Archetypical Visualization Of Childhood In The Cinomythology Of A Soviet Man

Abstract

After the Great Patriotic War, Soviet society begins to rethink its own social values, transforming them according to the new geopolitical reality. Post-war cinematography was one of the most influential instruments of such a change. The revision of pre-war and military film plots made it possible to discover a new subject field for visualizing the Soviet man mythology. Soviet childhood, as a necessary stage in forming the Soviet man’s worldview, is becoming such a space. The theme of childhood in the plot palette of Soviet cinema finally approves the motive of the artistic depiction of people’s everyday life, which makes it possible to focus on visualizing the processes of the formation of movie heroes’ individual feelings and thoughts. References to the early periods of his biography make it possible to reconstruct and visualize the existential drama of a Soviet man more fully. Therefore, the prerequisites for learning of individual experience have been created as a condition for the forming the relevant memory of Soviet generations, which were unusually productively used by the communist ideology. This practice has an undoubted psychoanalytic value and serves as the basis for a person’s internal dialogue with oneself and the whole society. Despite the obvious political engagement of the post-war Soviet cinematography, one managed to comply with the archetypal models of classical mythologies as much as possible and maintain the proper level of sacredness in society.

Keywords: Archetype, childhood mythology, cinematography, Soviet man, visual ideology

Introduction

An unprecedented emotional lift, which was successfully formed in Soviet society with the decisive help of post-war cinematography, allowed the Communist Party to give the life of every person a visual, universally significant social meaning, creating, maintaining and successfully exploiting the ideological and everyday illusion of a single social organism represented by the mythical chronotope of the past, present and future, individual and collective, sacred and profane. It was in this way that the prerequisites have been created for the forming a community in which a person would not only not dissolve in the social mass, but, on the contrary, would approve oneself, one’s best individual and collective qualities. Therefore, Soviet films of the post-war era did not in any way produce an unthinking mass and did not exacerbate the “discourse of absence and devastation after the war” (Beumers, 2020, p. 217), but rather served as a guaranteed figurative-symbolic and existential “inoculation” of such states, a reliable visual propaedeutics of archetypal individuation and collective unity of people.

The unusually sensually rich context of post-war cinematography created visual prerequisites for realizing the ideological significance and collective prospects for a person’s individual and social growth as an integral part of a new historical community – the Soviet people. Through complex plot compositions, Soviet cinema, creating and successfully promoting the “model of a new man” to the masses (Druzhnikov, 2017, p. 97), has become the undoubted leader of the visual mythologization of the state and society political, ideological and sociocultural life. Such patterns have determined the specificity of figurative-symbolic personifications in Soviet cinematography. It is here that “the mythological storylines and the ones corresponding to historical realities were most successfully combined” (Trofimov, 2020, p. 114), having civilizational and general cultural value (Hawkins, 2018) and directly corresponding to the archetypal principles of the individual consciousness origin and development.

It was in this form that the post-war Soviet cinematography “has simultaneously become an object of nostalgia, an object of mythologization and an object of myths deconstruction” (Nemchenko, 2020, p. 319), has acquired exceptional existential value, since it was able to organically combine individual impulses with universally significant social ideals and a collective desire for turning them into reality. In these works of art, unusually effective mythical illusions about the possibility of implementing social ideals precisely as the results of the embodiment of each individual person’s meaning of life have been created and actively promoted. The uplifting artistic cinematographic illusions of that time have not only actively shaped and promoted the special archetypal atmosphere of Soviet society to the whole world, making it possible to rethink the “aesthetic possibilities of the cinematic environment” (Kim, 2018, p. 19), but have also contributed to creating and promoting a unique heroic mythology, cultural and ideological significance of which is generally difficult to overestimate.

These are the post-war years which become a time of existential rethinking of basic political ideals, methods of their ideological substantiation, scenarios of artistic comprehension and cinematic visualization. The former categorical propaganda clichés are being replaced in the space of Soviet cinema by a thoughtful and careful consideration of the ambiguity and inconsistency of social processes which have not only been faced by the entire Soviet society, but also by each individual person. This has led to a certain critical attitude of the filmmakers, the heroes of their works and the audience itself to the socially-role interaction models already established in society in the context of implementing the Soviet regime political and ideological strategy. Despite the fact that all communication participants continued sharing its strategic ideology, there was also an urgent need to establish critical discrepancies in its implementation tactics with the archetypal expectations of each individual and the whole society.

