Oldal 22 [22]
OCR
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 order 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 continuation 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 innovation 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 survey 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 discussion 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 increasingly 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 anticommunist 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
