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Dagnostaw Demski
been annexed to the Reich (Wartheland). The film tells the story of a job well done:
a job that consisted of taking over a town so as to enable its proper functioning.
According to the film, order becomes well established in that Polish town, only at
one point the soldier walks past a synagogue that was turned into a stable. In the
narration reality seems to be normal, but it also consisted of subordinating the
Others in acts that deprived them of dignity and destroyed what was, in their eyes,
valuable and respectable.
An iconoclastic category is formed through a transformation of the image of
the Other, both as physical deformation and visual representation: in the docu¬
mentation of the acts of destruction, breakage, striking down of public symbols,
putting the enemy in a subordinate position, ridiculed and deprived of dignity.
The general mind-set of an epoch is always seen in its choice of topics. In this
sense, war is the time of creation of difficult visual foundations that form the sense
of a given community. Iconoclastic blows are not inflicted by accident, they have
a clear goal.
Offensive images form the core of iconoclasm. Typically, an attack takes place in
the public domain, and the repertoire here is wide-ranging—burning, mutilating,
shooting, cutting, putting out eyes, drenching with paint, repainting, reshaping,
distorting, egg-throwing etc. Mitchell claims that images are attacked for two
reasons, firstly, when “the image is transparently and immediately linked to what
it represents’, and secondly, when it is believed that a “picture possesses a kind of
vital, living character that makes it capable of feeling what is done to it. It is not
merely a transparent medium for communicating a message but something like
an animated, living thing, an object with feelings, intentions, desires, and agency”
(2005: 127).
Offensive pictures are a product of the social context, and, as noted by Mitchell,
of a reactionship between “a specific thing and communities” (Ibid.: 131). Some
of the photographs presented here offend or desecrate something precious, for ex¬
ample the values connected with the previous authority. They insult, and some of
them violate the taboo of morality. An iconoclastic gesture wishes to humiliate or
inflict pain; “the object is not to make the image disappear but to keep it around
and to render its appearance in a new way, one that is offensive to the image and
what it represents” (Ibid.: 132). Photographs presenting iconoclastic gestures in
a sense follow the same technique as the deformations employed in caricature.
‘They form a type of discourse with their own subject matter. This discourse, in
wartime circumstances, assumes a particularly controversial character. It is a heated
exchange, usually painful for one of the sides. On the other hand the representa¬
tions of a controversial situation or interaction serve to justify decisive moments
which reflect, or rather construct, the basis of a new order.