ABSTRACT
In Rabih Mroué’s The Pixelated Revolution (2012) a Syrian protester records a sniper in the act of shooting him. To the sniper’s raised gun, the protester raises his camera phone. There is the sound of a gunshot, and the man falls. The video shows the sky. Is the man wounded or dead? Mroué’s work, which takes the form of a “non-academic lecture” in a narrated digital video, looks at the practice of Syrian protesters who capture their own deaths on camera, with these videos being later uploaded to YouTube. He pits this specifi c phenomenon against the long-standing relationship between the camera and death, where taking a photographic image is seen as akin to stealing one’s soul. Mroué recalls another nineteenth-century belief, that the last image one sees before dying is imprinted on the retina of one’s eyes. If you could only peel away and develop this fi lm, you could see the last moment of a murdered man’s or woman’s life.
