Nicholas Avedisian-Cohen
Nicholas Avedisian-Cohen [11310359] avedisian.cohen@gmail.com June 26th, 2017
Master Thesis
Heritage Studies: Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image Department of Media Studies
Faculty of Humanities Universiteit van Amsterdam
Supervisor: Dr. Marie-Aude Baronian (Associate Professor, Film and Visual Culture) Second Reader: Dr. Eef Masson (Assistant Professor, Media Studies, Interim
coordinator, MA in Heritage Studies: Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image University of Amsterdam)
CONTENTS Introduction
Historical Evidence 2
Chapter I - Background Evidence
1.1 The Evidentiary Kernel of the Archive 6
1.2 The Moving Image as Legal Evidence 12
1.3 Syrian Archival Evidence 24
Chapter II - Power and Memory
2.1 The Activist-Archive as Instrument of Power 36
2.2 Images of Power 47
2.3 Power and Forgetting 56
Chapter III – Alternatives
3.1 Open Platforms: SyriaBackup, Reddit, Syrian War Maps 64 3.2 Open Images: Issa Touma’s Aleppo, Abounaddara Collective,
Purple 69
3.3 Relinquishing Control: Bak.ma and Autonomous Archiving 73
Conclusion
Pitfalls of Myopic Memory 76
Figures Figure 1 22 Figure 2 26 Figure 3 31 Figure 4 34 Figure 5 42 Figure 6 44 Figure 7 44 Figure 8 44 Figure 9 53 Figure 10 53 Figure 11 55 Figure 12 58 Figure 13 70 Figure 14 71 Figure 15 72 Figure 16 74 Bibliography 80 Acknowledgments 90
‘A picture is a fact.’ Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus 2.141 (Ludwig Wittgenstein)
Introduction / Historical Evidence
Both archives and moving images induce a sense of temporality. Each, in its particular propositional form, evokes time’s passage. So it follows that archives of the moving image are especially laden with historical residue. The moving image represents a specific captured past; the archive an amalgam of finite captivity, the rationale and the locus of the capturing. When something is captured or kept, this is in theory so that it can be activated or redeemed in some distant future. One of the most profound and essential ways in which archives and moving images may be so activated is as historical evidence, meaning each suggests that through them one can construe facts about the past.
It is not overly controversial to point to Sir Hillary Jenkinson as one of the seminal figures for modern archival theory.1 In ‘Reflections of an Archivist’ (1944)
Jenkinson ruminated on the basic nature of archives and the archival. Besides describing of what archives most recognizably consist, Jenkinson mused that archives are items rescued from oblivion that they may emerge as historical evidence.2 I propose that this
tenet, that archives have latent potency as historical evidence, still holds true and continues to provide coherence for the archival profession, decades since it was etched, despite how significantly archives have evolved since the 1940s. Archives, after all, are still kept, often without precise specifications for future use, simply because it is believed they may have some future use. The very hope of discerning past facts is what allows archives to persist. My working definition of archives is therefore Jenkinsonian in origin. Archives, from my prerogative, are rudiments of historical evidence, or at least are records kept in earnest belief that they may someday emerge as such. This does not 1 This is especially so for Anglophone archives. Terry Eastwood has asserted that Jenkinson’s theorizing, “helps us appreciate the timeless preoccupations of the archivist,” See: Terry Eastwood, “Jenkinson’s Writings on Some Enduring Archival Themes,” The American Archivist 67, no. 1 (2004): 31. And Terry Cook claims that “Jenkinson produced the second major treatise on archival theory and practice” after the Dutch Manual for the Arrangement and Description of Archives of 1898. See: Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria 43, (1997): 22-23. That these two prominent contemporary archivists associated with the postmodern turn in archival thinking retain deep attachment to the theories of Jenkinson suggests his towering stature in archival theory.
presume audience. Archives can be public or private or even secret. But even the most narrowly qualified archive is pre-inscribed as attempted communion with the past.
I am most concerned, in this text, with archives of the moving image. Moving images, I believe, represent an idea of a captured past. The very term ‘actuality’ to denote much of early cinema suggests such a recovery of the real, since vanished, event. It is curious to note that classic archival theory corresponds chronologically with the emergence of cinema: the Dutch Manual for the Arrangement and Description of
Archives is regarded as an early manifestation of the professionalization of archives.3
This was published only in 1898, just a few short years following the ‘birth’ of cinema. Over two decades later Dziga Vertov, often considered the pioneer of documentary as cinematic mode, promulgated the film-fact and built a revolutionary practice around the idea of kino-pravda – or film-truth.4 Thus the notion that moving images have unique
epistemic qualities is an early, but resilient, one, simultaneous to archival theory. Contemporaries, Jenkinson and Vertov were both partially shaped by the
circumstances of the First World War.5 The influence of technologies of war-making and
industrial violence on the emergence of film has been well established by Friedrich Kittler.6 And Jenkinson’s own career, heavily involved in archival administration during
both World Wars, speaks to a formative bond between war and archive.7 Inasmuch as war
is regarded as paramount historical event, considered epoch defining, providing navigable points for students of history, its effect on these two modes of knowledge – namely, the archive and moving image - offer a starting point for my line of inquiry. What follows is an examination of how the archive as evidence and the moving image as 3 Ketelaar, a thinker associated with the postmodern turn in archival theory has historicized the Dutch Manual as a key normative text. Its one hundred regels established a set of principles for future generations, to the detriment of the growth of archival theory according to Ketelaar. That he takes up the charge against its enduring impact concedes its totemic place in codification of the archival norms. See: Eric Ketelaar, “Archival Theory and the Dutch
Manual,”Archivaria 41, (1996): 35.
4 Dziga Vertov and Annette Michelson and Kevin O’Brien. Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 57.
5 Jenkinson was employed in the British War office until 1920 and was influenced by the magnitude of war records. See: Harold Cottman Johnson, “Jenkinson, Sir (Charles) Hilary (1882-1961), Archivist,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Vertov”s filmmaking was influenced by his experience operating agitational-propaganda trains for Bolsheviks penetrating remote parts of the front during the Red-White civil war. See: Dziga Vertov and Annette Michelson and Kevin O’Brien. Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 10-34.
6 Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. by Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 145-146.
evidence commune in a single case study - an archive collecting video to document
crimes in war.
The case that I examine, known simply as The Syrian Archive, is curious because it mobilizes both archives and moving images as evidence by proclaiming its collection as a tool for prosecution. I argue that this new formulation neglects some intrinsic
capacities of moving image archives to serve as historical evidence by focusing narrowly on becoming actionable legal evidence in advance of historiography. This amounts in part, to an archive designed for contingencies of the present, which in meaningful ways sabotages the unique nature of archives and obliterates the important residual epistemic power of the moving image. I term this the embedded archive - in the immediate sense of reporting from partisan war vantages - as well as in relation to how archives as
preservation tools relate to historical documents. Embedded also refers to the relationship of this archival project to larger power and geopolitical ends. Thus I seek to explore how the video archive is mobilized. In so doing, I argue that the archival database acts as novel claims-making instrument as well as problematic public memory tool.
