So much of filmmaking and film-watching boils down to either lending your eyes to another or accepting that loan as a viewer––a process so quick, so immediate when done right that one can easily forget it’s about exchanging consent. To look away, to close your eyes and cover your ears, to leave the room, to close the tab: all these acts seem simple and innocuous when taken out of their “spectatorial” context, but what effective cinema shares with the graphic images of violence circulating on our feeds is how horrendously watchable it is, to the viewer’s detriment. Afterlives, the debut feature by Kevin B. Lee, which screens as part of the BFI London Film Festival’s Experimenta programme off the back of its world premiere in DocLisboa, asks whether there is a way to see such images without showing them; to care, without avoiding them.
Ethics and spectatorship are at the root of Bottled Songs, which was a shared project for filmmakers and media researchers Lého Galibert-Laîné and Lee in search of strategies for making sense of online terrorist propaganda, especially videos of the Islamic State (ISIS). Bottled Songs, like Lee’s work until now (e.g. Transformers: The Premake), was a desktop documentary which recorded interactions, investigations, and reflections directly upon a computer screen, aided by a voiceover to discuss the complex mediascape people exist in today as viewers and consumers. Afterlives takes this impetus and explores it in the form of a feature-length documentary using not only desktop aesthetics, but also found footage and filmed images––interviews and exploratory scenes in Lee’s sense-making process. Best known for his video essay practice, and in particular the desktop documentary format, he fulfills the essayistic credo in Afterlives through a kind of self-interrogation that leaves the confines of the first-person singular. In other words: the film starts with him trying to negotiate the position of a viewer of ISIS videos outside of the typical tropes of identification, and gradually pulls from the “I” to make space for others.
The others in question include journalist and political educator Nava Zarabian, whose work includes online safeguarding and surveillance of terrorist content, and Director of the International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism Anne Speckhard, who interviews ISIS defectors, returnees, and prisoners. Both welcome Lee in their homes to discuss and reflect on their practices, and through those conversations, the film manages to equip the viewer with enough contextual knowledge to appreciate the more rigorous exchanges happening in front of the camera. However, Lee never allows the safety of conceptualizing too much for too long, well knowing that a specter of violence lingers over those he encounters.
Afterlives performs an excavation––metaphorical and literal––into the past of terrorist propaganda and their imagined future, for many of those the filmmaker encountered in 2014 have since disappeared off the Internet. One sequence shows the ways technology grapples with its limits even now, when Lee prompts an AI image generator to show him the very same visuals absent from the virtual space, and the results are polished––in a way, intentionally less harmful. That is when the film’s title comes into crisper focus, with the realization that “crimes of the past [are] buried in images of the future,” their “afterlives” safe and sound, ensconced in algorithmic tombs.
A more literal kind of archaeology (but also not quite) defines Lee’s interest in meeting artist Morehshin Allahyari, whose 3-D-printed model of a Medusa head he encountered in a German museum in 2021. Allahyari’s project is one of digital restoration, collecting data about artifacts destroyed by ISIS and resurrecting the lost objects in 3-D print replicas––she speaks about her work openly, but also voices a suspicion this practice can be co-opted by a colonial logic. What she terms “violent care” finds an example in the instance when a 3D-printed replica of Palmyra’s Triumphal Arch was unveiled, of all places, in London’s Trafalgar Square.
But while there is a certain synergy between Allahyari’s “violent care” and the flux of Lee’s approach to violent iconography, Afterlives insists on its own ambiguous relationship to visuals. Perhaps this is why you will see Lee “leaving” the desktop space and actually appearing in the flesh as a sort of exposure out of respectful necessity. Whatever cinematic form it inhabits, Afterlives is a dedicated, reflective documentary, the bell of its urgency ringing far into the past and into the futures of images.
Afterlives screened at the BFI London Film Festival.
The post BFI London Review: Kevin B. Lee’s Debut Feature Afterlives Interrogates Terrorist Propaganda first appeared on The Film Stage.
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