Digitally Indigenous: Images of Late-Stage Colonialism, Imperial Violence, and Metabolic Shift in Neptune Frost

By Micah Slater, Edited by Duncan Geissler

The world of film criticism was both stymied and scintillated with the 2021 release of the musical-surrealist-Afrofuturist Neptune Frost (2021), a film so entirely out of the purview—yet within the release profile and production value—of critics’ standard fare that nearly every review came bundled with synonyms of ‘strange’ (Liz Chan for Make the Switch: “A peculiar yet confusing visual and sonic experience,” A. O. Scott for the New York Times: “Neptune Frost,” a strange and captivating new feature by Saul Williams,” Özgür Çalışkan for SFRA: “an exciting production that defies convention.”). The film is multi-faceted, to be sure, but its narrative, symbolic, and political treatments could not be more clear: set in modern-day Burundi’s mining region, a group of escaped coltan miners, social outcasts, gender rebels, and the assorted detritus of colonial capitalism build an autonomous digital collective in an e-waste dump and begin to plot the downfall of the layered regimes that oppress and exploit their home. Accompanied by technospiritualist diatribes, visions of gods robed in icons of modern waste, diverse musical practices, and metaphysical technological capabilities, Neptune Frost presents a thorough consideration of the conditions created by digital colonialism and labor exploitation in the Global South. Further, in its dialogue of hyper-consciousness and its ambiguous (and distinctly non-Western) treatment of gender and sexual identity, the film positions alternative and expansive modes of being in a digital world as explicit resistance. 

The film opens with the death of an enslaved miner, Tekno (Robert Ninteretse), in the desolate gray wasteland of a coltan mine. Bludgeoned to death over a split second of non-productivity, his body is left where he falls. The other miners, one his brother, swarm the body to treat his wound, and upon failing that, mourn him. Armed guards, one of them his murderer, order their immediate continued labor [00:03:30]. This is the familiar image of resource extraction in Africa: land containing lithium, coltan, fuel, and other limited resources is seized and controlled by a foreign power, which then employs violence to maintain an underpaid, overworked, and dangerously exploited class of laborers from the local population. This paradigm resembles Marx’s theory of spatial rift, in that it exemplifies the “process of so-called primitive accumulation” followed by long-distance transport to urban centers, that then do not fulfill the reciprocal relationship that would be requisite to maintain the stability of the human-Earth metabolism (Saito 26). While Marx is speaking of agriculture here (his ‘favorite’ example, according to Saito), the relevance of the comparison becomes apparent when considering the use of extracted coltan: laptops and cell phones.

 While these devices do not sustain a population in the same way as agricultural exports, they are functionally equivalent in its necessity to the life of a person in the global North. However, Saito’s mediation of Marx’s ideas of luxury are also relevant here. In his definition, “‘luxury’ – something not ‘naturally necessary’ – becomes ‘necessary’” (Saito 9). Naturally, the extreme and temporally rifted coltan mining is not, in fact, a necessity: it merely seems so, as has been declared requisite for populations in the West to re-produce their ways of life. Neptune Frost is, to a degree, guilty of this misconception as well: while it presents depictions of resistance and reclamation, there is no explicit mandate for limits on technological use, solely the elevation of oppressed peoples to the level of consumption extant in the West. Michael Kwet notes in Digital Degrowth, on his perfect global equity income of $80,000 per year per family of 4, that “we likely need to reduce the present level of material consumption, which would leave us with even less” (Kwet 3). Neptune Frost rebels against this idea, focusing instead on their rights to the digital as tied inextricably to their rights to their own land; and therefore, more privileged to an unlimited consumption, even while performing resistance against the cultures that created this mode of planetary use. 

While the premise of Neptune Frost is inextricably linked to traditional and centuries-old practices of colonial capitalism, its novelty and prescience is predicated almost entirely upon its approach to the digital, specifically in terms of access, ownership, and, strangely, spiritualism. The film is not only concerned with the production of material assets used to access the digital space, but the space itself—which is used by its protagonists through meditative and metaphysical practices, directly evocative of their indigenous religious heritage. Early in the film, Neptune (Cheryl Isheja & Elvis Ngabo), an intersex character on the run from the volatility of Burundi’s socioeconomic condition, is visited by a god of the land, digitized and transformed by waste. Broken bicycle wheels spin like parasols on his back, black light paint decorates his clothes and body, wires are woven into his hair. He commands them to hack: “Hack into land rights and ownership. Hack into business law, proprietorship. Hack into the history of the bank. Hack and question the business of slavery, of free labor, of its relation to today’s world” [0:12:10]. Exhibited in this spiritual and extremely explicit verbiage is Neptune Frost’s divine mission: not only does the land from which the material resources of the digital are mined belong to its inhabitants, but so does the digital world created by those resources. It is therefore the goal of the Burundian natives not only to reclaim their land and labor, but to establish themselves as people indigenous to the digital space, and to use it against their oppressors. From Kwet: “We, the common folk, have to liberate ourselves” (9).