What makes this repository a rich case study is the way in which it
misappropriates or denudes the archive, and specifically how this helps sketch the
contours of the archival. I propose that it also helps explain, if often by negative example, the unique epistemic efficacy of moving image archives. The Syrian Archive does not transcend the archival but picks it apart and repurposes it. Vernacular re-use of the moniker ‘archive’ is not uncommon. But this is not the entirety of the phenomena I consider. I argue that The Syrian Archive, while an outsider initiative appropriating archival discourse, poses serious questions about archives because of the undeniable urgency of its appeal. This truly represents expanded archival terrain. So it should be taken seriously as a repository and as a potentially influential model, even if it ought not endorsed wholesale.
The manner in which this appropriation occurs is novel, and relates to trends in media production that I will explore in Chapter Two. I also devote this second chapter to explaining the somewhat insidious and misleading ways in which The Syrian Archive structures information about an active war. I do so neither to debunk its claims nor to
question the urgency of its call to document atrocity, but rather to show how archival theory equips archivists with theoretical tools to avoid some of these pitfalls.
My analysis of the potential pitfalls of this platform caters to archivists, although I understand that the originators of this project may not formally count themselves as such. Nor are they explicitly addressing contemporary archival concerns in their work simply by adopting this name. Rather, I focus on this platform, at this early stage in its inception, because I believe its impact is not yet manifest in the broader archival community, perhaps because it bypasses certain conventional archival considerations.
By collecting, organizing and purveying thousands of video files under the rhetorical rubric of the archive, this platform is one notable activist initiative designed to record and influence an ongoing conflict, ensuing for the last six years. This intentional framing of the video archive as site of admissible evidence culled from an active war-zone challenges archival ethics in fundamental ways, which so far have not received substantial theoretical attention. Scrutiny of this repository I hope may erect new signposts for archivists, refashioning questions as to how to collect, preserve, and disseminate empirically volatile moving image records. So, I insist the urgency of this platform’s appeal need not disarm archivists, though I acknowledge that The Syrian
Archive embodies a seductive appropriation of the archive for archivists above all, simply
because it postulates new relevance for the digital video archive. As I intend to
demonstrate, this urge to prove the archive immediately actionable and of geopolitical impact entails grave distortions of archival ethics and also reifies moving image documents as flat historical referents. Again, this further animates my use the term
embedded to refer to a model of an archive severed from any stereotypical aloofness as
arcane historiographic vessel. Likewise I deploy the term database memory as part of my interpretation of how the moving image record is reified within the database in service of politicized public memory campaigns. These are some of the novelties that my case study suggests. But The Syrian Archive also invokes a number of intriguing historical
precedents of which I believe it is important to have some prior awareness.
To pre-contextualize my object I briefly elaborate in Section 1.1 on the salience of the concept of evidence within archival theory, paying special attention to Terry Cook’s excellent history of archival paradigms that emerge from what he considers an originary
paradigm of evidence. This background will help underscore how vernacular
appropriation of the archive takes place and probe how different conceptions of evidence are deployed. Section 1.2 provides another pre-history entirely - that of how moving images have historically functioned as legal evidence. Section 1.3 explores hypothetical convergence of these historical ideas by engaging with my case study in fuller scope. These pre-histories, which precede encounter with my object, do not prove continuity with it, nor do they retro-attribute any intentionality in terms of how The Syrian Archive has adopted its peculiar mode of address. Rather, these histories reveal prior
developments that I believe have not been fully considered in the case of The Syrian
Archive, and which may help deconstruct its motives and question its more problematic
assumptions – in brief, the entire goal of Chapter Two.
Chapter Three is devoted to exploring alternative models of representing war in Syria, looking at moving image collections that potentially offer corrective riposte to key problems posed by The Syrian Archive. But first, brief encounter with past ideas and their present incarnations is essential.
Chapter I / Background Evidence
1.1 The Evidentiary Kernel of the Archive
Perhaps the most iconic credo of modern archival theory comes from Jenkinson’s foundational text, lionizing the archivist as ‘self-less devotee of truth.’8 Few tire of
quoting (earnestly or otherwise) Jenkinson’s rapturous vision of the archive as temple of historical evidence. Jenkinson construed his ideal (gendered) archivist as high-priest: ‘His Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; his Task, the Conservation of every Scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents committed to his charge; his Aim, to provide, without prejudice or afterthought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge.’9 This
evidentiary foundation of the archive rests on the impartiality and ecclesiastic position of 8 Hilary Jenkinson, The English archivist: a new profession (London: H.K. Lewis, 1948), 259.
the archivist as procurer and protector of records. Archives, for Jenkinson, were naturally accumulating documents (typically papers) from institutions (typically governments) meant to function as evidence for historians.10 Yet while their evidential nature may be
figuratively extrapolated from jurisprudence, this does not mean that archival records construed as historical evidence had any special right to enter courts as legal evidence. Just how archives were to function in courts appears not to have been extensively codified.11 Jenkinson’s model, stressing the evidentiary quality of archives assumes the
innocence of the archival record, based on its unbroken chain of custody. Thereby, the archival record faithfully and objectively unveils its functional context, for instance in government or corporate offices.
Terry Cook has prominently re-explained Jenkinson’s ideas, relating them to recent postmodern archival discourse to historicize the archival calling. From Cook, one better understands Jenkinson’s humility as a British archivist, as it is revealed Jenkinson merely saw his ideas as re-codifications of the 1898 Manual for the Arrangement and
Description of Archives of Samuel Muller, Johan Freith and Robert Fruin, applied largely
to federal and municipal government contexts in the Netherlands as operational guide for a larger national-juridical project of standardization.12 And the Dutch Manual was itself
considered a distillation of archival practices largely inherited from German and French archivists of the 19th Century, reflecting the scientistic bent of this period.13 Jenkinson’s
re-articulation of concepts of original order, provenance, and respect des fonds established in the Manual, stressed archives as evidence in the sense of existing as precursors to speculation about the past.
Archivists could, in this framing, function as diligent and neutral vessels for whatever remnants the past afforded posterity. In this paradigm, what makes archives a potential evidentiary raw base for knowledge is having been produced in routine processes of administration, faithfully reflecting functional transactions typifying 10 Hilary Jenkinson, "Reflections of an Archivist," The Contemporary Review 165 (1944): 358.
11 Such an archival history would be duly welcome and would give further context to my case study. Writing in a sense from outside the archives, Marc Nichanian has paid close attention to the way in which French courts have confusedly attempted to legislate historical verdicts in light of genocide denial. The juncture between historical evidence and legal evidence, and between the archives and the courts, is fascinatingly explained. See: Marc Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 38.
