“The Syrian people are shooting their own deaths.” This remark by a friend catalysed Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué’s lecture-performance The Pixelated Revolution (2012), in which a civilian films his “eye contact” with a military sniper during the early days of the Syrian revolution. There’s a brief moment of suspension when the lens of his phone camera stares down the barrel of the gun. The sniper then pulls the trigger and the frame tumbles into oblivion. The evidence of this brutal act is almost destroyed—the censorship is instant, eliminating the need for its usual bureaucracy.
Since the advent of the smartphone in the early 2010s, the camera has become a cyborgian extension of the body, lying in wait like a phantom limb even when not in use. We no longer rely solely on professional journalists to document war and conflict; rather, the masses making history are the ones making its images, risking their lives to construct a diffuse online network of counter-narratives. Yet as much as the internet is a means to disseminate information and organise protests, it is also a site of surveillance and control, where protestor footage is fed into facial recognition models that can see through masks, and state-enforced blackouts allow it to carry out its crimes in the dark. Curated by Inge Coolsaet for argos, the short film programme “Sensitive Content” probes the uneasy politics of visibility in a world rocked by mass unrest and censorship, where the abundance of irrefutable evidence clashes against technologies of repression.
The programme takes its name from Narges Kalhor’s film Sensitive Content (2023), which opens on the instantly recognisable square of an Instagram post. The photo is blurry to the point of indistinction, overlaid with the symbol of an eye crossed out that brands it with the titular content warning. As Kalhor reduces the opacity of the image, the eye looks left and right, and a woman facing a squadron of riot police slowly comes into view. Building a dispersed portrait of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement that swept across Iran in 2022, the film collages clips recorded by protestors and witnesses who film from balconies, cars, or while running through the streets. The embodied presence of the cameraperson in the shaky footage heightens our awareness of their position relative to the violence, making us fear for their safety. It is impossible to remain a passive spectator when the comforting barrier of distance is stripped away.
Filming is synonymous with seeing in Sensitive Content, a gaze that cannot be fully repressed despite the Islamic Regime’s brutal crackdowns. Yet the entrapment of the images within the Instagram square reminds us of their constant mediation by the social media platforms they depend on. The blurriness of the footage thus speaks to both the necessity of anonymising the protesters and its algorithmic suppression: both AI and human intervention label posts as “sensitive content”. Kalhor’s film illuminates this manufacturing of invisibility and credits the people of Iran who resist its hegemony through their collective camerawork.
Justine Capelle’s The Lost Sail (2022) uses a similar visual strategy of opacity to represent censorship, consisting only of a black screen for its entire duration. The voiceover of director Zao recalls how he was forced to rewrite a film script deemed inappropriate by Chinese censors. Set on a ship, the abandoned film is brought to life through Zao’s enthusiastic description of the scenes, made visible as subtitles in a serif font to mimic the script. INT. BALLROOM - NIGHT becomes a partial revival of its latent form. Curiously, flickers of celluloid artefacts materialise on the screen as if to suggest that the film lives on, if only in this provisional state framed by Capelle’s film.
The impossibility of representation is probed again in Doubts (2024) by Fırat Yücel, this time through the self-reflexive mode of desktop documentary, where the labour of post-production is made visible. Over a fictional text conversation, two filmmakers discuss what to do with the vast amount of footage filmed by protestors during the 2013 Gezi Park Resistance in Istanbul, scrolling through interminable spreadsheets that categorise the videos by content and location. The violence of the state, the resilience of the people: the evidence has been captured, but can it be shown under Turkey’s authoritarian government? To anonymise the protesters, the filmmakers nervously experiment with blurring the image or finding clips with low shutter and wide shots. In foregrounding the anxiety that pervades the editing process, the film becomes an exercise in self-censorship, where no amount of caution and restraint can guarantee safety.
Sécurise tes images : détruis-les (2024) offers a more concrete vision of resistance through a counter-technology in action: facial-recognition software is tweaked to blur faces instead of identifying them. GoPro footage of a demonstration in Sainte-Soline is overlaid by red rectangles hovering over each protester, tracking their movement and categorising them as “person”. The aesthetics of surveillance, usually yoked to police and military technologies, produces a sense of unease. Unlike the shaky, vertical videos shot by protestors gripping their phones, the wide-angle, slow-motion suspension evokes the disembodiment of a video game. Rather than direct documentation of the event, the footage acts as a demonstration of the technology: an Operational Image.
Coined by filmmaker Harun Farocki, Operational Images describe pictures that prioritise action and function over the interpretation of meaning or aesthetics. Originally used in the context of military technologies, the operational now appears to be the default mode of image circulation, where photos posted online are reduced to data to be mined by third parties and scraped by AI. Companies like Meta regulate the velocity at which users scroll through this visual deluge, tracking, measuring, and modulating our perception. If AI is trained on our pictures, then we, in turn, are being trained to engage with images not in a contemplative, critical mode, but in a state of perpetual inattention.
Against this operationalisation, the films in Coolsaet’s programme seek to activate their images as evidence, disrupting their designation as “content”. The civilian-captured footage utilises blurriness and shakiness as markers of authenticity, contesting the high-resolution propaganda of national media and rejecting the legibility demanded by the state. Yet these fragments can never tell the full story. They invite us to look with what filmmaker Maryam Tafakory calls a “critical paranoia”, to read their images with the assumption that something is always missing.
