Images and Context: Revisiting the Atrocity Photographs in "Persona"

Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others discusses the photographic documentation of atrocities, particularly of wartime atrocities. She opens the book with an anecdote about Virginia Woolf discussing gendered reactions to horrific representations of war. The discussion of women looking at wartime photographs immediately makes me remember Persona. In Persona, there are two scenes where Elisabet witnesses photographic documentations of atrocities: a video of a monk killing himself by self-immolation and a photograph of Nazi soldiers rounding up a group of Jews during the Holocaust. The two incidents stand out from the rest of the film as two of the only hints of a world outside the minimalist, insular realm of Elisabet and Alma. Because of their distance from the diegetic space of the film, the “real” images seem unreal, and yet they affect Elisabet more than most of the “real” (and, ironically, fictional) events that occur in the main plot of the film. We already know that Elisabet is an actress who has suddenly chosen to remain mute rather than perform roles in “real” life; essentially, her existential crisis arises from feeling that the real world is somehow false, so she seeks a jolt of “truth” from these deliberately shocking images.

Sontag addresses the reasons behind representations of the horrific, saying that people seek documentation in order to try and feel the “reality” of the event. The irony, she explains, is that most people who experience horrific events describe their memories in disconnected terms, saying that it felt “like a dream” or, more interestingly for this course, “like a movie”. One wonders whether the audience for these images, like Elisabet, is trying to capture an elusive feeling of “reality” or wholeness which is impossible to achieve in real life.

The two images in Persona—the monk and the Jewish ghetto—stand on their own, without any background information or connection to the rest of the story. However, in her book, Sontag discusses the problem of divorcing an image from its context, particularly when it is used to evoke horror. “Antiwar polemicists” like Woolf, she explains, see generic atrocities committed against generic victims, and fail to take politics into account. Perhaps this represents a common humanist attitude in which the suffering of an individual victim is believed to stand apart from its political context as more significant; the idea behind presenting wartime images without captions as anti-war propaganda is that such photographs are expected to be understood from the lens of “universal” human empathy rather than in terms of historical context. However, Sontag claims that “all photographs wait to be explained or falsified by their captions” (10). Captions and context can change/charge images with meaning. This makes one question whether an image can ever really stand on its own or speak for itself. It reminds me of the Kuleshov effect, the theory behind early Russian montage, which explains how the image of an actor’s ambiguous expression will be interpreted by an audience as sadness, lust, or hunger depending on whether it is cut with images of a coffin, a beautiful woman, or a plate of soup, respectively. This idea is also at the core of semiotics; Ferdinand de Sassure argued that words acquire meaning only in relation to each other, and perhaps the same can be said about images. If this is the case, what does it say about the audience’s role in constructing meaning?