12 Terry Cook, “What is Past is Prologue: A History of Archival Ideas Since 1898, and the Future Paradigm Shift,” Archivaria 43, (1997): 22.
authoring offices or agencies. The archival record was to be presumed a naïve clue that could reflect a pattern of bureaucratic behavior. The happenstance of why and how a record migrated to the archivists’ care was somewhat taken for granted. While Jenkinson acknowledged that the power to retain and pass on, to withhold or manipulate, lay with the record-producing agency, he still advocated against remedial intervention or selection of records, recommending a hands-off approach wherein archives grew as passive recipients of institutional artifacts.14
Considering this lineage is useful in situating any contemporary archive. It is thus important to understand how this specific ideal has shifted over time and how notions of evidence have changed. Cook submits four paradigms of archival thought, which address this, segmenting archival trends into discrete chronological periods: evidence; memory; identity; community.15 The earliest paradigm of evidence can be read as foundational, as
the kernel around which subsequent ideas concentrically cling. So I take it as a useful place to begin wider examination of the archives as evidence. Archival evidence, in the modern archival tradition, is portrayed as a direct outgrowth of enlightenment thinking and consequence of the preeminence of nation-states since the French Revolution, wherein archives were construed as national public services.16 Within this framework,
archivists were to be custodians of aging, inactive official government records. Appraisal or selection of archives was very limited. Cook paraphrases: ‘The archival records of the state were themselves not chosen to serve history or historical themes, for any appraisal or destruction of records by archivists was viewed as un-archival.’17
The archival and the evidentiary were figuratively intertwined, with the archival record acting as evidence of institutional acts. Archives, it was thought, could function as a type of evidence only if not pre-selected for specific historiographies, with archivists acting (in theory) blindly as to what the future value of such records might turn out to be. Preserving the ‘sanctity of evidence’ also mandated that archivists attain documents in as close to their original form as possible, keeping sets in their native groupings.18 Only thus
could their links to the activities and contexts in which they were produced remain fully 14 Ibid., 28.
15 Terry Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community: Four Shifting Archival Paradigms,” Archival Science 13, no. 2 (2013): 95-120.
16 Ibid., 106.
intact. Archives were conceived in naturalistic, even agricultural terms, as has been noted by Tom Nesmith,19 revealing the humble and self-effaced image of the archivist as minter
of pure evidence. To take the illusion further, this conception of archives as currencies of the future suggests use values uncertain in the present. It is easy to see how such
fetishistic attitudes towards archives as latent links to the past and the quasi-monastic work of archivists arises from this self-conception. Interestingly, Cook describes the preceding (pre-evidential) paradigm prior to the Dutch Manual as characterized by more interventionist practices rooted in medieval diplomatics, in which manuscript archives associated with private or public figures were typically grouped thematically or by location. Rationalized bureaucracies of the nation-state terminated this, ushering in an ideology of evidence.20
Cook goes on to explain the emergence of the memory paradigm superseding that of evidence in the interwar through to the post-war period of the 20th Century, following
Jenkinson’s heyday of influence and coalescing around the figure of T.R. Schellenberg.21
This so-called modern period reflected the new exigencies of the American
administrative context. In this telling, more pressing operational need to select and anticipate the historical value of records was foisted upon archivists by expanding quantities of records due to an increase in government functions associated with the New Deal and bureaucratic growth of the state during the Second World War.22 Archivists
essentially grew more comfortable abandoning lofty pretense to neutrality and gauging historiographic moods. Functionally, the conceptual legacy of this period is emphasis on macro-appraisal and the record group as organizing schematics, yielding a use-based approach that directly anticipated how archives were to be employed as historical tools. Firmer attention on the present, though still from a historiographic gaze, marked this Schellenbergian shift.23 Focus on appraisal in this American tradition expostulated the
18 Terry Eastwood, "Jenkinson's Writings on Some Enduring Archival Themes, "The American Archivist 67, no. 1 (2004): 43.
19 Tom Nesmith, “Seeing Archives: Postmodernism and the Changing Intellectual Place of Archives,” The American Archivist 65, no. 1 (2002): 28.
20 Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community.” 106.
21 Ibid., 107.
22 Cook, “What is Past is Prologue,” 28.
23 The turn from Jenkinson to Schellenberg paralleled the Twentieth Century shift in geopolitical power from Britain to America. I do not personally know if any valid conclusions can be drawn from this, but it is too obvious not to at
squeamishness associated with Jenkinson and embraced the subjective centrality of the archivist in public memory formation.24 In this trend Cook gleans something of a
degradation of perceived evidential value: the evidential and the informational were, in Schellenberg’s construction, of different research values.25 In view of the sheer
magnitude of records produced in industrial societies, insisting on the pristine evidentiary nature of archives became anachronistic and theoretically burdensome, justifying this meta-parsing or macro-appraisal.
The paradigm of identity enters Cook’s historiography as archival
professionalization evolves in the 1970s.26 The shift reflected growing complexity of
relationships between bureaucracies and perception of the more varied uses of archives beyond academic historiography. Cook elaborates: ‘Archives also moved from being a cultural and heritage resource underpinning the academic elite to becoming a societal foundation for identity and justice.’27 This ongoing re-articulation of the archives’ role in
society has been intriguingly conceptualized by Carolyn Heald as ‘diplomatics on the macro-level, or meta-archives,’28 in explicit acknowledgement of the archivist as agent of
accountability and transparency in pursuit of social justice.29 The idea that archives may
reveal multiple social truths mirrors growing emphasis on deconstruction and
postmodernist dismissal of grand-historical narratives. If Cook locates the paradigm of evidence firmly within the Hegelian-Darwinian view of historical procession, the identity paradigm speaks to the rise of New Historicism and postmodernism.
Interestingly, greater need for standardization and control over archives, owing to complexity of authorship and custodial chains, reinforces various notions of evidence as it pertains to the transparency and traceability of records. For Cook, the ‘Australian Series’ model most manifests this need for flexibility in archives, enabling complex
least note.
24 Suffice it to note that appraisal is elemental in perturbing the orthodoxy of historical evidence. This will be explored further in Chapter Two in relation to The Syrian Archive.
25 Ibid., 27.
26 Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community,” 110.
27 Ibid., 112.
28 Carolyn Heald, “Is There Room for Archives in the Postmodern World?” American Archivist 59, no. 1 (1996): 95.
29 This partly emerged from the new, in some ways competing but intimately linked, field of records management, which had become necessary to deal with the increasing organization complexity and provenance uncertainty of complex records, increasingly digital. See: Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community,” 111.
mapping of evolving relationships between records and agencies of production.30 This
further encourages the archivist to self-reflexively account for personal agency as originator of social meaning. Again, the idea of evidence has not been completely repressed but rather takes on new currency in this paradigm. The postmodern archivist situates evidence of her own actions vis-à-vis those of the institutions. The notion that the identity paradigm introduces ‘more sophisticated conceptions of evidence’31 may appear
paradoxical. If, however, the postmodern archivist relinquishes self-conception as neutral carrier of unaltered historical evidence, an entirely expanded terrain for the evidential comes into view, which includes the work of the archivist as social link within a consecrating process of knowledge production. In this rhetorical realm, the idea of the archivist as activist, advocate and curator replaces earlier conceptions of the monastic servant of truth preceding it. Eric Ketelaar already conveyed the essential aspects of this program when arguing for ‘interrogating the archive’s semantic geneology’ and ‘peeling back layers of intervention and interpretation’ so as to reveal more fully the contexts of record-creation as well as social concoction of knowledge.32
Cook’s newly budding archival paradigm of community emerges from this somewhat splayed preceding historiography. The community paradigm, born of the current moment, embodies a surrender of power on behalf of the archivist as medium between publics and truths. Cook notes the holistic approach of Canada’s “total archives” tradition as laying conceptual groundwork for this evolving reformation of archival function.33 Archives as communities are sites of inclusion and engagement, where various
self-forming groups may fashion autonomous monuments to memory. Yielding, as opposed to merely self-critically scrutinizing, traditional functions of acquisition, appraisal, arrangement and description of collections to communities in a participatory way, marks this still relatively untrammeled new archival terrain.
