While American forces celebrate the intelligence victory that led to the death of Al-Qaeda leader and cinéma vérité auteur, Osama bin Laden, his extensive video library of unfinished work and side-projects seized by the US operatives affords us a glimpse of another side of this controversial, often provocative filmmaker and mass-terrorist. Some of the most recently recorded tapes now in US military cinema unit hands are even thought to show that the director/murderer bin Laden was exploring broader narrative themes and looking to move beyond the to-camera threat style that he had made his own.
'What this new material seems to show is an artist-cum-deathmonger at a crossroads,' commented critic Mark Kermode, 'a man unsure of how to best represent truth.'
The works bin Laden is best known for involved combining naturalistic techniques and stylized cinematic devices of editing and camerawork, staged set-ups, and the use of the camera to provoke subjects, with a ruthless campaign of bloodshed and terror against the West, but the extensive body of unreleased footage seems to point to a more playful relationship with the audience, while still making explicit his trademark threat of extreme violence against the infidel.
Never straying from the core Jihadist message, Osama seems to dabble in a variety of styles, integrating extremist anti-American rhetoric into musical, fantasy adventure and film-noir genres among others.
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But perhaps the most revealing of the newly found material will be the musical comedy version of his own life that he was working on, where [...], and [
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