Page 9 - Bitter Icons

our case a western agent like the Canadian producers could be said to take the role of showing

the alleged crimes of the perpetrator Stalin.

In view of Bitter Harvest as a memory icon, as A. Assmann mentions, there could be a possi-
bility of it being viewed as such. She illustrates a memory icon by using an example from tragic

events between Argentina and Spain which stirred up debates and describes it as something
“…that arouses attention, creates visibility, stirs debates and support claims.” (A. Assman

2014:555) In this light, Bitter Harvest may have the ability to do just that. It seems to stir up

debates on different popular movie sites and in comment sections and to stir up some renewed
debate between academics. I will go deeper into this question later in the analysis, when we

will look at some part of the pluri-medial network of Bitter Harvest.

Hansen (2014) introduces the concept of an international icon, but uses examples of photo-

graphic images like “the raising of the flag of Iwo Jima” or “the naked running girl in Vietnam”.
The Bitter Harvest would perhaps not really fit into Hansen’s concept. In addition, the iconic

images she talks of are old and have persisted as international icons until now and shows up in
different contexts over and over, therefore I think there is little chance of Bitter Harvest having

such an influence, at least not yet. There exist of course photos taken during the famine, that

display the horrors in detail, it shows children looking like skeletons with bloated stomachs and
piles of skeletal bodies, but none of these seem to have the iconic status as the images I’ve

mentioned above. I have noted that the film does include images of people starving and heaps
of people dead that could be said to represent or reimagine the authentic images from the fam-

ine, that could be such images to reach the status of icons. And as Erll (2008:389) points out,
that it is not historical accuracy that counts in the memory creation of films, but issues of “au-

thenticity” and “truthfulness” which may be the case for the images of the Holodomor in Bitter

Harvest.

On a side note and related to the Holodomor are the various monuments erected around the
world for its remembrance. For instance, we have the example of the sculpture of the thin starv-

ing girl located at the memorial place in Kiev that evokes memories and could have the potential

to be an icon of the Holodomor. This sculpture is of course bound to its location and cannot
have the same impact as the free-floating iconic images mentioned earlier.

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