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Within and Across the Media Borders
who are criticized and ridiculed by the atheistic propaganda in Bulgaria that was
supported by cartoonists in the 1960s to 1970s. Religion was conceived as an
element of ideological subversion carried out by the “imperialist camp” during the
Cold War on the Arab countries and neighboring Islamic Turkey.
Chlopicki presents a contribution on the period of the 1970s in Poland, where¬
in democratic, anticommunist opposition started to expand. Chtopicki reminds
us of the unique character of Comrade Szmaciak, developed by Janusz Szpotariski.
This caricature metaphorically refers to a spineless character, and it was used broad¬
ly in literature, jokes, and in everyday conversations as a negative symbol of the
People’s Poland.
The question of “Ihe Construction of Marginals and Outsiders” is undertak¬
en in the next section. Lorke concentrates on the processes of social and moral
engineering in three different socialist states: the German Democratic Republic
(GDR), the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of Bulgaria. He illustrates the
relationship between semantic and visual strategies regarding the desired (as he calls
it) social order in the period between the 1960s and the late 1980s. According to
Lorke, the role of the media was to transmit a consistent image of unworthy and
antisocial individuals.
A similar motif is taken further in chapters by Angelov and Kassabova. Com¬
paring their chapters, we can see differences concerning the construction of the
protagonist in two distinct media—caricature (Angelov) and film (Kassabova).
Both authors deal with a concept of hooliganism widely used in the communist
propaganda. Angelov focuses on an appearance of a new urban society, accom¬
panied by the disappearance of the old sociocultural stratification. He shows the
visual caricatured representations of the Others’ entertainments in the first two
decades of socialist development, time of intensive social changes—nationaliza¬
tion, forced land cooperation, fast industrialization, and urbanization.
Kassabova analyzes the process of film making, which touches a variety of social
dimensions. She investigates the movie from a cultural-historical perspective that
treats films as visual and textual. From this angle, Kassabova offers insight into
film-making processes, with marginal film makers both creating and presenting
their films in socialist Bulgaria in the 1960s. The author shows techniques used in
the film to create messages and aesthetic effects, communicating shared socialist
values, new norms and habits, and a variety of factors—social, cultural, political,
and medial—that have to be taken into account when we talk about this period.
In the final chapter of the section, Halmesvirta focuses on the caricatures of the
most famous politically independent caricaturist in Finland, “Kari” (Kari Suoma¬
lainen, 1920-1999), who published in the leading liberal-progressive Finnish
newspaper from the end of the 1950s until the 1990s. This artist and his works are
interesting examples of the media providing a counterstatement, an attempt to hit
the ruling discourse.
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