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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Self-Configuration Gestures from the State of Conflict: Abu Ghraib, Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s Shahid
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Projects & Abstracts
2015-03-01
2021-09-21
2015-03-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Lorenzo Donghi
2015/03/01
Università degli Studi di Torino
2036-461X
24
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Ph.D. Thesis Abstract - Self-Configuration Gestures from the State of Conflict: Abu Ghraib, Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s Shahid
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie/article/download/16413/17045
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Self-Configuration Gestures from the State of Conflict:
Abu Ghraib, Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda’s Shahid
Lorenzo Donghi / Ph.D. Thesis Abstract1
Università degli Studi di Torino




   My Ph.D. thesis, starting from the definition of some significant aspects of
the media production concerning the images of the so-called War on Terror, in
particular from 9/11 to autumn 2008 (namely, when the global economy started
to collapse and crisis substituted terror on the international stage of emergency),
attempts to focus on a selection of the most important and most recent bibliog-
raphies on the subject, especially on studies coming from the Anglo-Saxon area.
   Two bibliographies are the main topics debated with the aim to profile the
state of the art of the current research on the war representation: the first one
focuses on the new media scenario, the backdrop wherein the contemporary
war is fought and negotiated;2 the second one investigates the presence and the
functions of new operators of visibility that emerged (or were reinforced) in
the last decade conflicts.3
   As a matter of fact, War on Terror is the first war increasingly fought online,
a context wherein those who fight try to take advantage of new communication
technologies, such a crucial instrument in the field of contemporary warfare, to
be able to promote the online space as an important showcase of the conflict. In
this way, the concrete and tangible ideas of the battlefield are re-mediated in a
virtual landscape formed by collective imagination and data exchanges, just as
the same idea of war frontline becomes a diffused horizon.4
   But the War on Terror is also a war wherein the conception of image as simula-
crum (a conception that reached the highest point with a suspicious and postmod-
ern mindset during the end of the last century) has become weak, unable to ask ap-
propriate questions about its own time. Indeed, if we can surely say that reality is
not disappearing, dissolved in the variety of its representations, we can also guess

1
  Ph.D. Thesis supervised by Prof. Federica Villa and Prof. Giaime Alonge. For information:
lorenzodonghi@yahoo.it
2
  Nathan Roger, Image Warfare in the War on Terror, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke-New York
2013.
3
  Kari Andén-Papadopoulos, Mervi Pantti (eds.), Amateur Images and Global News, Intellect,
Bristol 2011.
4
  Andrew Hoskins, Ben O’Loughlin, War and Media: The Emergence of Diffused War, Polity Press,
Cambridge 2010.

                                                   Cinéma & Cie, vol. XV, no. 24, Spring 2015
                                        Lorenzo Donghi


that nowadays another examination of the ontological unreality of images (espe-
cially digital ones) seems to be less useful than a meticulous study conducted on
their operative reality, the primary perspective in the study of the War on Terror.5
   Consequently, one must interpret the war imagination shaped in the first dec-
ade of the new millennium as a complex, chaotic and cacophonous reality that
requires some ‘exploratory paths’ to be investigated. The path chosen in this the-
sis is the one of self-configuration in the new media landscape: a model often
employed by the current media system to negotiate the visibility of contempo-
rary conflicts, as shown by several episodes of international news broadcasts that
marked the last decade and the fighting of the War on Terror. From the participa-
tive and citizen journalism (such as the so-called warblogs) to the video-footage
directly shot and edited by the soldiers and uploaded to file-sharing platforms,
from the global network to the entertainment industry, nowadays various forms of
self-representation take decisive part in the visual processes of the conflict, in its
sale as a product to the audience, and in its propaganda mechanisms. Under these
circumstances, the main aim of my research has been to investigate forms and
modalities of the self-portraiture as a privileged trajectory of undoubted relevance
to the analysis of how media return contemporary conflicts to the audiences.
   More specifically, this research has taken some symptomatic case studies into
consideration in order to define the close relationship between audiovisual de-
vices and men involved in conflicts, with the intention of understanding the in-
terrelated solutions existing between “technologies of Self” and visual forms of
contemporary war.
   The first one concerns the diffusion of Abu Ghraib snapshots. Indeed, in
April 2004 the television program 60 Minutes and some articles published by
Seymour M. Hersh in The New Yorker brought to public attention a sensational
case of war tortures. The cause of the scandal relates not just to what images
show (notoriously, a group of western soldiers forcing Iraqi prisoners into sub-
missive positions, often with evident sexual connotations), but also to the shock-
ing revelation about the identity of their authors: photographs and videos were
shot by the captors, who are authors of a self-portraiture gesture performed in
front of and behind the camera – a gesture that, in some ways, even reconsiders
the role of the war reporter, replacing his function and his presence.
   The second one concerns Osama bin Laden’s self-iconography. Osama bin
Laden has been a political leader with no official portraiture, with no monu-
ments erected in his honor or memory – indeed “no statues, monuments, palaces
or regimes could be leveled as ways of performing the destruction of bin Laden”6
– but he was also a leader who did not renounce a personal iconography, and
who was able to use television and the Internet as the most powerful spaces of
self-promotion. It means that bin Laden produced and released video-messages


5
  William J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present, University of Chi-
cago Press, Chicago 2011.
6
  Ivi, p. 3.

148
                  Self-Configuration Gestures from the State of Conflict


using his body as a symbolic figure (capable to easily change in response to politi-
cal decisions or military campaigns) and demonstrating in this way a full atten-
tion concerning his own mise-en-scene.
   The last one concerns one of the most shocking characters in the post-9/11
war imagination: the Islamic shahid. This term defines a recurring figure in the
horizon of Islamic radicalism; a person who decides to sacrifice his own life in
order to kill as many enemies as possible, assigning to his action of death a pow-
erful symbolic value and a vigorous mediatic resonance. In this perspective, the
shahid often shoots a video before his death, a content that constitutes the peak
of his rituals of indoctrination: in this way the shahid can assert the authorship of
his imminent gesture and he can also bid farewell to the world, exactly as in the
case of an audiovisual testament.




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