                 A hut made of televisions and wires. (Williams and Uzeyman [1:07:42])

Characters throughout exhibit extreme proclivities for technology, going so far as making tech objects begin to work in their sleep [01:06:19]. Others become functionally analogous to holy people, building huts out of televisions and wires in which they meditate to commune with the spiritual-technological realm [01:07:42]. As their powers and numbers grow, however, intervention is inevitable: after spotting a soldier on the outskirts of their camp, Elohel (Rebecca Musyo) declares to the people of the camp: “The Authority is working with European and US intelligence to avoid suspicion.” [1:33:37]. The Authority, ostensibly, is the company for which the coltan miners worked. This explicit conflation of the power of governments and corporations further demonstrates the film’s anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist perspective. This is followed by the appearance of drones, the most evocative symbol of militaristic technological surveillance—-the explicitly weaponized, mobilized sibling of CCTV. Kwet’s note of the overwhelming dominance of the United States aligns perfectly with Elohel’s declaration: he writes “US corporations dominate the world’s social media networks, search engines, semiconductors, cloud computing systems, operating systems, business networking, office productivity software, and more… the US plunders [the South], doing everything it can to [...] sustain its global power and benefit from cheap labor and raw materials” (Kwet 5-6). The collective—nicknamed Matalusa Kingdom, after “martyr-loser”—is clearly a threat to these ideals, both in its anti-capitalist non-productivity and supernatural propensity for technology. And indeed, the film ends the way one would expect: bombs rain down on Matalusa, killing everyone but Neptune. As drones hum overhead, one declares, through a speaker in a female American-accented voice, “I’m sorry. I thought we received confirmation that the target was destroyed” [01:38:10]. As Neptune stares at the drones, their body begins to glitch, and a male voice responds over a different speaker: “confirmed, the target was destroyed” [1:38:20]. In this last moment of digital connectivity, Neptune Frost dismisses and undermines the oppressive presence of the digital West: through their birthright to the technologies used against them, the Burundian people will never be completely annihilated. 

Neptune Frost is a completely singular film. Its conscious and explicit treatment of labor exploitation, digital colonialism, and imperial violence creates a distinct image of the digital space as disputed land and physical resource as rights to its ownership. The film is deeply rooted in the indigenous history of Burundi without neglecting the country’s modern condition, aware of extant rampant corruption and its roots in the powers of foreign governments and corporations. Its treatment of digital colonialism—including metabolic spatial rift, disproportionate access, and the leverage of military technology—is made further distinct by its spiritual assertions, aligning workers’ rights to the products produced by their labor with indigenous rights to the fruits of the land. What Neptune Frost does not consider, however, is degrowth: in its furious holy mission of reclamation, there seems to be no space for global considerations other than destroying the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized and elevating the Burundi people to their righteous level of power and wealth. Nonetheless, the film presents an extraordinary and thorough vision of the conditions that plague resource-rich areas of the global South, particularly those exploited for the materials requisite in the production of technological components. Neptune Frost is a surrealist film, certainly, but the conditions it depicts are far from unreal.

Works Cited

Çalışkan, and Özgür. "Review of Neptune Frost." Science Fiction Research Association, vol. 53, no. 3, 2023, https://sfrareview.org/vol-53-no-3-summer-2023/.

Chan, Liz. "NEPTUNE FROST
A PECULIAR YET CONFUSING VISUAL AND SONIC EXPERIENCE." Make The Switch, December 4, 2022, https://www.maketheswitch.com.au/article/review-neptune-frost-a-peculiar-yet-confusing-visual-and-sonic-experience.

Kwet, Michael. Digital Degrowth. Pluto Press, 2024.

Saito, Kohei. Marx in the Anthropocene. Cambridge University Press, 2023.

Scott, A. O. "‘Neptune Frost’ Review: Unanimous Gold Mine." The New York Times, June 2, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/02/movies/neptune-frost-review.html.

"Neptune Frost." , directed by Saul Williams, and Anisia Uzeyman. , Kino Lorber, 2022.

Female Martyrdom and Sexual Sacrifice in Jiří Menzel’s 1966 Adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal

By Micah Slater, Edited by Lucia Perfetti

In a review of the limited scholarship applied to the work of Czech New Wave director Jiří Menzel, several reading trends emerge: Western scholars are wooed by the Czech “miracle” of the 1960s, often attach his films to the work of philosopher Georges Bataille, and only briefly, if at all, address the symbology and characterization of the women in his films (Bates 37). Jonathan L. Owen, an author with a number of published works on Menzel’s films—specifically his adaptations from the works of Czech contemporary writer Bohumil Hrabal—speaks on Menzel’s portrayal of women most thoroughly, but still, merely to the pursuit of its limits: “Menzel’s representation of women does represent a flaw on the filmmaker’s own terms” (Owen 510). Some scholars ignore the gendered imbalance in his films entirely. Daniel Brennan asserts “all of Menzel’s characters have great depth” (212). Seeing that his work, alongside Owen’s, are the most frequently cited of the few English-language works on Menzel’s filmography, a gap in the scholarship becomes clear. 

