Afterlives by pioneering video essayist Kevin B Lee virtuosically congeals so many primary and secondary sources, and experimental visual strategies and narrative deferrals, on its topic of ISIS propaganda, yet rather than eliciting an orderly intellectual response, its impact is more visceral and straightforwardly emotional. It’s a seasick-like feeling of unease generated by the disturbing imagery recounted in the film (but never itself shown), and with its main visual scheme of proliferating MacOS interface windows, we’re reminded of the slight headache we have viewing a stereogram (or magic eye) picture. If the director – whose unique professional title is as Locarno Film Festival professor for the future of cinema and the audiovisual arts at USI Lugano – isn’t fully conclusive on his “hot potato” research subject, it’s compelling being strung along by his thought patterns. The film world-premiered at Doclisboa, followed by a Special Presentation showing at BFI London.

With some pride in the opening minutes, Lee (who’s American but is a long-time resident in Europe) describes himself as a former film critic, and it’s that prerogative, towards the close scrutiny of moving images, that led to the videographic criticism he popularised in the 2010s, succeeded by this even weightier research specialism of extremist propaganda. The demands of a theatrically exhibited feature make him stop relying on screen recordings of his desktop activity, and he productively bounces his ideas against three other colleagues in his field, who are captured as on-screen talking heads, or in two-shots with Lee, as if it were a (slightly) more orthodox documentary. They are media and installation artist Morehshin Allahyari, whose 3D-printed reconstruction of a Medusa head, destroyed in 2016 by ISIS fighters, is one of the film’s key inciting elements; and counter-extremism researchers Nava Zarabian and Anne Speckhard, whose cautious and more forthright methodology, respectively, are shown as telling contrasts.

But before these participants are introduced, Lee films himself gazing in horror at the notorious 2014 ISIS video Flames of War, narrated by Mohammed Khalifa, the so-called “English voice of ISIS”. With all of his analytic acumen, he’s driven to come up with a robust semiotic breakdown of its visual strategies – its “pragmatics”, along with its semantics, to sound suitably academic. The logging of individual image descriptions and timecodes – familiar from pathbreaking film scholar David Bordwell – doesn’t provoke much insight at this stage, yet this initial fascination comes into further relief with all he gleans from Allahyari, Zarabian and Speckhard.

To be as succinct as possible, the reappearance and recirculation of various audiovisual data from this field offer new intellectual vectors he can contemplate – whether they’re directly explicit, like the videos that cause Zarabian night terrors, or Speckhard’s post-facto interviews with ex-militants condemning their own actions, or Allahyari’s historical tracings. To paraphrase Lee, he can “work through the distance, finding another way to care – unburying those crimes, to finally grasp them”. The problematic nature of these researchers – especially the director and Speckhard, who aren’t Islamic – imposing their judgement and propagating further negative representations, is strongly acknowledged, and some audiences will wonder what concrete results are truly obtained. Otherwise, this is a rare example of undiluted academic research reaching beyond the lecture and seminar room, with eerie formal poetry in copious quantities.

Afterlives is a production by Germany, France and Belgium, staged by pong film in co-production with Naoko and Pivonka. Odd Slice Films handles its world sales.