Problem Statement

Research Questions

The article will consider a number of significant issues:

1) the individual foundations of the Soviet man’s myth;

2) cinemythology of Soviet childhood as a strategy for maintaining positive social dynamics.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of the article is to analyze the principles of the Soviet childhood mythologization as one of the key archetypal plots of forming the Soviet man’s ideologeme.

Research Methods

As the monitoring of domestic research has shown, at the moment, the archetypal mythology of Soviet cinema is considered in a rather fragmentary, situational and unsystematic manner. This indicates a certain unpreparedness of the domestic scientific community for the practical implementation of such a strategy. After all, it still prefers to avoid using globally recognized methodological strategies, despite the existence of an independent, comprehensively tested and well-proven tradition of psychoanalytic research, both in cinematography itself and in art in general. Therefore, the systemic reflections of Khrenov (2016) are especially close, relevant and useful to the authors. He believes that without recognizing the archetypal background of visual art, viewers and film researchers will not be able to reach the current horizons of interpreting the processes associated with the cinematic display of the Soviet era individual and sociocultural reality which has passed away from us, to understand the development trends of modern visual and digital culture. These ideas are adequately correlated with artistic and visual trends in Western humanitarian thought, which has turned out to be the most sensitive to Jungian methodology, serving as a key for studying practically all cultural texts. A separate group of sources is made up of a text corpus dedicated to the tradition of interdisciplinary studying the Soviet everyday life, which was the invariable “hero” of the Soviet cinematography visual mythology. Its study makes it possible to carry out a detailed analysis of the strategies of mythologizing and ideologizing the basic images which constructed and promoted the artistic doctrine of Soviet cinema of the post-war period. The theme of childhood, which is fruitfully considered in a number of scientific works, gave a special meaning to the heroics of Soviet post-war films (Teplova, 2020).

Findings

The post-war period in the history of the Soviet cinematography is an example of the unconditional dominance of new artistic practices and models of interpreting the heroic. Even if the viewer knew the social origin of the main characters in advance, nevertheless, the conflict always arose not in connection with global military, labor or ideological battles, but was built around internal individuation processes associated with the desire to outline possible scenarios of their unconscious, positive sublimation and the subsequent social personal self-realization of the heroes. In this context, the Soviet man’s visual, cinematic myth was directly focused on decisive liberation from any social prejudices, on assuming individual feelings and thoughts as the leading socio-forming principle of the Soviet people as a special and fundamentally new for humanity social and cultural community.

It was the continuous streams of unique individual experience that became those life-giving sources and the guarantee of a successful transformation of collective moods, tested over a thousand times and therefore uniting ideological and socio-cultural practices. Therefore, the hero of the Soviet cinematography of the post-war period, for the first time in the history of the country, attracts the attention of millions of viewers precisely with his everyday life and unique scenarios for the acquisition and subsequent embodiment of existential experience, within the framework of which his individuation takes place. This confirms the author’s hypothesis that the presence of such a symbolic context in Soviet cinema directly indicates its exclusively mythological and archetypal orientation, which explains “the repetition and seeming universality of certain experiences and images in people” (Rosemary, 2017, p. 104).

In fact, Soviet post-war cinematography is a unique example of a thoughtful, careful and critical attitude to the ideals of classical culture, which have been formed around the category of the “sacred” and the spectrum of its sociocultural interpretations, laying the foundations of the “national cinematic tradition” (Kovalova, 2017, p. 96). Therefore, for a period of time which is absolutely insignificant by historical standards, Soviet cinematography has managed to identify, comprehend and visualize various facets of this most complex cultural phenomenon, ideologically sublimate classical ideas about the sacred. Moreover, it has managed to accurately correlate these ideals with the person’s existential needs and reassemble these most important meanings in the context of a new socio-cultural situation. It was these meanings which have formed the existential basis of the Soviet man’s mythology, where the “person’s efforts to consciously assimilate the meaning of his position in social space” have been most vividly reflected (Dmitriev, 2017, p. 198).