In the interest of excoriating this deficit and examining the material causes and implications of this flaw in Menzel’s filmmaking, this paper will move between Owens’ limited readings of the sexual and body politics in Closely Observed Trains (1966) and Brennan’s assessment of sacrifice and martyrdom in the above and Mr. Balthazar’s Death (1966). Between the two films and scholars, a detailed analysis reveals the (mis)treatment of Menzel’s female characters to constitute a sexual sacrifice. In Closely Observed Trains and Mr. Balthazar’s Death, the self-effacement of Menzel’s female characters and their ostensibly willing submission to treatment as sex objects resemble the messianic sacrifice of national subjects in the Czech tradition, modeling for and compelling male characters to perpetuate the sex-death drive of Bataille’s theories of excess and consumption through forms of political martyrdom and individual dissidence. 

Owen’s analysis of the gendered politics in Closely Observed Trains resembles much of the scholarship on male directors with tendencies to underdevelop or disregard female characters. He notes the objectifying nature of the lens; that the women in his Hrabalian adaptations are often more attractive and less “base” than in the original writing; that their bodies are treated with a “formless materiality” that reduces them to sexual objects (Owens 510, Owens 97). Such are the immediately appreciable qualities of the women in the viewing of the film: of the six featured in Closely Observed Trains, one is a mother, one is a wife, three are erotic partners to male characters (erotic used here in the Bataillean regard for non-productive energy expenditure, as this is not exclusively sex), and one is a scarcely-appearing monument to scopophilia. Some are without explicit names. It is this set of patriarchal sexual norms from which Owen assumes Menzel was unable to sufficiently deviate. In Mr. Balthazar’s Death, the roles are reduced due in part to the length of the film, but nonetheless his women are remanded to sex or invalidity: an older woman drinks to the point of belligerence, well past being of any sexual value, while a younger sneaks off with her lover to withdraw from the spectacle of a motorcycle race. In extant writing, these portrayals are rightly cast as limiting and demeaning. However, in an analysis interested in the ecosystem and specific nature of these limits, Menzel’s meditation on sacrifice and martyrdom becomes relevant.

In Brennan’s article “Jiří Menzel’s Treatment of Sacrifice,” his working definition of sacrifice is the performance of “acts for political and social improvement at the expense of [a person’s] life” (208). He contextualizes these acts against the contradicting spheres of the political, cast as “distant [and] overbearing,” and the personal, the “mundane private relations” of intimate care relationships (Brennan 208). He argues that Menzel cautions against unconditional valorization of the sacrifice of dissidents and that, in order to perform martyrdom against the political, the interpersonal is inevitably disregarded. Brennan remains focused on the dialectics of these two spheres, viewing sex as the boast of the personal, and the political; an overhanging force to stymie the care relations fostered by the sexual-erotic experiences of his characters. 

While he does acknowledge that Menzel allows for play between the two, Brennan continually fails to recognize the established neglect of Menzel’s female characters, further remiss in that their narratives remarkably resemble his selfsame definition of sacrifice. (He uses as an example but doesn’t deign to name Zdenka (Jitka Zelenohorská), the station telegrapher and recipient of the infamous rubber stamps in Closely Watched Trains.) While there may be friction between this statement and the base survival of Menzel’s women through their narratives, it is not misplaced to note that they have endured a form of expense: in their mistreatment, they are, in a way, martyred to the erotic use-case of their bodies. Their sexual encounters are transformative points at which they engender political radicalization or personal growth in their male partners. Brennan also notes British Slavist Richard Pynsent’s diagnosis of a “martyr complex in historical Czech notions of national identity… a messianic complex around the blood sacrifice of various national Czech heroes,” an argument that would then certainly support Menzel’s implicit and, in Owen’s reading, unconscious treatment of his women as sacrificial bodies (Brennan 219). Menzel’s Bataillean synthesis of sex and death further aligns the sacrificial expense of a life with the sexual labor that then transforms his male characters. His ever-classic fixation on the French literal translation of orgasm to “little death” resounds (Owen 95).

