Scenes from Syria
Smoke, shouts and gunfire. Hauling a body – dead, wounded? – into the back of a van. The sound of man a crying. In a different film, you would take it he was singing, but this is ‘amateur video’ of the attack on Houla, Syria. Another film shows dead bodies from the village of Mazraat al-Qabeer, now dressed in their best clothes and composed – arranged like flowers – for the camera’s worldly eye. The lens lingers over them, and the accompanying voice calls for action against the forces of President Assad. But because there are children among the dead, twenty-first century decorum dictates that we must look at a white blob where their faces would otherwise be. It turns the whole scene into an outtake from the X-Files. So much story-telling, too much narrative, means we can’t see, we can’t see.