Amiralay called these years “the golden

age of Syrian cinema.”28 What these pieces of national culture shared was a commitment to a

burgeoning national cinema, articulated in ideological opposition to colonial representation.

However, by the time that most Syrian filmmakers returned from their studies abroad to

partake in the project of national culture, it became apparent to them that the ruling Ba’ath Party

began transforming into a counter-revolutionary vehicle for opportunism after the 1970 coup.

Hafez Al-Assad’s “corrective movement” after the 1967 defeat and Israeli invasion of the Golan

Heights came about as the result of an uneasy, yet mutually beneficial pact between a growing

state bourgeoisie and Syria’s mercantile classes against a more radical wing of the Ba’ath Party.

29

These developments unfolded in tandem with a global neoliberal counter-revolution, in which

expanding private capital, the rolling back of welfare states, and a growing US imperialist

hegemony slowly engulfed colonial peripheries.30

In Syria, these global developments

manifested in ways that increasingly alienated the Ba’ath from its historic rural base, while

7

bolstering its secret police and carceral apparatuses to crush growing dissent.31 Expanding the

carceral state became especially necessary after Ba’athist Syria’s highly unpopular involvement

in support of right-wing Phalangist and Zionist forces in the 1976 Lebanese Civil War against the

Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Lebanese National Movement.32 All in all, to use the

words of Hanna Batatu, the Ba’ath Party transformed in the post-1970 moment from a party of

“youthful visionaries and devotees” to one “increasingly dominated by careerists and

professional party operators,” whom, I would add, became among the region’s many

opportunistic profiteers in the war against the Zionist settler-colonial entity.

33

Moreover, as the Ba’ath Party became increasingly embedded in a neoliberal world

system, it began to crack down more seriously on the cultural sphere, turning cinema that

partook in anti-colonial national culture into an export commodity by banning local screening

spaces. Galvanized by “the victory” of the October War against Israel in 1973, the Ba’ath Party

replaced the NFO’s more independent leadership with a more state-oriented leadership to

maintain its monopoly over the culture sphere.34 Simultaneously, the Ba’ath Party issued orders

to close down theaters, as the new NFO leadership began censoring the cultural sphere in Syria

under the pretext of protecting national security.

35 As a result, Syrian cinema became a

commodity exported to film festival circuits in an increasingly neoliberal world system, rather

than a means of constant politicizing of the masses in an internationalist anti-colonial struggle.36

As Rasha Salti points out, “when Syrian films travel to film festivals worldwide, they almost

always garner critical acclaim and awards, but all initiatives for their screening originate from

outside their country. Inside their country, Syrian films are barely known.”37 Films such as

Amiralay’s explicitly Fanonian Everyday Life in a Syrian Village shared this fate. As such, by the

mid-1970s in Syria, anti-colonial national culture paradoxically became a commodity itself,

8

neutralizing its political impulses and rendering the conditions for its creation of a revolutionary

actor an impossibility.

While neutralizing the political project of anticolonial national culture, the NFO

maintained its monopoly over the politics, discourse, and culture of anticolonial revolution in

cinema via the NFO’s newsletter, Al-Hayah al-Sinima’iyah. By the time its first issues appeared

in 1979, Al-Hayah al-Sinima’iyah devoted many articles to Third World cinemas that rose from

nothing (min al-sifr) in service of national consciousness (al-wa’i al-watani).38 Among the most

prominent of these prescriptive examples is the documentary cinema of Cuban filmmaker

Santiago Alvarez, whose work is considered a prime example of a politically committed

cinema.39 However, this focus on the aesthetic work of a prescriptive anti-colonial cinema does

not come with any sustained analysis of the present day of the region in 1979, a few years on the

heels of the Lebanese Civil War and a time of growing opposition to the Ba’ath Party. Nor does it

include any concrete plans for this revolutionary cinema’s transformative potential within and

beyond Syria, outside of the realm of an ossified dogma. In fact, the NFO’s role in ossifying

revolutionary rhetoric in cinema became part and parcel of a broader project of creating an

officially endorsed aesthetic of revolution at the hands of a counter-revolutionary regime.40