At first reading, a connection between a purposeful but non-productive erotic expenditure and a Bataillean approach to the “truth of eroticism”—the squandering of excess energy—may seem contradictory (Owen 86). In fact, Bataille argues, this sense of waste is “integral to the pleasurable erotic experience” (Owen 84). If Menzel’s female characters are serving a sacrificial purpose, then the energy is not wasted, and therefore, the encounters are rendered as productive and by definition un-erotic. This goes so far as to be potentially rendered null in the face of  Menzel’s vocal resistance to the Soviet “productive man” (Owen 83). If his portrayed sexual encounters are motivating, and therefore in pursuit of a producible goal, what is between his erotically active cast and the gormless productivity of the characters in Socialist Realism films? Brennan offers an answer. As mentioned above, he argues that Menzel’s films of the 1960s regard sacrifice, even in its conventional and established definition, as waste itself, and inevitably results in the forgoing of the personal sphere—where Menzel places so much importance. Brennan asserts, regarding the death of  Closely Watched Trains protagonist Miloš Hrma (Václav Neckár), specifically as a martyr to the cause of the resistance, that “a young person, brimful of potential [...] has been fooled [...] into too lightly giving away their life” (213). The implication therein is that his successful erotic experience with female resistance fighter Viktoria Freie (Nada Urbánková), was a performed martyrdom that compelled him to his sacrifice; one that then ended his life. Therefore, a bifurcated picture of the nature of sacrifice emerges between Bataillean philosophy and Menzel’s own national complexes: female characters martyr themselves to unproductive sexual experience, a waste of their youthful virility and also a grand symbolic gesture in the Czechoslovakian national context. The gesture then motivates their male partners, as constituents of the same beliefs Menzel implicitly holds, to make their own wasteful sacrifices. Thus, Menzel splits the national martyr complex along gendered lines, restricting the sacrifices of Czech women to their erotic roles in men’s lives.

In Mr. Balthazar’s Death, the political—as in, the structural system in dialogue with the personal sphere—is reframed from the Nazi occupation to a motorbike race (Brennan 210). The spectacle of the race is presented as if akin to the political exploits of sacrifice or war—everyone is there for, and chattering relentlessly about, the past and potential gruesome deaths of the riders–reifying the national Czech sacrificial complex. He also refocuses his erotic waste on a couple, a pair of side characters who miss the race entirely to sneak off into the woods and expend Bataillean erotic energy. While they’re gone, the crowd gets what they came for: a rider, the eponymous Mr. Balthazar (uncredited), dies on the track [00:22:49]. This is tantamount to the form of martyrdom Miloš expresses in his own death, a public and pointless expenditure of (not as, but still) youth and virility. The political spectacle is missed by the lovers, who subsequently return to the track and see both the man motionless and the spectators leaving. They appear to be the only ones, other than the medical staff collecting his body, who hold any empathy for the rider and run to his body [00:23:24]. Here, Menzel presents a synthesis of feeling between the two forms of sacrifice. In the sexual sacrifice of his female partner, the young man is enabled of resistance in the form of empathy—a personal dissidence from his older, sexless, detached peers. In her sexual sacrifice, the young woman identifies with this dead rider, martyred to the national interest in the same way she has martyred herself to her partner’s sexual experience. Again, not a conventional death, but a marked rift between the politically living (the spectators) and the interpersonal dead (the couple and the rider). In a strange way, this death has liberated these young people from imbrication into the political quagmire of their elders. This evokes further considerations on Menzel’s—and other New Wave directors’—break with their predecessors, particularly in their ideological foundations. 

Other than fictionally condemning older generations for their fanatic indulgence in wanton political sacrifice, the Czech New Wave investment in the recontextualization of socialism from the state has been well-documented throughout the 1960s. As Robin Bates writes, “from 1962 to 1968, a basic goal of the Czech filmmakers was to liberate the ideals of socialism from the reified state in which those ideals had been trapped” (37). Closely Observed Trains casts further backwards than the context of 1950s Socialist Czechoslovakia, but between these two films, it’s evident both Hrabal and Menzel have little interest in literalism in terms of critiquing controlling political systems. Owens notes “one of Hrabal’s early ambitions was, it seems, to “colloquialize” surrealism” (496). Bates also includes a quote from critic Penelope Gilliat, observing that Czech contemporary audiences “seem to start from the assumption that everyone in the audience notices everything, that everyone is sick to death of public utterances that nibble around the edges of things as they are, and that there is not a man left in the country who could honestly be deceived” (39). Between the two, the clear inference is that both of these films inform audience readings not merely of the oppression of the Nazi period and the gladiatorial politics of the race, but the creative limitations of the generation and the decade of filmmakers preceding the New Wave. In both films, the older generations hold to the precepts of homogeneity and productive output, disapproving of frivolous sex and valorizing the death of martyrs as purposeful in the political context. 