Evidence, memory, identity and community, as four overlaid paradigms, are not flat descriptions or fixed historiography for Cook, but simply reflect an expansion of fertile theories of evidence within the archive. Appraisal, skirted by certain records-30 Cook, “Evidence, Memory, Identity, and Community,” 111.
31 Ibid., 113.
32 Eric Ketelaar, “Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives,” Archival Science 1, no. 2 (2001): 141.
management practices, can either be passively undertaken on behalf of interested groups such as corporate or governmental record-creators, or operate according to notions of public interest in more interventionist memory-shaping capacity. The latter need not entail wholesale rejection of archives as evidence. Cook lauds the ‘rediscovery of
provenance’34 forwarded by Luciana Duranti, in this respect. Duranti drew on pre-modern
diplomatics traditions of authenticating murky medieval documents in the context of multiple record-creators and intertwined institutional environments, with especial bearing on electronic archives.35 David Bearman’s 1985 Electronic Evidence is likewise viewed
as discourse shifting, reviving earlier paradigms for new purposes.36
As this section details, discursive trends surrounding the concept of evidence have developed unevenly and remain contested. I find Cook’s main premise and his
recommendations convincing as means of historicizing the archive and conclude that historical evidence remains at the core of the archival, whether this is implicitly or frontally embraced. Ketelaar brutally simplifies this paradigmatic analysis, stating with austerity: ‘Records embody the nexus between evidence, accountability, and memory. Without evidence, no accountability and no memory.’37 Evidence should thus not simply
be seen as a lingering regime but as a base from which other archival possibilities spring. It can even be viewed as an adaptable theoretical tool, as Duranti has shown.38 With this
historiography in mind, I shift focus entirely in the next section, to discuss evidence in a far less figurative sense – namely, legal evidence – and more specifically moving images as legal evidence - all in approach of my ultimate object of scrutiny. I will return to the history of archival evidence vis-à-vis my case study in Section 1.3.
1.2 The Moving Image as Legal Evidence
34 Cook, “What is Past is Prologue,” 37.
35 Luciana Duranti, “The Concept of Appraisal and Archival Theory,” American Archivist 57, no. 2 (1994): 328-344.
36 Cook, “What is Past is Prologue,” 42.
37 Eric Ketelaar, “Everyone and Archivist,” in Managing and Archiving Records in the Digital Era, ed. Niklaus Bütikofer, Hans Hofmann, Seamus Ross (Baden: Hier+Jetzt, 2006), 11.
The presumption of The Syrian Archive that moving images can act as legal evidence is not unfounded. This section considers the origins of this supposition, which contemporary observers may take for granted. My aim is to step back from the rhetorical scope of archives as evidence and examine how belief in the moving image document as evidentiary tool operates. I offer only a partial and cursory survey of this lineage of moving image evidence in courts. Nonetheless I hope what I am able to parse can help better orient the reader toward my object. Relatively little has been written on the use of moving images from a legal perspective. And it seems few in film and media and studies have engaged this specialist discourse.39 As a restrained point of entry I focus primarily
on this history within the American legal system.40 But specific instances of video
evidence from Syria used in courts of law will further encapsulate my discussion.
Part of what calls my attention to The Syrian Archive in the first place is the way it transverses disparate, in some ways competing, epistemic niches.41 New media tend to
destabilize prior regimes of knowledge. The justice system is a clear example of this principle because the law is by definition rigidly codified and because the mandate of courts stems from the originating political constructs of polities. If at present one takes the plausibility of photographic evidence for granted, Susan Schuppli reminds us how controversial the introduction of ‘sun-pictures’42 actually was for 19th Century law. As
motion pictures arose from technical advancements in photography, it is worth dwelling first on the legal legacy of the photograph.
What Schuppli aptly isolates as epoch-shifting is the new reliance on extra-human testimony: ‘For the first time evidence was entered into legal proceedings that had been produced by a nonhuman agent; one whose motivations could not be judged, and whose actions could not be tried for perjury.’43 Authorship of testimony, loosely tethered to
39 Schuppli”s work represents one notable exception.
40 I focus on legal evidence in a specifically American context in part because Paradis has provided such a succinct history and because other traditions have not been as accessibly recapitulated. In part I do so also because I am considering the Syrian Archive within a primarily Anglo-American discourse. This decision also betrays my own very limited familiarity with any legal setting outside the American, this system being the only one in which I have actively participated (by performing jury duty).
41 Archives, jurisprudence, news, and social media all occupy different socio-cultural space and make claims to knowledge on rather different terms. The Syrian Archive, as will become clear, interacts with all of these.
42 Susan Schuppli, “Can the Sun Lie?” in Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth, ed. Forensic Architecture (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2014), 58. This evocative term was coined by photography scion Henry Fox Talbot in 1845.
human agency, seems to have truly disturbed legal paradigms in the early era of photography. Hence proponents of photographic evidence took Henry Fox Talbot’s poetic trade name for photographs to heart in defense of photography as if authored by
the sun - effectively anthropomorphizing it as ultimate objective witness by trading on
metaphorical conflation of light and truth. In referring to the sun as literally a mute witness testifying through photographs, advocates harped on ubiquitous solar
cosmologies and idioms. Within this framing, such a question posed in the Albany Law
Journal of 1886 as, ‘Can the sun lie?’ has far more concrete a meaning than it might
reasonably hold today.44
In order to be considered legally admissible in 19th Century American courts,
photography had to be accompanied by human testimony. This in turn further developed the custom of calling in technically versed expert witnesses, tasked with translating photochemical phenomena for judge and jurors. Despite these marked misgivings about the sooth-saying capacities of photographic evidence, Schuppli notes growing trends towards epistemic certainty.45 Loraine Daston and Peter Galiston theorized the threshold
of social acceptance beyond which, ‘the photographic process be elevated to a special epistemic status, putting it in a category of its own.’46 And yet this was a gradual process,
as the urgency of this episteme initially unsettled jurisprudence, inciting quasi-philosophical considerations as to the nature of new media.47 Jennifer Mnookin has
detailed the contested history of early photographic technology in American courts, elaborating on the evolving, often logically inconsistent legal rationalizations of this new form of evidence, from the daguerrotype to 20th Century photographic prints.48 She argues
that the dominant conception of photographic evidence relied on precedents set by earlier forms of visual evidence such as maps and diagrams, which also, at root, operated as
analogies for oral human testimony.49
I emphatically acknowledge that pre-history of cinema is contested in film and 44 Ibid., 56.
