Oldal 17 [17]
OCR
Representations of the Other in the Time of War: Does War Matter? a particular Other? This will add to the on-going discussions about the functionality of humour in general (see Davies; Kozintsev, this volume). As we have established, one of the goals of photography and caricature is identical, that of constructing the Other. However, they operate in different ways. Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) talks about the history of documenting war and suffering, and of our experiences around this documentation. She argues that shocking images are a means of making alarming matters ‘real’ for those privileged and safe people who deliberately ignore the atrocities and live in their own closed world. She also discusses how instead of documenting the suffering that is here and now, we sometimes choose to document the suffering that is further away from us. War, in a way, is generic, and the victims are also generic and anonymous. But it is so only when viewed form a safe distance, because those “who are sure that right is on one side, oppression and injustice on the other, and that the fighting must go on, what matters is precisely who is killed and by whom” (Sontag 2003: 10). Using photographs and caricatures usually fulfils different purposes and derives from different traditions of representations, although both may show the atrocities and devastation of the times. Documentary photography often plays on emotions and thus its force of persuasion is higher. In the case of more symbolical representation—as in caricature—the artist targets what seems to be highly valuable by the Other, educates through humour, but does not shock the viewer in a way a photographer might. The period of WWII and the post-war decade is marked by the rapid spread of new media, such as television, cinema etc. This affected the ways in which Others were represented, exemplifying the close-knit relationship between what is being shown with how it is shown. The media introduced and familiarised people with new ways of representing the Other by giving voice to certain agents (for example caricaturists, photographers, war correspondents), institutions (for example departments of propaganda) and discourses, and dictated the conditions for inclusion and exclusion. The process was also affected by the rapidly changing situation created by victories and losses in the war. During this decade, the traditional field of visual representations of alterity started to extend. Otherness was depicted in various ways in the so-called new media (mainly film, cinema, television). As already mentioned, much of the suffering that people witnessed in pictures during the global war was faraway and thus alien to them (cf. Sontag 2003), although they could sympathise to some degree, based on their own (or their nation’s) experience. Nevertheless, the category of the Other grew, changed content/targets, was borrowed, discovered, forgotten and denied—all within a short period of time during and after WWII. This is a key to our discussion: how relational wartime images were and what actually shapes the viewers’ perception of the familiar and the strange. Following Sontag’s line of reasoning we can say that familiarity and otherness become manifest in the opposition between the Other (and the wartime horror, devastation and suffering the Other causes and represents) and the horror, 15