A critical interrogation of the women of Jiří Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains and Mr. Balthazar’s Death can seem, at times, an exercise in making mountains out of molehills. They are hardly considered, barely named, and almost exclusively exist in the context of sex, eroticism, or male visual pleasure. Some scholarship has ignored this; others have commented on it in summary as a personal failure of Menzel’s to elide patriarchal sexual conservatism in his otherwise emancipatory impetus. Other more studied elements of his work, however, provide scaffolding to critically interrogate his female characters beyond their marginalization: between Owen’s readings of Bataille’s erotic waste and Brennan’s examinations of Menzel’s treatment of sacrifice, a refocused analysis of women and girls in his films is possible. Here, they are revealed to function as sexual sacrifices to their male partners, centered in the national preoccupation with martyrdom and messianic sacrifice as assessed by Pynsent. Menzel himself appears to hold a distinctly Bataillean perspective on the literal martyrdom of his male subjects, ending their lives in pointless politicized acts of spectacle and resistance, expending their youthful and virile energy in abject waste. Bataille’s assertion of erotic pleasure stemming from such waste allows this principle to backwards apply to sexual encounters between men and women, enforcing the wasteful erotic expenditure of Menzel’s female characters as another form of sacrifice. The deaths and sacrifices of these young people also serve as subtle critiques of the preceding generation of film-makers and -goers, whose capitulation to state depictions of socialism is compared to the spectatorial demand for meaningful death and (re-)productive sex. While Menzel tactfully criticizes both, his own sexual conservatism and disregard for his female host is equally illustrative: to Jiří Menzel, the martyrdom of eroticized women in the process of male maturation is implicit, informed by national preoccupations and social orders. It is through this initial self-effacing sacrifice that these men are then able to become wasted martyrs themselves, bodies on bodies in a heap at the end of the Czechoslovakian New Wave. 

Works Cited

Bates, Robin. "The Ideological Foundations of the Czech New Wave." Journal of the University Film Association, vol. 29, no. 3, 1977, pp. 37–42. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20687379.

Brennan, Daniel. "Jiří Menzel’s Treatment of Sacrifice." Ethics & Bioethics (in Central Europe), vol. 9, no. 3, 2019, pp. 208–220, doi:10.2478/ebce-2019-0018.

"Closely Observed Trains.", directed by Jiří Menzel, Ústřední půjčovna filmů, 1966a.

"Mr. Balthazar's Death." directed by Jiří Menzel, 1966.

Owen, Jonathan L. "Closely Observed Bodies: Corporeality, Totalitarianism and Subversion in Jiří Menzel's 1960s Adaptations of Bohumil Hrabal." Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne Des Slavistes, vol. 51, no. 4, 2009, pp. 495–511. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40871461.

Owen, Jonathan L. "Jiří Menzel’s Closely Observed Trains (1966); Hrabal and the Heterogeneous." Avant-Garde to New Wave. Berghahn Books, 2011. JSTOR,http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qd7tp.8.

Before Our Eyes

By Jules Crawford, Edited by Aimi Wang and Joseph Green

Introduction 

A civil war in Sudan causing millions to be displaced, another in Yemen leading to a hunger crisis, and an invasion of Ukraine that created over $155 billion in damage. All of these crises inevitably led to devastating loss of human life, but more often than not, they existed simply as a flicker in the background of American perceptions. A significant aspect of why these conflicts are so limited in their effect on American consciousness is that they are not consistently present within our news cycles. The development of social media allows foreign conflicts to become more recognizable and present within international recognition, allowing for real-time reporting. This is especially relevant in the ongoing genocide in Gaza, which is being reported on with a near-microscopic lens. The conflict stands out from others, past and present, because of the mass amount of professional photographers, journalists, and reporters that are trapped within the humanitarian crisis. These press workers demonstrate how warzone reporting has developed over the last 200 years, eventually leading to on-the-ground sources becoming available at one’s fingertips. While the vast increase in available media about a conflict seems beneficial, it can first appear overwhelming and may be difficult for the average viewer to disseminate. Understanding the history of war photography, the various Palestinian-specific themes, and the importance of cultural preservation will allow viewers to more easily understand the importance of all the photos currently coming out of Gaza.

From telegrams to Instagram, the technology used to record warzones has come a long way. Invented in 1843, the telegraph was the first technological tool to allow rapid dissemination of information from warzones; it would be followed up by photography, newsreel film, radio, and television (McLaughlin, 63-88). This rapid innovation not only made it easier to report on ongoing wars, but also opened the doors for increased corruption within the news industry. With the rise of social media and the citizen reporter, there is a new wave of wartime reporting coming directly from those affected by the genocide. The advent of cell phones and the internet allows anyone to record and publish directly from the scenes of action. The use of modern media technology to broadcast events around the world in real time makes wars like this more visible than ones of our past. This is most evident in the current crisis in the Middle East, with Palestinians and Israelis in conflict over territories that include present-day Israel, The Gaza Strip, and The West Bank. 