Amiralay’s 1974 film Everyday Life in a Syrian Village reckoned visually with state

ossification of anti-colonial aesthetics by annotating Fanon with images of rural suffering in

Ba’athist Syria. Much of Amiralay’s second film juxtaposes images of poor living conditions of

the Syrian peasantry with the rhetoric of state officials. Unlike Getino and Solanas however,

Amiralay offers very little by way of narration or commentary, preferring what he calls “an

austere cinema” with minimal mediators.41 The effect of his approach is almost as

anthropological as it is sardonic, letting the interviews Amiralay records with peasants and state

9

officials speak for themselves, near one another, and near the viewer, rather than hold the

viewer’s hand. Yet, Amiralay makes the choice to end the film on an openly ideological note,

one that directly recalls Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of the Furnaces. At the film’s climax, a

peasant bemoans the inescapable poverty his family is subjected to at the hands of wealthy

landowners still supported by a supposedly revolutionary state party, before ripping his shirt

apart in frustration. After this scene, Amiralay ends his film with a Fanon quote from the essay

“The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness” in The Wretched of the Earth, accusing

“spectators” of colluding with the injustice captured in the film. In a move that mirrors Solanas

and Getino’s, Amiralay’s invocation of the quote subtly replaces Fanon’s “bystander” with a

filmic spectator (mutafarrij). Recontextualized in Everyday Life in a Syrian Village, much like in

Hour of the Furnaces, Fanon’s scathing words imply that, if the spectator were to simply remain

a spectator, any consumer of these images of rural suffering would be a traitor to those filmed.

The result is a transfixing call to revolt that takes state rhetoric beyond its ossification: an urgent

unlocking of the inventive potential of anticolonialism, once it is placed in dialogue with

evolving material conditions.

Much like The Hour of the Furnaces, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village could not be

legally screened within Syria, leading Amiralay and his peers to founding the Damascus Cinema

Club as a space for screenings and discussions on material conditions and political possibilities

within and beyond Syria. Amiralay recalls the “clashes” that took place between himself and a

number of filmmakers in his cohort with the NFO after 1973, when the NFO banned his

provocative film and discontinued avenues for screening most Syrian films through an executive

order.

42 Between 1974 and 1978, Amiralay and his comrades worked tirelessly to develop a

makeshift Cinema Club independent of the NFO, which eventually boasted over 800 members

10

and began expanding throughout the rest of Syria.43 Similarly to Solanas and Getino’s

theorization, the space of the screening itself became just as crucial to the political projects of the

films. While the film screenings typically lasted about an hour and a half, the conversations after

the film went upwards of three or four hours, turning the Damascus Cinema Club into a forum of

meetings for dissenting Syrians of various political persuasions.44 However, the alternative public

screenings experiment did not last long—in 1980, the Damascus Cinema Club was banned by an

executive order, at a time in which the Ba’ath Party became threatened by growing opposition

movements among Communists, former Ba’athists, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

As a result of these precarious screening conditions within Syria, Amiralay’s invocation

of Fanon in Everyday Life in a Syrian Village has a haunting effect, as it anticipated a remnant,

overdetermined Western spectator of Syrian cinema that remains entrenched today.

Given that Amiralay could never screen his films in Syria, the spectator declared as a “traitor or

coward” became omnipresent before Amiralay could even name him. In other words, rather than

shake the Syrian masses out of their complicity with rural suffering, Amiralay’s militant call fell

on the deaf ears of the ambivalent Western art film audiences to whom the film was exported.

Without a screening space, Amiralay’s films simply became export commodities, preemptively

speaking to the concerns of Abounaddara in the post-2011 moment. A political economy of

extraction has long dominated the market for distributing moving images—one in which

non-mainstream films from the developing world are disproportionately shipped to the West.

