The Proto-Film Period (2004–2006): Layman Video for Jihad

Beginning its history during the onset of the War in Iraq (2003–today), the film of the Islamic State is conceived as a reactionary snuff video with a binary ideological framing. While ultraviolence serves a calculated tactical purpose for the media wing of the Islamic State’s predecessor groups, and even seems to serve in selecting a favorable audience online, the extreme violence exerted by these groups and their leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is soon toned down: his pledge of allegiance to Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda network leads to a series of pictorial shifts that favor new recruits and civilian followers. Still, a closely controlled noetic corridor formulated on film through tight editing already excludes philosophical and religious difference to Islamic State ideology, predefining already in this period the sustained aesthetic norms of seeing and witnessing in Islamic State film style. With little to no access to complex devices of film style, proto-period releases focus on showing, staging to the camera, and abstract form to communicate ideas while, simultaneously, establishing axes of identification and repulsion with the viewer. The developments of this proto-filmic period result in the establishment of three traditions of gaze that have shaped the Islamic State’s propaganda film since: ultraviolent gaze, military recruitment gaze and utopian gaze. These three gazes, constructed by an interplay of videography, editing, and staging, are the paradigms of seeing the world through the film of the Islamic State, and they are a sustained basis for the processes of cinefication in later periods.