It should be noted that the theme of childhood has a very special and significant place in the Soviet man’s cinematic mythology. It is in this sense that it represents a particularly valuable and truly unique research material. The unusually powerful actualization of such a topic in Soviet cinematography of the post-war period unequivocally indicates the large-scale mythologization of childhood as an integral component in creating an integral ideological paradigm of forming the Soviet man’s myth. This problem has been successfully solved by Soviet children’s cinematography, which has not only managed to visualize the entire process of a child’s formation as a future Soviet society member for the first time in the world, but also to focus on the problem of forming the consciousness and feelings of a small person, as well as on the mutual congruity of a child and the entire socio-cultural context of his socialization. Therefore, it is the cinemythology of Soviet childhood that is especially relevant for understanding the formation and subsequent functioning of the entire heroic paradigm of the Soviet man’s archetypal myth in general.

The holistic approach of the communist ideology to the process of construction and the subsequent cinematic popularization of the mythology also indicates close attention to this topic. Childhood generally turns into an independent and extremely significant plot of this myth, since it allows us to record the necessary stages in the formation of a Soviet hero. “The image of childhood is valuable for the uniqueness of a child’s experiences, his ability to ask philosophical questions, to study the world in detail, to see its imperfections” (Lefman, 2019, p. 137). In fact, the images of the Soviet cinema heroes – warriors, workers, creators, romantics, dreamers, etc., are impossible without a mythical reference to the early periods of their biography, which not only makes their social mission understandable, but also allows one to penetrate into the inner dramaturgy of images which reflects all the possible conflicts between childhood and adulthood. Awareness of the exceptional importance of a child’s image in the Soviet man’s archetypal mythology allows us to understand the sacred principles of this ideological doctrine and to interpret such a mythological plot as a visualization of such a short, but so dramatic and contradictory stay of God in the world of people. Therefore, these are precisely the attitudes which directly archetypally bring the Soviet man’s mythology closer to all the sacred cults of past eras at once.

It should be pointed out that the cinematic phenomenology of childhood, characteristic of the post-war period of the USSR development, is an extremely effective psychoanalytic technology for keeping the most significant existential problems in the field of contemporaries’ consciousness. When making films about children, Soviet directors have intuitively created conditions which would prevent the unconscious displacement of feelings about the contradictory nature of social communication, have created opportunities for retaining and mastering internal experience in the current memory of new Soviet generations. From a psychoanalytic point of view, such a practice was a form of mythological-symbolic propaedeutics of an individual’s internal split, formed the prerequisites for a permanent dialogue with his continuously opening abilities, which, due to such visual samples, became the reasons for real emotional, conscious and active person development. Therefore, Soviet cinematography has created and during the life of several post-war generations effectively tested the ideological paradigm of visually imparting individual and social significance to the continuously opening and previously unknown aspects of human nature, which, in the end, have ensured both sustainable individual development and given positive dynamics to the life of the whole society.

On such an anthropological foundation, the Soviet man’s mythology has successfully formed unique conditions for a comfortable and non-conflict entry of each person into the mythological culture space, which presupposed a harmonious combination of his feelings, thoughts and actions, and, on the other hand, organically connected the past, present and future through him. Archetypal film stories about the hero’s childhood have, in fact, acted as the generic core of the Soviet man’s mythology, in which all the necessary stages of the hero’s individuation have been necessarily presented.

A young hero, who possesses the bright qualities of a Soviet man, who is striving for the future and is ready to fight for it, also influences the positive changes in his parents. In fact, it was a very serious ideological setting, for the implementation of which, the visual images, worked as well. (Teplova, 2020, p. 149)

That is why such cinematic myths, continuously broadcast across the entire country’s socio-cultural space, have formed the prerequisites for creating a continuous and effective internal dialogue with their own archetypal contents.

It is based on such a dialogue that a space of continuously updated contexts of meaningful relationships between the hero and the archetypes of the “Mother”, the hero and the “Father” is formed. At the level of the hero’s actions, the result of such communication is the formation of his beliefs about the primordial role of family and clan relations in his life and the life of the whole society. That is why the theme of the family for the Soviet post-war cinematography, which “explores the nature of mythologemes and visual codes” (Sputnitskaia, 2018, p. 58), has become one of the most important. Moreover, it has been brilliantly passed through all possible storylines, turning into an effective ideological strategy which truly unites not only the visual space of Soviet cinema, but all the geopolitical reality of the whole Soviet society.