Ba’athist Syria’s contradictory position in a neoliberal world system allowed its state-business

elites to monopolize on an aesthetic of revolution, all while becoming increasingly economically

reliant on Western and Gulf capital. As such, unequal looking relations constructed via film

distribution map onto a broader political economy of global inequality.

11

Seen through the prisms of Third Worldist cinema, Fanonian anticolonial national culture

relies on a constant reinvention of the revolutionary actor through the use of a screening space, a

praxis that emphasizes points of departure rather than fixed endings.45 Over the course of this

essay so far, I have attempted to understand Fanonian national culture by looking at how

anticolonial cinema has rendered the relationship between image and spectator, between Syria

and Argentina. Solanas and Getino characterized the imperative of responding to an evolving

neocolonial situation through the guerilla film, which relied on the screening space just as much

as it relied on a formalistic realism to create revolutionary actors out of spectators. Omar

Amiralay, deploying the idiom of anticolonialism by directly citing Fanon, provided a subtly

different formalistic register through which to politicize the spectator: a more muted,

anthropological approach that gradually became more reflexive over the course of his career.

Crucially, both The Hour of the Furnaces and Everyday Life in a Syrian Village point to how

anticolonial cinema relies on a constant reinvention of the revolutionary actor. Everyday Life

offers a particularly incisive look at how such a cinema would respond to the ossification of

revolution itself, a facet of Ba’athist Syria’s incorporation into a neoliberal world system. As

such, these films and their afterlives allow us to think through what happens when Fanonism is

taken to its inventive horizons, irreducible to a fixed destination of a politically calculated

sovereignty, itself often an impasse in a colonial capitalist world system. The demand is not to

read Fanon in search of a utopia premised on a false destination of perfectibility, but to read

Fanon as a dialectical thinker whose horizon of inventing a new man remains beyond our reach.46

The historical experiment of transnational anticolonial cinema allows us to see how the project of

Fanonian reinvention plays out, in all of its precarity, simultaneously within and beyond the

“national” in national culture.

12

Following the emphasis on reinvention in Fanon, I want to insist on returning to the

historical experiment of anticolonial cinema from the present day, against the ossification of

revolutionary rhetoric at the hands of Ba’athist Syria as well as the global dominance of liberal

humanitarian politics. Today, it is much simpler to insist on a language of human rights vis-a-vis

Syria, partially because of the regime’s tactical monopolization on revolution’s aesthetic, and

partially because of the place of humanitarianism as a hegemonic global institution.47 Moreover,

Syria has inspired a fiercely polarized debate within the Left, throughout and beyond the Arab

world.48 There are scarcely any clear-sighted, principled leftist positions on Syria that do not rely

on some kind of disavowal of a facet of the violent reality in Syria, especially as it has become a

war entangled with various capitalist nation-states.49 The impasse of leftist politics on Syria

leaves many of those in search of a “third way,” between imperialism and uncritical endorsement

of Syria’s opportunistic position in the axis of resistance, constantly on the defensive.50 However,

in this contemporary moment, rather than provincialize the colonial and imperial, I insist on

treating the anticolonial tradition as a “line of flight,” “not as an exercise in nostalgia but

precisely as a way of thinking futurity.”51

In other words, Everyday Life in a Syrian Village and

The Hour of the Furnaces cannot be understood as foregone conclusions, but films whose

moment of completion entailed a constant project of reinvention.

In fact, these films’ ongoing material existence invites new spectators: fugitives at the

interstices of a global political economy of dispossession. To reject treating cinema of the

moment of decolonization as a foregone conclusion is to ask what kind of actors can they create

in the present day, and through what kinds of spaces. Omar Amiralay himself believed that,

despite the censorship of his films, their ability to remain as haunting documents “with long shelf

lives” preserves the potential of different ways of viewing them in the future.52

In Omar

13

Amiralay’s lifetime, his films could only be viewed through Ba’athist Syria’s position in a

broader extractive infrastructure of film distribution that exported them outside of Syria. Yet, his

stubborn belief in a revolutionary potential for future viewers of his films maintained his

insistence on the medium, as opposed to the rapidly proliferating television that he felt had a

more fleeting shelf life.53 Future viewers of these films like myself, whom I call fugitives, view

the films with an awareness of the films’ displacement outside of their intended space and time.

