Also Known As Jihadi

2017 - Film & Video (Film & Video)

99 minutes

Eric Baudelaire

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Baudelaire’s latest film, Also known as Jihadi (2017) tells the story of a young French boy from Parisian suburbs and his assumed journey to the Al-Nusra front in Syria to join ISIS and fight Bashar al-Assad’s regime. Employing the cinematographic approach known as ‘landscape theory’ — or fûkeiron — developed out of Marxist film criticism in the 1970s where the landscape of a film is read as an expression of the political climate, thus becoming a significant character, motivation or reasoning for the films development. The 101-minute follows Abdel Aziz from the socially and politically rife milieu of the Parisian suburbs, weighted by division, segregation, development and poverty to, what the viewer assumes, Syria. Following landscape theory, the viewer does not see Aziz, rather his story is told through different landscapes, filmed in France, Spain, Algeria, and on the Syrian border in Turkey. The viewer is caught in a maelstrom of perceptions and realities, the aimlessness and alienation heavily felt in segregated communities, how society and the media define a terrorist or jihadist, and attempts to understand the motivations of the various evils experienced in our shared political condition. A grid of photocopied transcripts accompanies the film from Abdel Aziz trial that took place only weeks after the attack at the Bataclan in Paris in October 2015.

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Currently based in Paris, Franco-American artist Eric Baudelaire has developed an oeuvre primarily composed of film, but which also includes photography, silkscreen prints, performance, publications and installations. In his research-based practice, the artist examines the relationship between images, past events and their documentation. Interested in the role of the cinematographic image as an index marker, Baudelaire creates narratives in which recorded facts serve as a starting point for an exploration of the unknown. In examining the changes in human behavior though interrogating the great political structures that govern the global, national and micro-communities, Baudelaire’s practice could be read through a bio-political perspective. Navigating the experience of urban living, the global, technical and economic dependencies of war, movement and the contemporary paradigm of geographical proximity and distance, Baudelaire’s practice evokes a hauntingly provocative perspective on the current political climate.

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Colors:

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• landscape.n.01
• politics.n.01
• segregation.n.01
• radicalize.v.01
• terrorism.n.01
• poverty.n.01