The Downfall (2017–2019): Denialism

After the Death Knell Events of late 2016 the film of the Islamic State loses it experimental narrativity and rapidly devolves back into a glorified war journal. Suffering further from military opposition and an internal schism over the issue of excommunication (takfīr), the remaining ultra-extremists working in the media wing by late 2018 practically declare global war through their failing propaganda film. Simultaneously, compensating for the lack of photo-optical footage from the battlefield, the editors perform a leap of faith into animation and create children’s programs and entire video series from digitally composed footage. While still producing aesthetically presentable results, the Islamic State’s video producers—who had fallen for fiction already in the caliphate’s bloom period—increasingly permit imaginary visions and digital compositions of artificial realities to enter the screen. In tracing the development of animation in the downfall years, this chapter breaks through to a theory of animation in the Islamic State’s propaganda film that roots in Islamic aniconism (the ‘ban on images’). Through an increasing experimentation with artificial life through animation the Islamic State’s film even endangers the Islamic State’s own ideological consistency, but cannot cease painting utopian visions of conquest and victory through animation despite the inevitable downfall of the caliphate.