Images convey strong narratives. In a recent talk, Maaza Mengiste questions the “exploitation in post-production”, particularly in the context of shooting images of refugees, disadvantaged people or the poor. (1) What do post-war images or images of violence say to the world? What are they meant to convey? What is their aesthetics? Such are the issues that Patricia Spyer, Professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Institute, explores in her body of work on Indonesia. Here she talks about “Reel Accidents: Screening the Ummah under Siege in Wartime Maluku”, an article published in Current Anthropology.

Can you present your article and its distinctive features?

My article focuses on the Muslim video compact discs (VCDs) that circulated in wartime Maluku during the religiously inflected conflict that wracked these eastern Indonesian islands in the early 2000s. Characterised by an aesthetics of seriality and repetition, scenes of urban warfare and rampant destruction serve as backdrop for close-ups of the vulnerable Muslim body rent asunder by Christian aggression. Unfolding as repeated rupture across the VCD’s frames, such films visualise the ummah as a body in parts rather than a coherent unity. Of particular concern is the VCD’s mode of interpellation, the aesthetic of accident that violently undermines any narrative framing, and the relation between their post-narrative appeal and public making. Within a wider media ecology, Malukan “Muslim Power” murals featuring Sunni and Shia big men from different times and places appear to counter the VCDs’ visions of the ummah in shreds with the strong image of a transnational and trans-historical ummah. Yet such murals also echo the VCDs’ indeterminacy and displays of vulnerability as they also aim to contain them through the defensive line-up of Muslim strongmen. While ethnographically this article is focused on Indonesia, the argument has implications for understanding the appeal of Muslim genres of mediated spectacular violence elsewhere and more broadly.

This article is novel and different from the bulk of my work that has focused especially on Christian images. When I started working in the post-war Malukan environment, I was interested in the burgeoning landscape of new media and peace journalism promoted by liberal organisations in Indonesia. In addition to the huge Christian murals that proliferated in the post-war city of Ambon, I found out that Christians were also making VCDs similar to those of the Muslims – that is, the aesthetics interestingly is very similar in both Christian and Muslim VCDs, the only difference being the victims and perpetrators. That is what brings me to this article.

Can you tell us more about its core purpose?

My purpose was to inquire how these VCDs move people affectively and what the precise implications of that might be. I would like to emphasise, however, that the affect I discuss in the article does not necessarily move people to violence – indeed, it most often does not do so. I was especially interested in the “aesthetic of accident”, in which different components such as the “coup”, the interruption or the cinematographically inspired cut collaborate to produce an aesthetic based on repetition and the recurrent effect of shock as scene after scene of extreme violence are witnessed on screen. As a consequence, as I argue in the article, this aesthetic challenges the possibility of imposing any linear narrative. Watching those VCDs was akin to trauma, as described by Freud, in the sense that it completely undermines the possibility of recuperation.

Apart from aesthetic considerations, are there any striking similarities or differences between Christian and Muslim VCDs?

The main difference that I found between the two, on which I have written elsewhere also, is that the Muslim VCDs were distributed and circulated widely and openly around Indonesia; also, they replicate in many respects those from other parts of the world, say Pakistan or Bosnia. In contrast, the Christians in Ambon were extremely careful to control the clandestinity of their VCDs’ circulation, something that speaks to the sense of their precarity in the aftermath of the fall of the authoritarian Suharto state.

There is an ongoing debate on what not to show through images, especially in context of refugees. What is your comment on that?

What not to show is being talked about widely now. In the course that I am currently teaching at the Institute on image and violence, the recent assignment that I gave to the class was on what images to show, what images do affectively, and the possibilities of what could be done with images. Some argue that images can arouse voyeurism or apathy if they are highly disconnected from one’s life. While this may be the case, I was especially interested in this article to convey how precisely the imageries and VCDs have the power to grab people’s attention through shock after shock, blow after blow or by deploying a particular aesthetic. In respect to the ongoing refugee crisis, be it in Europe or Asia, one sees that notwithstanding the enormous capacities today to manipulate images, for example through presenting fake images as real ones and through post-production editing by digital cameras, and notwithstanding common knowledge of this, people still are uncritically drawn in by images, especially photographs.

Is there any surprising element that you would like to share about your research?

Perhaps two things. Apart from the aesthetic of the VCDs, in this research I was intrigued and fascinated by the Muslim power murals and by footage shot in a mosque of jihadis departing for battle. The position of the camera was most interesting. It kept circulating around the mosque interior as if to contour and bring about – at least visually – a kind of unity in the highly heterogeneous crowd.

I come from the Netherlands and I am half Dutch. I am used to seeing churches avoiding images. Yet the whiteness inside those churches has a message, it is not a vacuum. People might say they are empty but they are not. Through their whiteness, churches proclaim transparency. This is one particular type of aesthetics. I have been coming to Ambon since 1984 and it came as a huge surprise therefore when I first saw the immense Jesus pictures in city streets and then, around 2005, I also began to see images of Jesus Christ as a protective fatherly figure arising behind some Protestant church altars.

(1) ↑ See www.suchitravijayan.com/archives/984.

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Full citation of Professor Spyer's article:
Spyer, Patricia. “Reel Accidents: Screening the Ummah under Siege in Wartime Maluku.” Current Anthropology 58, no. S15 (February 2017): S27–S40. doi:10.1086/688734.

Interview by Sucharita Sengupta, PhD student in Anthropology and Sociology.
Front picture: section of a mural with sprocket borders between portraits, Tidore, 2008. Photo by Patricia Spyer.