Fugitivity therefore implies that displaced spectators are aware of their own unsanctioned

viewing, moving beyond an extractive register towards commitment from unintended

spatiotemporal locations.

However, as a result of global Syrian dispersal, this kind of spectatorship necessitates a

political practice of coalition, what Trinh T. Minh-ha calls a cinematic language of “speaking

nearby.” By looking at The Hour of the Furnaces and Everyday Life of a Syrian Village via

Fanon, I do not wish to be taken as to imply that Syrian cinema and Third cinema, and therefore

Syria and Argentina, neatly map onto one another as a singular colonial periphery rendered

subaltern in relation to Europe. Instead, I am interested in how these films speak nearby to one

another, and to a coalition of fugitive spectators. In the writings that accompanied her earliest

films, Reassemblage, Naked Spaces, and Surname Viet, Given Name Nam, Minh-ha coined the

term “speaking nearby” to describe her filmmaking praxis.54 Elaborating on the concept of

speaking nearby, Minh-ha explains:

“In other words, a speaking that does not objectify, does not point to an object as if it is

distant from the speaking subject or absent from the speaking place. A speaking that

reflects on itself and can come very close to a subject without, however, seizing or

claiming it. A speaking in brief, whose closures are only moments of transition opening

14

up to other possible moments of transition — these are forms of indirectness well

understood by anyone in tune with poetic language.”55

Minh-ha rejects making films that “speak about,” a proprietary form of speaking associated with

an objectifying spectator. Instead, Minh-ha articulates the need for speaking reflexively and in

proximity, a poetic language of care. This approach characterizes how I understand the

relationship between Syrian cinema and Third Cinema: films from different locales that speak

near each other, never fully mapping onto one another, by way of Fanon. It also characterizes

how I understand the future of Syrian filmmaking practices beyond the nation-state, as global

dispersal and dispossession remain ongoing.

My own approach to filmmaking brings the Middle East and the Americas nearby one

another through the collective experience of creating fugitive actors in the US settler-colony.

Assembling a montage of Syrian film, television, and theater, I am interested in what kinds of

politics a coalitional viewing of these audiovisual archives can unlock. I hope to bring together a

variety of fugitive spectators with differential positions across a colonial capitalist totality to a

collective screening of the resulting montage. At the screening, I plan to film what kinds of

embodied responses and generated knowledge result from various members speaking nearby one

another and near the montage from different positionalities. The resulting footage then helps me

think through a screenplay I am currently writing, where the montage is viewed from the future

by a Syrian in diaspora living in a Black and indigenous-run commune, whose mother was a

filmmaker imprisoned and murdered during the 2011 revolution. This fictional film puts into

practice my stretching of Fanonian anticolonialism, allowing it to speak near the politics of

indigenous media and the aesthetics of the Black radical tradition through the collectivity of the

15

screening space. To do so is to reject a clean synthesis between differential sites of critique and

struggle, and advocate instead for a more complicated practice of coalition.

What remains to be articulated in the work of stretching Fanonian anticolonialism by

speaking nearby is a simultaneous struggle for different material infrastructures of distribution,

and more importantly, of living. Over the course of this essay, I have placed the political

practices of Third Cinema in dialogue with Syrian cinema to demonstrate how Fanonian

anticolonialism holds inventive horizons within it that go beyond ossifying its historically

contingent moment. The potential of that inventive horizon lies in the collective screening space,

a location rendered scarce by a Ba’ath Party keen on claiming a frozen notion of revolution while

opportunistically sustaining itself through an overarching political economy of dispossession.

