Exekutionsvideos des Islamischen Staates

Filmsprache, Zielpublika und rhetorische Potenziale

Abstract

Capital punishment videos are a fringe genre of film that for more than a century experienced virtually no systematic development in regard to style and cine­matic techniques. This has changed, however, with the recent works of the Islamic State (IS), which made an effort to invest in its media production and to gain control of the processes of filmic signification. Using the genre as a rhetorical utterance, the IS employs videographic documents of capital punishment to produce communicative acts direc­ted towards the population of the Islamic State as well as viewers outside of it. In this regard, the Islamic State’s video production of the years between 2014 to 2017 is par­ticularly powerful in communicating the IS world view. Its media workers have maste­red a range of cinematic techniques, and acquired the ability to control the connotative level of film signs to a greater degree than the producers of previous capital punishment videos. By the same token, capital punishment videos of the Islamic State indicate a wealth of IS-specific discourses with respect to its military, ideological claims and the construction of enemies.