The dispute began as far back as 1885, but intensified in 1933 with a rise of Jewish immigration to Palestine during the lead-up to WWII and the rise of Nazi fascism (Cruz and  Cruz). The ongoing discordance further picked up increased publicity in the wake of mass media and the internet. The Palestinians are native to the land, while the Israelis believe they hold religious rights over it. The active fighting taking place in the Gaza Strip since October 7th, 2023 has been exceedingly visible compared to other present conflicts– such as those in Sudan, Yemen, and Ukraine. On October 7th, the militant extremist group Hamas attacked Israel during their Nova Music Festival, killing a reported 1,139 people (France 24). Israel responded by both attacking and occupying the Gaza Strip, which is an ongoing event as of October 2024. The death toll is reported to be over 43,000 as of October 2024 (AJLabs). 

This on-demand coverage has caused the Israel-Palestine War to be one of the most documented engagements in history. War photography was already a highly discussed genre of photography with its questionable ethical motives, but the recording of the conflict in Gaza adds a new layer to understanding war photography and how it is influenced by the internet. It is also important to consider the historical symbols used within Palestinian activist photography prior to October 7th, as they are essential to the readings of Palestinian war photography. These photographs are different from other war photography because they have a goal of cultural preservation ingrained in them, due to the genocide targeting cultural centers. Thus, Palestinian  photography during the Israel-Palestinian conflict is paving the way for a new understanding of  modern war photography, primarily due to the way it uses the internet and social media for broadcasting, the incorporation of important symbols for Palestinian resistance, and the intentional recording of ethnic cleansing.

Photography, Mass Media, and the Internet in War Photography 

War photography as a genre is built on the foundations of photojournalism and primarily serves to document conflicts while questioning their motivations. It was said to have been originated by Roger Fenton during the Crimean War; however, the coverage was still restricted compared to modern scales due to the limitations of equipment of the time (Smith, 132). Rather than most of the photos being of action, many were of soldiers and depictions of their everyday lives. Other significant aspects of these early war photos include portrayals of the war-affected landscapes, women working, and children from the other side of the war.

This was the beginning of the “democratization of images” which served to take the power depicting wars out of the government and place them into the hands of the people (Smith, 136). As war photography developed into the mid-19th century, an aesthetic of “decay, disorder, and destruction” began to become favored (Smith, 139). Around this time, we started to see the  debate over how ethical war photography was, with claims of exploitation and propaganda being  made. There was also a central question on whether war photography serves the purpose it was  created for. 

One of the critiques on war photography, as it serves as an artistic genre, is whether or  not the aestheticizing affects the way it’s perceived. Studies go back and forth with numerous  results that both support and deny the hypothesis on how aestheticizing war photography is less effective. Most recently, a study from the Department of Psychology at Ludwig Maximilians-Universität München reported results that suggest there is no effect of aesthetic style or aesthetic content on emotionalization and behavioral activation (Altenmüller and Gollwitzer). Nonetheless, the topic is still highly debated and studied. The main concern is  whether or not we are becoming desensitized to war imagery due to a distance developed by regular aestheticized content. However, despite possible downfalls of the genre, it creates a  power to understand war that hasn’t otherwise existed. Photographs have the ability to “stand as evidence…on a social, historical process” (Taylor, 159). They offer another layer of insight into what wars our countries are funding or taking part in. Outsiders are also more willing to believe suggested events with the use of photographic evidence, but this also can result in issues of photo manipulation and staging. Ultimately these central concerns about war photography all go back to it being designed to be marketable under a specific news organization. No matter how objective a photo may seem, they are always affected by how “photographers have their own personalities and points of view, and that what they choose to photograph and how they choose to photograph it is more than a little tinged by who they are and by the news organizations they represent” (Ritchin, 22). Especially when war photography is led by outsiders, there’s no guarantee of the legitimacy of what’s being presented through the lens, versus what actually exists outside of it. 

What makes the Palestinian crisis so relevant is how well broadcast it is. It is far from  being the first conflict like this, nor the only conflict like this currently occurring. It is simply  being recorded and shared on a mass scale, unlike other conflicts. Nearly every day there are new photos, videos, or tales of horrific events with children trapped under buildings, aid workers being shot, entire families starving to death, and so on. It’s a constant whirlpool of graphic imagery. While there is still a lot of non-professional capturing, a significant amount of what’s being spread on a mass-media scale comes from Palestinian and Egyptian journalists, photographers, and other media workers. This is causing not only constant content being shared, but constant content that is created with specific messages and intentions embedded within them. With Gaza being locked down to entry and exit, there is also a lack of international photographers covering the engagement- which affects the typical sanitized delivery of media that normally occurs. The power of the telling of events is placed in the hands of those directly affected by them (Sheehi). Most of these reporters have lost families, friends, and homes to the war. Unfortunately, a reported 134 journalists have also lost their lives since October 7th (“Journalist Casualties in the Israel-Gaza War”). While the same ethical issues of war photography are present, the mass variety of perspectives and the fact that the sources are those who are inside the conflict, rather than outside of it, create a more complete picture of what’s happening. 

