Oldal 98 [98]
OCR
96 Valentina Vaseva documents are among the important reasons such innovations as the cinematograph were used to construct the "image of death". In 1915, at the funeral of Exarch Joseph I, for the first time in Bulgaria footage from the removal of a body by the court of the Holy Synod and the funeral procession to the St. Kral church, where the funeral service was held, was captured by a cinematographer (Vaseva 2006: 106; Constant 1991: 340; Utro [Morning], issue 1587, June 27, 1915). By the 1920s, photography had permanently entered the life of Bulgarians, especially in cities, and photographic images began to occupy an increasingly important place in the visual presentation of funeral events, not only in the pages of the newspapers, which mainly documented the funerals of important figures, but also in the everyday life of ordinary Bulgarians who could afford to hire a photographer. At that time, images of funerals at which relatives are posing with the coffin and the deceased gained popularity. These group portraits were broadcast in villages and small towns and quickly entered the life of Bulgarians, even as a part of the funeral ritual itself. Such “mournful images” are evidence of the complex nature of photography and its significance in the process of converting verbal images into visual ones—funeral photos were the last attempt to save portraits of deceased members of the family so that the person could remain “known” (Gadjeva 2016). After the establishment of the communist regime in Bulgaria, the existing urban traditions of building a bright image of the “other dead”,' deceased individuals who had made special contributions to society, were being used as communist propaganda for political, moral, and aesthetic suggestions. The death of the first political leaders in the communist countries became an occasion to construct the image of the “immortal leader of the people”. This concept, originally created in the Soviet Union after the death of Vladimir Lenin in 1924, was later adopted in Bulgaria after the death of Georgi Dimitrov, who was buried in a similar fashion. This image of propaganda had its verbal expression in the form of text in the printed media, where the portrait of the late leader was described in words, whereas posthumous photographs and documentary footage of the funeral ceremonies preserved a visual image. Thus, in the mass consciousness of “ordinary” people, the image of the “other dead” is constructed with the help of printed and visual media, and they become the extraordinary, the “immortals”, who are being used as an example for the next generations. The practice of using such images and ideas of the “immortal leader”, however, collapsed after the fall of communist regime in Eastern Europe. The chapter is based on analysis of photographs published in the press and documentary footage from the socialist period that relate to the death and burials of political leaders. In the centre of the study, there is a visual representation of the ' This chapter discerns two categories of dead—the “regular ones”, any person after their passing, and the drugite martvi (‘the other dead’), extraordinary persons who had made great contributions to society. The “other dead” referred to in the text are great politicians, persons of power, and tsars from the presocialism period. Later on during the socialism period after WWII, the term “other dead” shifts to the high-ranking leaders of the communist parties like Georgi Dimitrov in Bulgaria and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.