45 Ibid., 57.
46 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Representations 40, no. 1 (1992): 114.
47 Perhaps this is what is unique about the practice of law, its clumsy but inevitable contact with quotidian aesthetic reality.
48 Jennifer Mnookin, “The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy,” Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities 10, no. 1 (1998): 1-74.
media studies.50 Without ignoring useful ontologies that point to other emergent modes of
pre-cinematic vision,51 I proceed in my argument by recognizing that - at least from the
perspective of the courts - the ancestral chain of photochemical production between still and moving image is clear. Within a general history of jurisprudence, still photography offers obvious prototype for moving image evidence, priming legal bodies for the complexities it introduced. Corroborating this idea is the simple fact that up until 1912 the American legal system (as concerned copyright status) treated motion pictures merely as quantities of photographs.52 Plus, Schuppli’s own research, which I value in terms of
contextualizing my object, attests to this linkage.53 Therefore, photography as legal
pre-history retains an objective utility for my analysis.
So, having eventually emerged as legally admissible only after a period of uncertainty, photographic evidence must have to some degree smoothed the path for motion picture evidence. Pierre Paradis provides an authoritative account of moving image evidence in American courts in the first half of the 20th Century, noting that it was
almost unheard of during this period for film to be disqualified as evidence simply because of its format.54 The first documented US court case referencing moving images is
attributed to Edison vs. Lubin, a 1903 copyright dispute.55 Peter Decherney has detailed
50 Hermann Hecht has set broad parameters for discussing the pre-cinematic. See: Hermann Hecht, Pre-cinema History: An Encyclopaedia and Annotated Bibliography of the Moving Image before 1896, ed. Ann Hecht (London: Bowker-Saur, in Association with the British Film Institute, 1993).
51 Scholars such as a Terry Castle and have emphasized non-photographic origins of cinematic modes of vision by focusing on spectral geographic technologies of the 19th century such as the magic lantern. See: Terry Castle,
“Phantasmagoria: Spectral Technology and the Metaphorics of Modern Reverie,” Critical Inquiry 15, no. 1 (1988): 26-61. Similarly Erkki Huhtamo has focused on panoramic vision as cinematic precursor. See: Erkki Huhtamo,
“Penetrating the Peristrephic: An Unwritten Chapter in the History of the Panorama,” Early Popular Visual Culture 6, no. 3 (2008): 219-38.
52 Photography had itself existed as a unique US copyright category from 1865 onwards. Copyright law was expanded to accommodate the motion picture. See: Peter Decherney, “Copyright Dupes: Piracy and New Media in Edison v. Lubin (1903),” Film History 19, no. 2 (2007): 110.
53 Prior to probing the history of photographic evidence Schuppli examined the use “walk-back technologies” by investigators in the United Arab Emirates in the murder case of Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, analyzing the reliance on digital Closed Circuit Television footage and various facial algorithms. See: Susan Schuppli, “Dusting for Fingerprints and Tracking Digital Footprints,” Photographies 6, no. 1 (2013): 160. CCTV video in conjunction with various facial recognition softwares, computer algorithms and telecommunication networks implicated Mossad agents in the overseas murder of a Palestinian political exile. James and Taylor undertook a more methodic accounting of the most common issues in CCTV footage being admitted as legal evidence in the UK. See: Annabelle James and Chris Taylor, “Video Games: Some Pitfalls of Video Evidence (United Kingdom),” Journal of Criminal Law 69, no. 3 (2005): 264-276. What resonates most in these recent reckonings is how epistemological uncertainty repeatedly resurfaces in the legal arena with new technologies, all of which serve a wide array of more loosely litigated societal functions.
54 Pierre Paradis, “Celluloid Witness,” University of Colorado Law Review 37, no. 2 (1965): 235.
55 Peter Decherney, “Copyright Dupes: Piracy and New Media in Edison v. Lubin (1903),” Film History 19, no. 2 (2007): 109.
this early legal tussle over industrial practices that ultimately revolved around
disagreement over the legal ontology of the motion picture as a medium distinct from photography.56 Paradis points to uncertainty as to whether the physical filmic objects in
contestation between Thomas Edison and Siegmund Lubin even appeared in court, despite being the subject of the trial.57 So apparently moving images came under
American legal scrutiny initially as commodities, in advance of being considered evidential objects.
Paradis dates the shift toward film as evidence to Glyn v. Western Feature Film
Co. Ltd. (1915), where the exhibition of the defendant’s film was recorded as
admissible.58 Following this, similar to photographic evidence, moving images began to
be admitted accompanied by expert testimony. In what may seem like extreme
fastidiousness today, film evidence was exhibited in McGoorty v. Benhart (1940) with in-person testimony from the technician at Eastman Kodak’s Service Department who had developed it, so as to attest to its un-tampered state.59 This not only harkens back to
earlier conventions of technical expert testimony accompanying photographic evidence but also stresses the chain of custody of filmic evidence. Yet this quasi-archival scrutiny apparently never took hold as legal convention. Instead, moving image evidence came to rest simply on principle of the ‘authenticating witness,’60 a person associated with the
film production that could attest to its topical relevance and unaltered nature.61 Paradis
notes subsequent standardized use of ‘foundation questions’62 for authenticating
witnesses to verify these points, suggesting devolved pro-forma lingering doubts as to filmic capacity to reveal lived events. Jane Kalinski, writing decades later about video evidence, recapitulates this juridical history succinctly: ‘This early mistrust of the motion picture medium diminished significantly when the courts turned their focus away from the process used to create motion pictures and toward the accuracy of the depiction as 56 Decherney, “Copyright Dupes,” 109-124.
