Ashes : Words and Images in the Forms of Remembrance

The issue of representing war has often been critically tackled by reflecting on the increasing exploitation of images often coexisting with their ambiguous quality (Franzini 2001, Mirzoeff 2005). In 1938, Woolf has no doubt about the interpretation of photographs as “a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye. But the eye is connected with the brain; the brain with the nervous system”. Yet, things have been changing from World War II to today amd Woolf’s supposed total reliability of the visual documents of war has been gradually undermined, while the spectacular aspect of war has been given priority in the congregation of discursive tensions marking any recent representation, reflection and form of remembrance on world conflicts. My work here focusses on Tony Harrison’s film poem The Shadow of Hiroshima (1995), and tries to reflect on how the poetic word combines with the filmic image in trying to produce a convincing commemoration of one of the worst war tragedies of our Western history