Wartime Kiss: Visions Of The Moment In The 1940s by Alexander Nemerov (review)

Wartime Kiss is a book on the interpretation and meaning of time, analyzed from the viewpoint of a historian and focusing on medium history, photography, film studies, and cultural history in general. It is, however, in the first place a very personal and exceptionally well-written book, and throughout its reading the word that is constantly popping up in the reader’s mind is: poetry. Not just in the sense of beautiful language, strong emotional involvement and originality of insights, but in the sense of what makes poetry poetry: the capacity to bring together two ideas, two words, two events that only existed as independent, unlinked realities in the mind and the heart of the reader. At the same time, the book is also a seminal example of new ways of writing history, for real poetry and great, demanding scholarship are not incompatible under the pen of Alexander Nemerov.

The initial corpus of Wartime Kiss is a collection of images, both photographic and cinematographic, some fictional and others documentary, most more or less known (some even so well known that we no longer question their meaning) but more than one totally unknown (if not discussed for the very first time). All of the images have to do with the dialectical relationship between moment and history, be it real history or mythic history (for in quite some cases moments tilt over in bits and pieces of eternity, and vice versa of course). In this book, the moment, the time and the history under scrutiny are those of the 1940s, the heydays of photojournalism as well as of the Hollywood studio system. However, the ways in which moment and history interact in order to construct original and complex, yet also very familiar and deeply shared, experiences of time cannot be reduced to either of these two dominating models—the documentary modus of Life magazine on the one hand, the dream factory of the culture industry on the other hand. What Alexander Nemerov unearths in the five chapters of his highly personal inquiry into some of the most iconic and most obscure representations of exceptional moments of the 1940s is the existence of a hidden relationship between the visual language of the decade and the issue of being at war.

The book starts with a chapter that deserves to become a classic in all future readers of visual cultural studies: a rereading of Alfred Eisenstaedt’s image of a sailor kissing a nurse in Times Square on V-J Day. However, to reread here signifies much more than to read anew: It is really to read in an unseen and unexpected manner, so that overlooked meanings and relationships become suddenly clear, as in a “flash.” The whole reinterpretation of the picture is based on the notion of flash (the atomic blast) and its implicit and explicit continuations, first in the picture itself (which Nemerov shows to be a picture of a violent collide, representative of the violence produced by the celebrations of victory at the home front), second in the picture’s surroundings (such as, for instance, the cover illustration of the Life issue in which Eisenstaedt’s photograph appeared: the picture of an underwater ballet swimmer, whose career proves to have crossed in countless ways the violence of war). Nemerov, however, never simply lists or enumerates the items of the files and archives that his research has gathered on the life (and sometimes death) of the characters represented in front of the camera or working behind them. He weaves them together in a story that takes the reader from one surprise to another, always managing to stay slightly ahead of his or her (increasing!) curiosity and always capable of bringing his reader back to the existential question that spans the whole book: How can we read history in what seems to be the representation of a moment out of time? How does...