The Film of the Caliphate (2014–2016): Cinefication

After a rapid territorial expansion, the Islamic State declares itself a caliphate in June 2014. Now serving the messaging needs of a theocratic sub-state actor, the Islamic State’s film diversifies and develops into a genrefied film that feeds local messaging outlets offline as well as social media globally. Through a concentrically organized topology of video genres (utopia, statehood, hisba and iconoclasm, migration, news agency reports, war, boy soldiers, punishment) a growing number of stratified media offices produce thousands of video releases during the Islamic State’s bloom period. Building on the stylistic developments of the ISIL period (2013-2014) the increasingly better-trained media producers find new grounds for stylistic experimentation, particularly in the vitriolic and sickening capital punishment genre whose conventions of production ensure the cooperation of hostages in front of the camera. Through forced self-stagings the punishment genre yields the most freedom in experimentation for Islamic State video producers, who introduce cinematic devices like point of view montages, attempts at the narration of subjectivity in on-camera figurations, and meaning-productive editing to the Islamic State’s film. This terrible experiment in propaganda film, that marks the height of cinefication in the Islamic State’s film history, serves a function in and of itself for the Islamic State: through displays of barbaric violence the group hopes not to insulate the caliphate, but to submit it to a ‘divined test,’ a final confrontation between believers and non-believers that will supposedly test the resolve of the believers on the way to global domination—the utopia genre of the caliphate years (but also all other video genres) is thus only a function of a collectively apocalyptic vision. Bizarrely, the Islamic State’s film feels so secure of its own cinematic blasting power that it not only challenges the recently organized military coalition against the Islamic State, Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), to on the ground combat in Iraq through intimidation propaganda, but additionally challenges Hollywood from the territory of a cinematic fiction that it readily conflates with reality. Programming the Islamic State with military defeat, this period of the Islamic State’s film ends by late 2016 as OIR enters the battlefield and eliminates IS media leaders.