Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria.

• Author: Tosun, Osman Burak

Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria

By Donatella Della Ratta

London: Pluto Press, 2018, 272 pages, ISBN: 9781786802101

A researcher who wrote her thesis about television series (musalsalat in Arabic) aired in Syria, and unluckily faced the grim reality of the Syrian Civil War, Donatella Della Ratta gives us a solid and undeniably unique work about transforming aesthetics of propaganda videos, TV shows, and images circulating in new media and the cross-referencing, reviving and everchanging modern myths of a postmodern revolution. Even if her intentions were not related to writing a book about the transformation of new media in a civil war, she states that her deep emotional bond with the Syrian people living in agony, her long-running ethnographic research about visual culture in Syria and her first-hand testimonies from the very first days of peaceful protests in 2011 would have made her write a book about it. Shooting a Revolution offers readers a broad theoretical discussion about the transformation of contemporary conflicts in the age of networked visual culture and helps to frame a more informed debate on the current situation in Syria.

Shooting a Revolution consists of an introduction, eight chapters and eight fragments called "snapshots" that could be considered prologues for every chapter. Every snapshot gives a general view of the following chapter and an abstract view of the historical context of the main topic. With the guidance of these well-thought-out snapshots, readers become initiated in the discussion and may grasp the theoretical and historical background easily. Each chapter addresses a prominent issue that changed Syrian visual culture. The first chapter provides a brief yet encompassing history of Syrian Neoliberalization from the days of Hafez al-Assad to the first days of the Syrian Revolution and interestingly expounds the changing face of the reproduction of the official ideology of the Syrian State (Tanwir) by means of ideological apparatuses. From the use of musalsalat as an ideological apparatus that employs Tanwir-influenced rhetoric, to the emergence of a new, rich class in Syria and the changing ownership structure of the media, Della Ratta offers a well-documented summary of contemporary Syrian visual culture.

The next three chapters identify the crisis of Tanwir ideology and the changing efforts of representing it in the public sphere by using conventional and new media. The second and...