57 Paradis, “Celluloid Witness,” 235.
58 Ibid.
59 Ibid., 238.
60 Ibid., 236.
61 The purpose of this contingency was made explicit in UAW v. Russell of 1956, whose judge stated, “a motion picture does not of itself prove an actual occurrence but the thing reproduced must be established by the testimony of witness.”See: Lawrence Douglas, “Film as Witness: Screening Nazi Concentration Camps before the Nuremberg Tribunal,” The Yale Law Journal 105, no. 2 (1995): 466.
represented by the authenticating witness.’63
The general acceptance of the motion picture format as evidence appears relatively settled by 1930, despite initial misgivings over how emerging optical sound film technologies affected the accuracy and newly enlarged epistemic scope of film.64
Sound films thus were not ruled out as an evidentiary format tout court but were judged on objective merits pertinent to their production. Thus the basis on which film evidence could be excluded from legal consideration remained ill defined. Even in the early silent era filmic evidence could be excluded for quite prejudicial reasons.65 An extraordinary
dismissal of film evidence was issued in Metropolitan Life Insurance Company v. Wright (1940), whose judge noted,
‘... that the motion of the picture can be accelerated or slowed down materially, in order not to present the real situation; also, that the wheels of an automobile in motion may be shown as turning backward instead of forward. Even without such proof, nearly everyone has witnessed the operation of moving pictures in slowing or speeding motion, and performing many tricks, such as falling off a precipice, going through buildings with an automobile, and various other illusions which serve to show the possibility of inaccuracy in such evidence.’66
The entire socio-cultural phenomena of cinema as popular entertainment could apparently be invoked in a common-sense appeal to ordinary viewing publics as a means of rejecting film evidence in the courtroom. Despite these sways in legal opinion it was largely accepted that Streit v. Kestel (1959) served as definitive legal precedent for admission of film ‘within the sound discretion of the court, where such pictures are relevant to the issues, and are an accurate reproduction of persons and objects testified to in oral
63 Jane Kalinski, “Jurors at the Movies: Day-in-the-life Videos as Effective Evidentiary Tool or Unfairly Prejudicial Device?” Suffolk University Law Review27, no. 3 (1993): 794.
64 Paradis, “Celluloid Witness,” 238. The 1930 verdict on film evidence offered in Commonwealth v. Roller acknowledged “objections to the introduction of sound pictures” as indexically suspicious documents but nonetheless conceded that such dismissals of evidence, “ must be based upon lack of authenticity of the particular picture which is offered in evidence rather than on the ground of general unreliability of the process by which such pictures are produced.”
65 Ibid., 240. In the 1922 case of Pandolfo v. United States highly relevant footage submitted by the defendant and owner of a manufacturing firm was denied entry as evidence on the grounds that it had been shot under the supervision of the firm’s advertising manager. An entire genre of commercial motion picture was thus deemed by one trial court (and later upheld by federal district court) as inadmissible because of the self-interested and deceptive intentions read into its initial production.
examination before the jury.’67
In light of this prolonged lack of codification, it is perhaps not surprising that the history of film evidence in American courts tilted heavily towards films documenting medical issues, often in liability for personal injury lawsuits.68 That moving images were
used in court to corroborate medical conditions, bound up their admission as evidence with yet another socially authoritative scientific discourse besides that of photochemistry. In what precise ways being buoyed by the pre-sanctioned discourse of medicine solidified or came to characterize moving image evidence remains fruitful ground for further inquiry. Jane Kalinski has followed this thread through to new moving image formats, describing the prevalence of ‘day-in-the-life-of videos’69 in victim testimonies deployed
to demonstrate the prolonged conditions of plaintiff suffering in personal injury and medical malpractice suits. She deems codifications for admitting this genre of testimony as ill defined and points to widely divergent juror reactions to such videos.70 The primary
question for Kalinski is how such videos may manipulate juror sentiment and reify or distort events that may not even have direct bearing on criminality.71 Karen Campbell has
offered a more medium-specific account of admissibility of videotape evidence, similarly concerned with how the moving image evidence affects jurors.72 She cites a fascinating
study by Seltzer and Phillips,73 which claimed jurors retained 650% more information
when submitted on laserdiscs as opposed to when recapitulated orally.74
Tracing the history of videotape evidence from the 1970s, Campbell emphasizes new juridical uses, such as recording and playback of witness testimony for trial
documentation.75 Campbell explains that contemporary videotape evidence admissibility
rests on three pestablished evidential paradigms - demonstrations, recreations, and re-67 Ibid., 236.
68 Ibid., 235.
69 Kalinski, “Jurors at the Movies,” 789.
70 Ibid., 791.
71 Ibid., 791. In this I discern a precedent for scrutiny of The Syrian Archive, to be addressed further in Chapter Two.
72 Karen Campbell, “Roll Tape - Admissibility of Videotape Evidence in the Courtroom,” The University of Memphis Law Review 26, no. 4 (1996): 1445-1500.
73 See: Robert Seltzer and Mark Phillips, “Laser Discs Propel Courts into the Future,” Mass Law Weekly Nov. 11, 1991.
74 Campbell, “Roll Tape,” 1447. This serves as premonition of the memorializing capacity of filmic evidence that The Syrian Archive appears to understand well.
enactments.76 Similar to Mnookin’s focus on the specific legal analogies for photographic
evidence, Campbell suggests the medium of video almost exclusively functions in American courts in these three modes. These classes of evidence contrast with so-called
real physical evidence such as blood, hair, soil samples or bodily secretions, submitted as
the original physical trace of an event, as opposed merely to its representation.77 Despite
this hierarchy of evidence, it is made repeatedly clear that moving image occupy a unique epistemic platform, whose exhibition in courtrooms can require the moving of furniture, dimming of lights and temporary introduction of screens - all of which impinge on the standard atmosphere of proceedings and thus potentially train juror attention on what may be intuited as having special evidential significance.78 This curiously parallels the notion
of cinematic dispositif articulated succinctly by archival film theorists such as Giovanna Fossati.79 This issue of mediated power and sociological conditioning acutely comes to
the fore in the context of a trial and certainly warrants serious scrutiny from media scholars. That moving image evidence inevitably refers to the history and social present of cinema is thus not lost on legal thinkers.80
In light of this, Campbell notes that the Federal Rule of Evidence number 403 can be used to object to moving image testimony that causes prejudicial reception of materials on what one might call ‘grounds of the dispositif.’ Beyond signaling the basic socio-cultural conditioning that can bias moving image reception, Rule 403 can be cited to probe biasing elements of submitted video evidence by pointing to technically leading aspects of production such as its lighting, camera angle, montage and mise-en-scene.81 In
effect, this suggests close analysis of moving images can challenge a document’s
admissibility in court. Both the overall framing of such evidence and the entire context of its production can be scrutinized according to Campbell’s interpretation of Rule 403.82
As one of the most socially authoritative epistemological regimes, jurisprudence 76 Ibid., 1455.
77 Douglas, “Film as Witness,” 466.
78 Campbell, “Roll Tape,” 1463.
79 Giovanna Fossati, “Found Footage Filmmaking, Film Archiving and New Participatory Platforms,” in Found Footage: Cinema Exposed, ed. Marente Bloemheuvel, Giovanna Fossati, Jaap Guldemond and Peter Delpeut and translated by Pierre Bouvier (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press: EYE Film Institute Netherlands, 2012), 178-180.
