NOTION : Places and forms of power

The notion of power generally implies a basic division between those who gave and exercise power and those who have none of it. Consequently, the exercise of power within a community requires that its members accept a complex system of relations, laws… which helps to create social cohesion in one hand and which reveals clearly the conflict existing within a group. Indeed, even when authority seems absolute, there are always a counter power such as what we call “bad press” which aim at limiting the exercises of this absolute power.

In the Middle Ages, there was no separation between the Church and the government, so the Clergy was in charge of everything related to children’s education and medicine, however, in Salem in Massachusetts, women tried to cure people with other treatments than the official one. That’s why in the seventeenth century, the puritans who had very strict moral codes, called these women, “witches” and they were accused of witchcraft and were hunted, judge and usually sentenced to death. According to an image found in the movie “The Crucible”, by Nicholas Hytner in 1996; people are pointing at a scared woman, I think they may accuse her of being under the influence of Satan. She must be one of the women who were accused of being witches during the Salem witch trials. During those witch trials the witnesses were urged to give the names of other suspects out of fear that their names would be further maligned. The camera angle used in this picture is a high-angle shot, we have the impression that we are looking down on the woman, I believe that the photographer did this to give the point of view of the judges who have power and were always looking down on these women. All which is not of the religious education and the Bible is forbidden, that is why these women are considered enemies of god.

Then, during the period of prosperity of the USA in 1950, the American people knew the fear of communism. During the McCarthyism, it's a practice which happened in 1950, where people were accused of some communists act without any evidence. Celebrities have been accused and they were put on a blacklist because they could transmit their ideology through film. In the trailer for “Guilty by Suspicion,” the fictional David Merrill is accused along with others from Hollywood of being a suspected Communist. He is pressured to give the names of others in order to save his own career and possibly his life. The charges against people were groundless, innocent people were wrongly accused, people who testified just gave names, denounced people who were thought to be traitors without concrete evidence. In the comic trip “Guilty by suspicion”, the drawer retraces the American history in a simple way, to understand the most important landmarks of American historical, political, economic or social events. He tries to analyze what influenced the rise of what is called the second red scare, after the