Symbols in Palestinian Photography 

Like in many third-world countries, Palestinian photography has been overlooked despite  its significant use as a national art throughout its country’s violent history. It’s more than just  photographs that all originate from the same country, it presents unifying themes and motifs that are used to represent the Palestinian ethnic survival through art. Another reason why it is often  overlooked is the suppression of art that represents the Palestinian national identity by Israel,  with artists being targeted since the start of the initial hostilities. An important aspect of  understanding Palestinian modern war photography is to understand the history of Palestinian  photography. 

One of the most significant themes within Palestinian photography is depictions of the  land and destruction. With the land being the cause of the conflict and also the current  battleground, it often serves “as a metaphor for the social, political, and physical body of the  people” (Apel, 186). The land not only is a physical object but represents the identity of the  Palestinian people as their home is taken from them. Historically, photos depicting the land in  this war of ownership emphasized the destruction used by Israel in marking their claims. More  than just removing Palestinians from the land, the destruction serves as a way to remove 

Mahmud Hams, The destroyed Shehada family home following an Israeli strike on Rafah on Dec. 14, 2023

Palestinian culture from the land; in other words, tearing it down to start anew. This shines through in modern war photography in Gaza, as much of the land has been destroyed by airstrikes. A lot of photographers seek to emphasize the level of destruction to the land as evidence of the claim of ethnic cleansing. There is no specific target being hunted; the target is Palestine itself and everything that represents it. Alongside this, the specific wrecking of a home is emphasized in many photographs to highlight the overall displacement of Palestinians. 

One of the key plights of Palestinians trapped in Gaza is homelessness, as a majority have  been forced to evacuate or lost their homes entirely. The history of homelessness within Palestine is plentiful, as they’ve been systemically separated from their land and denied housing in order to make space for Jewish settlers. This focus on invading the domestic space was taken on by the IDF who trained their soldiers on “walking through walls” (Apel, 199). The goal was to cut holes in walls to aid in teaching soldiers to detect bodies and kill through walls. The presence of these mock Palestinian villages and holes in walls was used within Palestinian photography to show their loss of domestic spaces. Within the current context, this has evolved to photos framed around blast holes from airstrikes. It continues this narrative on destroyed landscapes  and the displacement of the Palestinian people. 

Abed Rahim Khatib, A Palestinian man inspects a destroyed house belonging to the Al-Jazzar family after an airstrike in Rafah, Gaza, on October 18, 2023 

The last area of note within Palestinian war photography is the presence of walls and borders. As previously mentioned, the borders are currently closed to both entry and exit of the occupied territory. The land has essentially become akin to an open-air prison. Even before the complete lockdown of the land, travel was limited and numerous walls were constructed to create a division between Israel, the territories of The Gaza Strip, and The West Bank. These walls were often painted on both sides and it’s a prime  subject of Palestinian photographers, representing this division within their native lands (Apel,  205-216). Since October 7th with the threat of constant Israeli attack, attention has shifted from the Gaza-Israel border to the Gaza-Egypt border where numerous Palestinians are trying to leave. There is also a regular mass of aid trucks lined up at the border attempting to get in. This border represents a choice between the Palestinian’s physical life and their national life since, they can’t return if they leave. 

Agence France-Presse, Palestinians near the border fence with Egypt at a makeshift tent camp for displaced people in Rafah on Jan. 24, 2024

Even if one makes the decision to leave, crossing costs more than most can afford with many making a GoFundMe in order to fund their escape. These photos of Gazans waiting on the edge of their safety serve to demonstrate the desperation for peace in a war that they never signed up for. Ultimately, what we are seeing in photos coming out of Gaza since October 7th is hardly new thematically. A lot of what’s happening now has happened before; it’s just reached a greater scale. Other common Palestinian photographic themes I didn’t cover include the destruction of olive trees, the use of pine trees in Israeli land claims, and the persistence of cacti marking former Palestinian homes. New trends I’ve noticed mostly revolve around mass bloodshed, the tent cities for displaced individuals, themes of ongoing famine with many shown  begging for food, and the sacrifice of the Palestinian press. With the crisis having no end in sight,  these themes and motifs will likely continue to develop. I suspect they will be reimagined once there is some sort of resolution and individuals have the opportunity to restructure their lives around their new state of existence, post-war.

Mohammed al-Aloul, a photographer for a Turkish news service, said he had lost four of his five children on Nov. 5 in what the Gazan authorities said was an Israeli airstrike in central Gaza, 2023

Recording Ethnic Cleansing 

While what’s happening in Gaza is certainly a war and thus the photography falls under  the category of war photography, there needs to be a consideration of the fact that it is also an  ethnic cleansing. Especially since most of the photographers are Palestinian, the desire to preserve Palestinian culture and history in the wake of ethnic cleansing is essential within the war photograph. This type of war photograph is most similar to the photos from the Litzmannstadt (Lodz) Ghetto from WWII where Jewish photographers had secretly recorded their daily lives.