80 Paradis, “Celluloid Witness,” 241.
81 Campbell, “Roll Tape,” 1464.
functions largely as a system for identifying and classifying objects, not dissimilar to the archive. Both lexicons do so by regulating what can be entertained as possible
mechanisms for deriving social truths. This history of moving image evidence seems to tacitly anticipate the documentary. Bill Nichols contends that documentary manifests a unique type of voyeurism termed ‘epistephilia.’83 This spectator fetish mimics and
represses jurisprudence as definitive public episteme by placing the viewer, as seeker of knowledge through the image, as privileged judge of its truth-value. The mirroring of juror and viewer isolates, but is unable to fully account for, ‘the special indexical bond’84
– the unique reproduction of facts – that characterizes documentary representation. Jane Gaines cites Dziga Vertov as one of the early totems of documentary, whose legacy is legion but still misapprehended.85 If Vertov is perceived as the founding theorist
of documentary from an era when the genre was still nascent in the 1920s, his theories also transcend generic and even cinematic interpretation, in dialogue with epistemology and phenomenology as well. What jurisprudence is able only to hint at, Vertov seems to have already elucidated while film was still establishing itself as a legal object. Contrary to many legal authorities, Vertov was unrestrained in his belief that film could elicit profound truths that mere human testimony could not approach. In his advocacy of the mechanical eye of the camera as superior to the unaided human ocular apparatus, more capable of enhanced objective vision, he indirectly refutes early qualms of legal bodies handling filmic evidence.86 Vertov spoke of films as if a newly discovered natural
epistemological element: ‘Every instant of life shot unstaged, every individual frame shot
just as it is in life with a hidden camera, ‘caught unawares,’ or by some other analogous
technique – represents a fact recorded on film, a film fact as we call it.’87
83 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issue and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 178. Nichols deploys this term in distinction to scopophilia associated with cinema-viewing in general to demonstrate the desire to know and uncover that the documentary format harnesses.
84 Jane Gaines, introduction to Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5.
85 Ibid.
86 Of course for Vertov, staged fiction-film was equally capable of treacherous lies that denuded human empirical capacities. Cinema as a human pursuit, because of its unique epistemic properties, was seen as crucial site of an almost millenarian battle for human perception and social emancipation. This was because the film fact was seen as
incommensurate with more rote forms of knowledge. See: Dziga Vertov and Annette Michelson and Kevin O’Brien. Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
87 Dziga Vertov and Annette Michelson and Kevin O’Brien. Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov ( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 57.
Vertov introduced this special, revolutionary category of knowledge, driving his
kino-pravda movement, but with little resonance for jurisprudence. This is unsurprising
in light of Vertov’s professed belief that untrained cinema-viewers such as the illiterate Russian peasants for whom he programmed agit-prop train screenings during the Russian civil war, were uniquely capable of ascertaining truth from film. These ‘unspoiled’88
audiences, many having never seen the moving image before in their lives, could, claimed Vertov, intuit realness, reserving only ‘coolness and distrust’89 for the
‘film-moonshine’90 of staged dramas. This idea, taken at face value, has intimate bearing on the
entire concept of film-as-evidence but was rarely, if ever, invoked in courts. However, in the context of contemporary hyper-mediated war-propaganda, marked by surplus of digital video promising deeper access to violent events, it can be of particular import.
It would take until the Second World War for documentary to really enter the legal lexicon. Writing in Yale Law Journal, Lawrence Douglas detailed the use of documentary footage as testimony in the Nuremberg Trials. The screening of the
documentary Nazi Concentrations Camps (George Stevens, 1945) during the trial, in lieu of eyewitness testimony, undermined the central focus of moving image evidence on the authenticating witness.91 The way in which provenance or originating authority defines
evidence is important to consider in this context, because it also speaks to historical methodology. Prosecutors at Nuremberg acknowledged this by screening clips from the most infamous Nazi propaganda documentary Triumph of the Will (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935) – submitted as self-convicting evidence.92
But Douglas argues that it was the US-Army-produced documentary Nazi
Concentrations Camps that was most influential in Nuremberg as evidence of mass
atrocity and genocide that could in no other way be adequately conveyed.93
Transliterating Vertov, the stated assumption of documentary-as-evidentiary prosthesis in this context was that the human mind was ill equipped to grapple with Nazi horrors,
88 Ibid., 61.
89 Ibid., 61.
90 Ibid., 61.
91 Douglas, “Film as Witness,”466.
92 Ibid., 466.
rendering mere human testimony insufficient.94 Contrary to Vertov’s idea of film-truth,
however, the sworn affidavit of authenticity is physically inscribed in Nazi Concentration
Camps in the form of voiceover from the famous Hollywood director cum-US Army
Colonel, George Stevens,95 who certified, ‘these motion pictures constitute a true
representation of the individuals and scenes photographed.’96
Douglas conclusively examines the still unsurpassed ambition of filmic testimony at Nuremberg and explains the novelties of this highly self-conscious attempt by
international law to grapple with facts that defied human reason. But he does not analyze how embedded Hollywood norms were in this unparalleled piece of filmic evidence.
94 Marc Nichanian has addressed this same issue as raised by the documentary Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) that fundamentally, genocide is “in-de-monstrable.” See: Nichanian, The Historiographic Perversion, 96. I will return to this issue of limits of the demonstrable in the context of Syria in Chapter 3
95 Stevens had a successful and generically varied career in Hollywood before enlisting with the Signal Corps of the US Army. Before the war his Hollywood output consisted largely of romances and comedies.
96 Douglas, “Film as Witness,”454. A second extra-diegetic affidavit was provided to the court by “director of film effects” E.R. Kellog upon reviewing the film, attesting that it had not been “retouched, distorted or otherwise altered in any respect.” Ibid., 454.
(Figure 1) Lieutenant Colonel George Stevens during filming of Nazi Concentration Camps. Source: Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.
Douglas notes, however, that the film’s voiceover guides the prosecutorial conflation of militarism and genocide and even suggests that images in the film were misread on a basic level, in order to grasp the larger scope of the crime committed.
Nuremberg represents a totemic referent in the history of moving image evidence because of the prominence of Nazi Concentration Camps. And it is especially pertinent as precedent for The Syrian Archive simply because of its central place in the history of war crimes prosecution, although The Syrian Archive never overtly invokes this history. Legal precedents of film evidence were altered to fit the Nuremberg Trials, which speaks to assumptions that new types of atrocity justify new evidential platforms. Exactly how documentary as a genre may have been reconfigured post-Nuremberg remains an open question. But documentary was undoubtedly a prominent referent throughout the trial.
This recalls what Vivian Sobchak has referred to as ‘documentary
consciousness.’97 In probing the phenomenology of identification with moving images
writ large, Sobchak rehabilitated Jean-Pierre Meunier’s theses on the spectrum of filmic experiences, positing that documentary exists as an intermediate form between fiction and home-movies or souvenir films in terms of the depth of its apodicticity – and its presentness or even presentedness. By stratifying these different ‘structures of attention’98
Sobchak goes well beyond rehearsed discussions of genre. This is important in light of
Nazi Concentration Camps, where documentary evidence was the centerpiece of an
unprecedented juridical-historical event - a genre unto itself, in significant ways.