Moreover, by arguing for the long duree of Fanonian anticolonialism through my own

filmmaking practice, I am not merely arguing for a project that exists strictly in the realm of

poetics or filmmaking, but for a project that is part and parcel of struggle in much the same way

Fanon understood it. Believing deeply, like Amiralay, Solanas, Getino and Fanon, that every

spectator that does not turn into an actor is a traitor or a coward, I conclude by gesturing towards

the urgent work of struggling for different futures—worlds articulated and fought for through

disparate, yet devastatingly interconnected, locales of struggle.

16

Endnotes

1 Omar Amiralay, dir. Everyday Life in a Syrian Village, 1974, Damascus: National Film Organization.

Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 140.

2 “Dialogue with Syrian Writer Yassin Al-Haj Saleh on Syria, the Left, and Political Islam in the Contemporary

Age,” Ahewar TV, December 5, 2021.

3 Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment and Mourning Syria (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 2019), 20.

4 Bayan Aboubakr, “The Contradictions of Afro-Arab Solidarity(Ies): The Aswan High Dam and the

Erasure of the Global Black Experience,” Jadaliyya. Aboubakr highlights how this generic colonial

periphery in postcolonial studies is, in many ways, the inheritance of Third Worldist politics. These

approaches tend to be particularly problematic in approaches to race and indigeneity in the region.

5 Adam Hanieh, Lineages of Revolt: Issues of Contemporary Capitalism in the Middle East, (Chicago:

Haymarket Books, 2013), 4-10.

6 Donatella Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria. (Chicago: Pluto Press,

2018), 33.

Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

7 Joscelyn Shawn Ganjhara Jurich, “Abounaddara and the global visual politics of the ‘right to the

image,’” (Sage Publications: Journal of Visual Studies, Vol 18(3):378–411), 386.

8

Ibid, 384.

9 This critique has an affinity with another film collective, Mosireen, who also write about the image in

the wake of the Arab Spring. Their critiques also have an affinity with the work of Susan Sontag, from

whom I borrow the language of “looking relations.” Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, (New

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003). Mosireen, “Revolution Triptych” in Uncommon Grounds: New

Media and Critical Practice in the Middle East and North Africa, ed. Anthony Downey. IB Tauris/Ibraaz

Series. 2014.

10 Charlotte Bank, "Film and Video as a Space for Political Expression and Social Critique in Syria."

Artl@sBulletin 9, no. 1 (2020): Article 7.

11 Hanna Batatu, Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics,

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

12 Joshka Wessels, Documenting Syria: Filmmaking, Video-Activism, and Revolution, (London:

Bloomsbury Publishing Press, 2019), 25.

13 Wessels, Documenting Syria: Filmmaking, Video-Activism, and Revolution, 25.

14ArteEast. (2011, April 7). An evening with Hala Alabdalla and Omar Amiralay. Vimeo. Retrieved April

10, 2022, from https://vimeo.com/20761531

15 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 168.

17

16

Ibid, 178.

17

Ibid, 158.

18

Ibid, 159.

19

Ibid, 178.

20 Solanas, Fernando and Getino, Octavio. “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the

Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” (Black Camera: An International Film

Journal 13, no. 1 (Fall 2021): 378–401), 378.

21

Ibid, 386, 400.

22

Ibid, 397-398.

23 Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, Unthinking Eurocentrism, (London: Routledge, 1994), 269. It is also

fascinating to think about the affinity between Ba’athism and Peronism: namely, that they both posit an

anticolonialism that is at once anticommunist as well as ideologically opposed to imperialism. Both

Ba’athism and Peronism are also eventually hijacked by right-wing nationalist orientations of the

ideology.

24

Ibid, 397.

25

Ibid, 398.

26 Max Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba’athist Syria, (Redwood City: Stanford

University Press, 2022).

Al Hayat al-Sinama’iyya Vol.1-3. Damascus: The National Film Organization.

27 Much of this anticolonial national culture is depicted in detail in Max Weiss’s book, Revolutions

Aesthetic. Ted Ziter focuses on Syrian theater in this period, with special attention to playwright Saadallah

Wannous, whose theater aimed to mobilize the audience to such an extent as to start a revolution on its

own. Max Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba’athist Syria.

