Oldal 22 [22]
20
Dagnoslaw Demski, Liisi Laineste, Kamila Baraniecka-Olszewska
those held in America, leads the author to conclude that cinematic representations
of the female figure in Soviet movies functioned as a weapon of propaganda in the
Cold War.
The final section, entitled Old Enemies, New Faces, maps the relationships between
nations and their identity construction processes onto a more spatial context in or¬
der to understand how the processes of othering, evoked by and developed during
WWH, worked on a wider social, political and geographical scale. Accentuating
the uses of the past, the authors describe how old images are re-used in a new and
sometimes incompatible context (which may cause a humorous effect).
The image of the West is further addressed by Tomasz Kalniuk as a continu¬
ation of the discussion started in Riabov (this volume). He describes the positive
stereotyping of the US, which was a dominant motive in the Polish press in the
1930s. Europe, just recovering from WW, looked up to the US, to the land of in¬
novation and exaggerated proportions, and Poland was no exception. Kalniuk sees
this as an important aspect of the self-awareness and self-identification of a nation,
the need for which was particularly strong during the interwar period.
Ewa Manikowska’s chapter about the images perpetuated in documentary sur¬
vey photo projects discusses the power of images in geopolitical decisions. The
material—photographs taken before the destruction brought about by the two
world wars—served as propaganda material in later periods, which initiates a dis¬
cussion about the ways images continue to ‘live on’ and mean different things to
subsequent generations.
‘The status and re-use of photographs taken during and after WWII is also the
topic addressed by Eda Kalmre. The photos illustrating her discussion depict the
city space in downtown Tartu, in Estonia, where the ruins, missing buildings and
empty areas cleaned of rubble were and continue to be meaningful for the local
inhabitants in the reconstruction of history. She refers to the photos as an increas¬
ingly important part of remembering the wars, not only in the Soviet period but
also in today when photoshopped images of old and new town landscapes are
circulated on the Internet.
Dominika Czarnecka also focuses on town and city space, discussing the highly
contested monuments for soldiers erected in communist Poland during the 1940s
and 1950s. These numerous monuments depicting heroic Red Army soldiers can
be seen as a vehicle for propaganda. Within the context of the prevailing anti¬
communist sentiment the symbolism in these statues’ poses and their dimensions
and locations became an object of (general and anonymous) scorn—this, of course,
on the part of the viewer, making the monuments both familiar and alien at the
same time.
Photography, even if it seems to be a ‘neutral eye’ that captures and documents
without discrimination, is conceptualised as highly ideological by Magdalena
Sztandara in her account of the images of women in Polish (Silesian) magazines of