Understanding documentary as one of many modes of cinematic attention, on the phenomenological spectrum that Sobchak charts, begins to suggest the impact of
documentary as evidence in such a context. The idea of fluid flux in viewing conventions, requiring a tacit filling-in proportional to immersive hermeneutics associated with fiction films, demonstrates how tendentious it is to channel documentary (or any type of film footage) into raw evidence, as was attempted at Nuremberg. Notions of the real referent beyond the indexical image are always arrived at in spectatorship through untraceable psycho-social processes. Even when documentary as such is not the explicit object of evidence (most often the case in courtrooms), Sobchak’s analysis would seem to suggest that abstruse subjective dynamics of cinematic identification always impinge on the objective image of an event. For Sobchak this identification is ‘radically coconstitutive’ in that generic attention may be ‘solicited, but is never determined a priori.’99 This
ultimately unresolved but intriguing attempt to characterize a spectrum of
phenomenological processes of spectatorship comes to bear on the use of
yet-to-be-fully-defined footage amassed in The Syrian Archive.
One final addendum to this overview of documentary evidence to further segue into discussion of my case study is the recent use by Swedish law of online video from the present conflict in Syria. In February of 2017 Swedish courts sentenced an asylum-seeker from Syria named Haisam Omar Sakhanh to life imprisonment for the
97 Vivian Sobchak, “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 241.
98 Ibid., 245.
extrajudicial killings of Syrian Army soldiers based on published video footage of the incident. In this stand-alone case, Swedish jurisdiction could only be invoked if the atrocity was deemed a war crime, as opposed to a foreign homicide.100 Given the court’s
inability to access the crime scene in rebel-held Idlib province of Syria and to attain any physical evidence from the event, the case appears to have hinged entirely on recorded video of the murder and on prior videos published on Youtube and Facebook proving the execution had been summary, pre-meditated and cruel.101 The New York Times and The
Daily Mail currently host the very same footage used in the trial on their websites, the
former having done so before the trial had even taken place. This exemplifies, in novel circumstance, the dissolving boundary between evidence and media, with video initially published online in an entirely different context, as war propaganda, transmuted into news item, and eventually juridical document. The defendant, in this the sole case of European prosecution deriving from video evidence from war in Syria since 2011, was a combatant against the Syrian government, which is of course the main entity that The
Syrian Archive seeks to indict. This serves as an awkward precedent, then, for The Syrian Archive’s subsequent appeal to domestic European as well as to international law. This
issue of partiality and intent goes hand-in-hand with appeals to power to be taken up further after a more prolonged engagement with my case study, in the following section.
1.3 Syrian Archival Evidence
Evidence operates in The Syrian Archive outside of Jenkinson’s postulations referred to in Section 1.1. Jenkinson’s ideal of archives as raw historical evidence is in fact inverted in this case, where video archives are submitted as literal evidence in the aspirational tense, inscribed with the hope of legal utility. This oversteps by some margin the ‘prejudice or afterthought’102 that Jenkinson proscribed when defining archives. I argue,
along these lines, that pre-charting the purported function of records sabotages their 100 Christina Anderson, “Syrian Rebel Gets Life Sentence for Mass Killing Caught on Video,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Feb. 16, 2017.
101 Ibid.
potential utility as historical evidence. Because The Syrian Archive was founded in consultation with international human rights lawyers and because its administrators work in collaboration with international war crimes prosecutors, it sidesteps historical
evidence, appealing directly to international law in a politicized present. In so doing,
much of what traditionally framed the archives as evidentiary tool is jettisoned.
Examining this repository, therefore, shows it caught between the two preceding histories just sketched.
The Syrian Archive functions as an activist platform that collects and publishes
online video documentation from Syria in order to facilitate war crimes prosecution. Without re-theorizing what constitutes activism, I use this designation at face-value: The
Syrian Archive compiles video from what it terms media activists; and it archives with
the political goal of shaping ongoing events and enabling war crimes prosecution.103 This
suffices as base-level qualification for an activist-archive for the purpose of my analysis. I also characterize this repository as an online platform in Olga Goriunova’s sense of the
art platform.104 As Goriunova has shown, the legacy of this concept rooted in early
Twentieth Century programs of revolutionary political parties still inflects its use: ‘Since then, ‘platform’ has generally meant a set of shared resources that might be material, organizational, or intentional that inscribe certain practices and approaches in order to develop collaboration, production, and the capacity to generate change.’105 This broad
definition suffices as descriptor for The Syrian Archive.
This collection was established in 2014 by two Berlin-based data activists, Hadi al-Khatib and Jeff Deutch, in consultation with journalists, lawyers and activists in Turkey.106 It is subsidized solely by an NGO called Alternatives International and
professes no formal affiliation with any political group in Syria.107 The archive functions
103 Hadi al-Khatbi and Jeff Deutch, “Vox Populi and the Syrian Archive – Documenting Revolution and Conflict in the Digital Age” (presentation, EYE Film Museum, Amsterdam, January 21, 2017).
104 Olga Goriunova, Art Platforms and Cultural Production on the Internet, Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies 35, (New York: Routledge, 2012), 7.
105 Ibid., 8.
106 Hadi al-Khatbi and Jeff Deutch, “Syrian Archive: Preserving documentation of human rights violations” (presentation, Chaos Communication Congress, Berlin, December 27-30, 2016).
107 Hadi al-Khatbi and Jeff Deutch, “Frequently Asked Questions - Syrian Archive | beta,” The Syrian Archive, https://syrianarchive.org/p/page/faq/ It has been difficult to find any documented affiliation between this NGO and The Syrian Archive. No link to its patron is provided on the latter’s site and the website for Alternatives International describes it as network of NGOs as opposed a single entity. Strangely, no documentation of affiliation with The Syrian Archive is stated.
as a freely accessible online database of videos purported to document various war crimes and human rights violations. As of January 2017 over 2,000 discrete video-incidents have been preserved and uploaded. The total duration of footage accumulated now surpasses the lived time of the conflict itself - more than six years worth of video.108
This alone serves as a telling reflection of the hyper-mediated nature of this conflict and stands as testament to the ubiquity and centrality of digital video in modern war.
(Figure 2) The Syrian Archive homepage. Source: syrianarchive.org.
The Syrian Archive describes its mission as ancillary in nature. It supports ‘citizen
journalists’ and ‘human rights advocates’ in Syria as part of ‘evidence based advocacy campaigns.’109 It defines its key functions as ‘acquisition and standardization,’ ‘long-term
preservation’ and ‘cataloguing and metadata enrichment’ of video documents, as a way of making material accessible to broad publics, thereby ‘raising awareness’ of human rights abuses.110
In its mission statement, The Syrian Archive only broadly refers to ‘visual
documentation’ and ‘visual evidence’ – with no explicit mention made of the medium of video despite that this is the only format it preserves.111 It seeks to ‘tell untold stories,’
108 Al-Khatib and Deutch, “Syrian Archive” (Chaos Computer Congress, 2016).
109 Hadi al-Khatbi and Jeff Deutch, “About - Syrian Archive | beta,” The Syrian Archive, https://syrianarchive.org/p/page/about.
110 Ibid.
111 Ibid. Actually, The Syrian Archive is not constrained to the purely visual, but more often than not includes audiovisual documentation. In some cases the audio can be read as atmospheric, but in instances where people are