Edward Ziter, Political Performance in Syria: From the Six-Day War to the Syrian Uprising, (London:

Palgrave Macmillon, 2015.)

28 ArteEast. (2011, April 7). An evening with Hala Alabdalla and Omar Amiralay. Vimeo. Retrieved April

10, 2022, from https://vimeo.com/20761531

29 Max Ajl, “The Political Economy of Thermidor in Syria: National and International Dimensions,” in

Syria: From National Independence to Proxy War eds Ali Kadri and Linda Matar, (London: Palgrave

Macmillan, 2019), 210.

30

Ibid.

31

Ibid, 211.

32 Batatu, Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics, 289-307.

18

33

Ibid, 133. This analysis also shares a lot in common with Fanon’s analysis of the revolutionary party

emptied of its revolutionary content, becoming a vehicle for native bourgeois opportunists.

34 ArteEast. (2011, April 7). An evening with Hala Alabdalla and Omar Amiralay. Vimeo. Retrieved April

10, 2022, from https://vimeo.com/20761531

35 Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba’athist Syria, 321. While film became seriously

restricted in Syria, television was interestingly widely promoted, especially with the influx of gulf capital.

Although Syrian television contains some subversive representation and critical politics, its more

individualized consumption setting makes it less politically dangerous than the movies, which rely on

collective screenings in theaters.

36 miriam cooke names this strategy “making the oppositional arts official” in her book Dissident Syria:

Making Oppositional Arts Of icial, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).

37

Ibid, 21.

38 Saleh Almani, “Documentary Cinema as a Political Weapon,” (Al Hayat al-Sinama’iyya Vol.3.

Damascus: The National Film Organization. 1979), 44.

39 Rimon Butros, “Notes on Cuban Cinema,” (Al Hayat al-Sinama’iyya Vol.3. Damascus: The National

Film Organization. 1979), 32.

40 Weiss, Revolutions Aesthetic: A Cultural History of Ba’athist Syria, 338-340.

41 Jean-Louis Comolli and Serge Daney, “Entretien avec Omar Amiralay,” Cahiers du cinéma No.

290–291 (juillet-août 1978): 79–89, at 79.

42 Rasha Salti, “Nadi Al-Sinama in Damascus, or When Cinema Wielded Power to Threaten the Social

Order.” ArteEast, August 18, 2016.

43

Ibid.

44

Ibid. Interestingly, the Cinema Club became a place where many Syrian communists often attended,

including Syrian filmmaker and collaborator with Amiralay, Hala Abadallah.

45 David Marriott, “No Lords A-Leaping: Fanon, C.L.R. James, and the Politics of Invention,”

(Humanities 2014, 3, 517–545), 517.

46 Marriott, “No Lords A-Leaping: Fanon, C.L.R. James, and the Politics of Invention,” 517-518.

47 Shareah Taleghani, Readings in Syrian Prison Literature: The Poetics of Human Rights, (Syracuse:

Syracuse University, 2021).

48 Bassam Haddad,“The Debate over Syria Has Reached a Dead End.” The Nation, October 25, 2016.

49 Lisa Wedeen, Authoritarian Apprehensions, 144-145.

50 Samah Idriss, “The Third Choice.” Al-Adab, April 2, 2016.

19

51 Nasser Abourahme, “Revolution After Revolution: The Commune as Line of Flight in Palestinian

Anticolonialism,” (Critical Times (2021) (4 (3): 445–475), 467.

52 ArteEast. (2011, April 7). An evening with Hala Alabdalla and Omar Amiralay. Vimeo. Retrieved April

10, 2022, from https://vimeo.com/20761531

53

Ibid.

54 Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, (Bloomington: Indian

University Press, 2009).

55 Nancy Chen, “‘Speaking Nearby:’A Conversation with Trinh. T. Minh-ha,” Visual Anthropology

Review: Vol 8(1):82–91.