Steven Soderbergh, after shooting his 2018 feature “Unsane” with an iPhone, declared smartphone cinema to be the future.” Yet the technology is also a window on the recent past, as shown in the largely unknown masterpiece, “The Uprising,” a 2014 film by the British journalist and documentarian Peter Snowdon.
Snowdon shot no footage to make “The Uprising.” The movie is entirely composed of material found on YouTube. It is an anthology of vernacular videos (to use Snowdon’s phrase) made nine years ago in Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, Libya, Yemen and Egypt during the Arab Spring.
“The Uprising” isn’t the first such anthology. Huang Weikai’s 2009 documentary “Disorder” is a lurid compilation of amateur video recordings of traffic accidents and other instances of urban chaos shot in Guangzhou, a focal point of the Chinese economic miracle. “The Uprising,” which Snowdon has said chronicles “popular self-documentation on an unprecedented scale” is more violent and political. It is also more ethical. Snowdon credits all the footage and has maintained that each clip was edited to respect its integrity “without the feeling of betraying or falsifying or misrepresenting.”
Working with the French documentary filmmaker Bruno Tracq, as well as a small army of translators, Snowdon has taken about 100 videos and distilled the Arab Spring into a weeklong imagined revolution. “The Uprising” jumps from country to country, tracking a revolt from the initial rallies through violent confrontations with the police, the euphoria inspired by the fall of an autocratic regime, to the army’s attempt to restore order and the seizure of power.
As if to suggest political upheaval as a force of nature, Snowdon frames the action with smartphone videos of tornadoes approaching an Alabama suburb. That idea is reinforced by the film’s closing quotation from the 19th-century Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin that uses the metaphor of a cyclone to warn that “centuries of injustice, ages of oppression and misery, ages of disdain of the subject and poor, have prepared the storm.”
The film’s narrative structure is made evident by a series of chapter titles that count down seven days. Still, the story is overwhelmed, at least on a first viewing, by the immediacy of each video. Crowds march, chant, hold rallies and hold forth for the camera — airing grievances, offering analyses and expressing the elation of a leaderless revolt. Other comments can be heard above the general clamor: “The world must see this.”
Stones are thrown, tanks drive into crowds. In the most brutal videos, people are shot down in the street; in the most ecstatic, the crowds break down the prison walls or breach state security. Paraphrasing one of the most popular American street chants, the movie might be subtitled, “This is what revolution looks like.”
There are moments of respite. In one scene, rambunctious teenagers use a captured bazooka to fire potatoes and onions into the sky; in another, a young man sits amid the rubble of an apartment apparently shelled by government forces and performs a comic routine. “Is Al Qaeda living in my hair?” he asks insistently. “What wrong did the poor carpet do? What was the crime of the cushions?”
Turning the Arab Spring into an invented revolution even as it presents specific incidents from an actual one, “The Uprising” demands an active viewer. Throughout, there are multiple things to consider. One of the citizen-made videos Snowdon found and incorporated, documents and annotates the way in which events in the street are being televised into his living room.
Attention is continually divided between the imposed narrative and the truth of individual moments. Awareness shifts between the events being witnessed and the spatial position of the witnesses. The viewer has the option for analysis. While these images are immensely powerful seen projected onscreen, the advantage of watching “The Uprising” online is the ability to freeze and re-examine scenes.
Snowdon has argued that the smartphone is less an extension of the eye than of the arm, a tool used not only to record but to act. Visceral almost by definition, vernacular video has its own wildly spontaneous visual vocabulary — light smears, hyper kinetic movement, jolting angles, inadvertent “artifacting,” in which the image is distorted when a visible anomaly is introduced.
The 1950s television series “You Are There,” had TV newsmen report on dramatized historical events. “The Uprising” shows a heady history being made in the streets. “These days the people have a supernatural awareness of their responsibilities,” a young bystander tells the camera. “This is the real Egypt.” (At the same time, “The Uprising” has the uncanny effect of letting the viewer imagine the unfolding of the Paris Commune or the Russian Revolution.)
More than a bystander, the camera runs along with the crowd, recording the frenzy and the daring. The cubistic jumble of images is exhilarating but given the presence of dead bodies, bloody streets, live firing, panicky screams and shouts, it can be hard to watch — precisely because it is real rather than staged.
“I came to understand that I was making a film about these images, not about the revolution,” Snowdon has said. “The Uprising” documents not only the Arab Spring, but also the promise of vernacular video and the internet’s potential as a medium. It is a memory that functions as a prophecy — one of the great movies of the still-young 21st century.
“The Uprising” has its own site (theuprising.be) and may also be found on Vimeo (vimeo.com/66820206). Both offer English subtitles. No passwords are necessary.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
