Rising flags, falling soldiers: film, icons and political violence

Abstract

This dossier seeks to expose and challenge the pervasive assumption that the modern secular icon is necessarily still or photographic and therefore marginal to the moving imagery of film and cinema. Our focus, in the following three case studies, on images linked to political violence reflects how this theme has dominated our notion of an icon throughout the eras of photography, cinema and digital technologies. This introduction briefly considers some of the many claims made about iconicity in recent years, across several disciplines, and highlights how film’s important role in the making and remaking of icons has been overlooked or downplayed. Photography has consistently been prioritized over film in historical research on twentieth-century icons, in spite of the growing propensity of moving images, especially since World War II, to determine public understandings of events. 1 Iconic images of political violence are traditionally approached through narrow, event-centred and often journalistic histories that focus tightly on the taking of a photograph. Such accounts typically trace the author and/or subjects of the image and grant them authority to dictate its meaning. 2 These histories in turn can form the basis for further representations, including documentary and feature films, but of a kind that rarely explore distinctions between the properties of photography and cinema. 3 A cognate approach subsumes iconic images in wider (often teleological) histories of photography as technology and art form. 4 These studies all emphasize the moment of taking the photographs, not their reproduction, circulation or consumption. The issue of production, however, can be approached with more historical rigour than is evident in most of these accounts, interrogating the images for bias (as historians do written documents) and staging, 5 and contextualizing them with new archival findings. 6 As Guy Westwell’s and Jeremy Hicks’s contributions to this dossier reveal, the abundant film footage of the events petrified in some of these photographs constitutes a vital tool for such comparison and reappraisal.