While a majority of photos from the Holocaust come from Nazi photographers due to  strict regulations, a selection of Jewish photographers was able to sneak photos. This most  notably occurred in the Lodz Ghetto in Poland where Mendel Grossman and Henryk Ross risked  their lives to take photos of their daily conditions as well as the mass deportations and liquidation of the Ghetto (Löw). The focus of these photographers was to not only document the injustices they were facing but the survival of the Jewish identity despite the drastic conditions they were facing.

This meant that both the highs and lows of the Lodz Ghetto were recorded, with the highs including mothers and their children, family gatherings, make-shift schools, and events that the upper class partook in. The purpose of these photos was not to downplay the utter horrors of The Holocaust but to take the Jewish people out of the imagery of being helpless victims, and instead paint them as those who persisted through the worst. The same sort of imagery can be seen in a lot of Palestinian photography. 

Yousef Masoud, The Khaled Bin al Waleed Mosque on Nov. 8 in Khan Younis, in the South Gaza Strip, 2023

While a lot of current Palestinian photography has been focused on the bloodshed and  aftermath of the airstrikes, a number of photos have focused on the role of the war as an act of  ethnic cleansing. This includes depictions of the perseverance of the Palestinian people despite  all they’ve lost with photos of children playing, mothers cooking, and families celebrating religious holidays. These photos, like those from the Lodz Ghetto, illuminate Palestinians as more than passive victims. Another type of photo that illuminates the role of ethnic cleansing is  revealing the damage of the war on historic and religious landmarks, including Mosques. The  goal is to express the deliberate efforts to erase the cultural history of Palestine from the  landscape. Photos that depict the remains of Mosques stand to attest that no amount of  destruction can erase what came before, the memory of these landmarks cannot be allowed to fade.

Thus, in circumstances where war is more than just conflict, but an ethnic cleansing, it’s  crucial to understand how war photography is affected. This is best seen in the photos from the  Lodz Ghetto during the Holocaust, which express the importance of recording the Jewish people as people, and not just victims, as well as in Gaza with the documentation of the purposeful attack on religious monuments to erase cultural histories. This reading allows for a greater nuanced understanding of the conflict through the photos and creates a depiction of the war that is more evolved than meaningless violence. It also contributes to a variety of photography which helps prevent desensitization due to an overload of violence. 

Conclusion and What Follows 

Ultimately, through the use of the internet and social media, important symbols for  Palestinian resistance, and representations of ethnic cleansing, Palestinian photography during  the Israel-Palestine conflict represents a new age of developed war photography. What we are  seeing from Gaza is more than we’ve ever seen from past conflicts, and the photography is more  complex and diverse than the genre has previously been able to provide. Current technology  allows for more to be seen of the conflict, and the ease of both taking and sharing photos allows  more perspectives to be seen. Alongside the overall increase in photos, the genre is developed by the mass amount of trained photographers who are sharing the war, and the fact that many of them are affected by it. One of the greatest issues historically facing both Palestinian photography and war photography was the fact that it was coming from outsiders, the ability to hear the voices of those who are victimized by the conflict changes the output entirely. This includes a meaningful inclusion of important themes and motifs for the Palestinian resistance and a focus on the effects of the ethnic cleansing they’re experiencing. Previous use of the war photography genre would’ve just shown the gore and violence of the conflict, but the current use of war photography expands out farther than the genre has ever gone. This is likely why the conflict is exponentially seen and more discussed than other ongoing conflicts because the ability to see through a Palestinian perspective helps outside viewers empathize with ongoing crises. 

What’s important to keep in mind going forward is that while what’s coming out of Gaza is integral in aiding our understanding of the conflict from the Palestinian perspective, the photos  and other kinds of reporting often go through multiple hands before they reach the average  American. Along with computer algorithms that can be manipulated to hide certain information or mishandling by secondary news outlets, there are often many biased avenues before these  pictures reach us. A lot of Palestinian press workers have contested that American or pro-Israeli  media has been manipulating their work to tell a certain story. A significant occurrence of this  has been the manipulation of victims’ footage and to claim they are crisis actors, creating a narrative that what’s happening in Gaza is fake (THE ASSOCIATED PRESS). Also coming out of Gaza has also been a lot of Israeli propaganda, and any outside reporting done in Gaza is extensively monitored by Israel. Similar to the manipulation of Palestinian reporting, the main goal of Israeli propaganda is to downplay the violence and create a narrative focused on a terrorist threat of Hamas. Unfortunately, Israel has a lot more ties to the US and our media, so keeping vigilant of understanding sources is imperative when analyzing what’s coming out of Gaza. The most reliable method involves focusing on the primary sources of Palestinian reporters and following their social media, rather than using American-based news outlets. Before we can take the step of trying to understand the Palestinian war photograph, we must first ensure that we aren’t being misled by outside influences who may be presenting it.

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