The Post-Caliphate Period (2019–today): Full Circle

After deteriorating into the serialized and mostly non-animated militant propaganda it had been before 2013, the film of the Islamic State bears witness to the caliphate’s end. The last bastion of the Islamic State, a shantytown named al-Baghuz, falls to military opposition, and key video producer Abu Ridwan al-Kanadi surrenders to Kurdish forces. Having missed every opportunity to build a public image in support of his state, group leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi resurfaces and basically reprograms his followers with the idea that militant jihad is perpetual and therefore circular. The idea of circularity is the dominant motif of the immediate post-caliphate period, as staging and editing immediately adopt it as an abstract form in order to stress closedness in the ranks of the remaining Islamic State subgroups and to suggest a continuation of jihad. The newly founded international subgroups of the Islamic State, who are offshoots of the core group in Syria and Iraq and who have quietly metastasized outside the caliphate during the downfall, do study the norms of the Islamic State’s film (especially those developed by 2014) and seem to enter their video productions into circularity as well: while some of these offshoots clearly study and emulate caliphate era cinefication in an attempt at film style, the Islamic State’s online publication makes some early attempts at reviving global exhibition online.