Conclusion

Soviet post-war cinematography fulfilled a social order, successfully implementing significant ideological functions, but in the end, the film masterpieces filmed during this period almost always turned out to be incomparably higher than the level of those political, economic and ideological tasks that had been set by the state and the Communist Party to this branch of culture. Therefore, it appears to the authors not only as a means, but also as a unique visual space for forming and promoting the archetypal Soviet man’s myth as a key mythologeme of the Soviet discourse (Dyrin, 2021). When demonstrating mythological and existential models to the viewer, Soviet cinematography and especially its children’s segment, it was possible to bring society to the horizon of understanding that forming the personality of each individual person is the only and indispensable condition for creating and promoting a new type of communitarian society. Moreover, in contrast to the declarative political slogans and program provisions of party documents, real Soviet film stories about childhood were an incomparably more convincing visual example of forming and subsequently implementing a meaningful life choice.

Therefore, the carried out comprehensive analysis of currently existing Soviet culture studies, as well as archetypal mythology and ideology of Soviet post-war cinematography dedicated to childhood, allows us to state not only the increasing relevance of the research subject, but also the absence of systemic studies within the declared problem field. At the same time, the unique myth-constructing experience of Soviet ideology (which was built “into the process of forming cultural identity, ensured the unity of its value-semantic space and the solidarity of communicative practices (Savelieva & Budenkova, p. 114), presented by the children’s post-war cinema in detail, requires an adequate scientific assessment and adaptation of the experience of Soviet visual ideology for the forming educational and consolidating strategies within the framework of modern Russian society. After all, according to many researchers, it is in it, that the processes of restoration of the “idealized patriarchal-imperial past” begin (Kabysheva, 2018, p. 62).

References

  • Beumers, B. (2020). Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 14(3), 217. DOI: 10.1080/17503132.2020.1814564

  • Druzhnikov, Y. (2017). The Myth: An Example of the New Man. In Y. Druzhnikov (Ed.), Informer 001. The Myth of Pavlik Morozov (97-106). Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9780203788547-8

  • Dyrin, S. P. (2021). Portrait of a “Soviet man” in post-Soviet Russia. Collection of Scientific Papers, 3. DOI:

  • Dmitriev, T. (2017). “Perepisyvaya” sovetskoye proshloye: o programme issledovaniy “sovetskogo cheloveka” N. N. Kozlovoy [“Rewriting” the Soviet past: on the program of research of the “Soviet man” by N. N. Kozlova]. Russian Sociological Review, 16(1), 183-226. DOI:

  • Hawkins, S. (2018). Myth and the human Sciences: Hans Blumenberg's Theory of Myth by Angus Nicholls. Goethe Yearbook, 25(1), 310-312. DOI: 10.1353/gyr.2018.0022

  • Kabysheva, E. V. (2018). The character of “Patsan” as an image of masculine features in russian cinema: characteristics and reasons of relevance. Vestnik Tomskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Kul’turologiya i Iskusstvovedenie [Tomsk State University Journal of Cultural Studies and Art History], 31, 56-64. DOI:

  • Kim, О. (2018). Cinema and painting in Parajanov’s aesthetic metamorphoses, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 12(1), 19-36. DOI: 10.1080/17503132.2017.1415519

  • Kovalova, А. (2017). World War I and pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 11(2), 96-117. DOI: 10.1080/17503132.2017.1300425

  • Khrenov, N. A. (2016). Kino: reabilitatsiya arkhetipicheskoy real’nosti [Cinema: Rehabilitation of Archetypal Reality]. Agraf.

  • Lefman, T. O. (2019). Obraz detstva kak ob”yekt konstruirovaniya v otechestvennoy animatsii [The image of childhood as an object of construction in Russian animation]. Vestnik kul’tury i iskusstv [Culture and Arts Herald], 1(57), 137-143. https://www.elibrary.ru/item.asp?id=37212717

  • Nemchenko, L. (2020). Strategies for Working with Soviet Past in the Post-Soviet Cultural Space (The Cases of TV-series Thaw, Kolyma Tales Performance by Yeltsin Centre’s “V tsentre” theatre studio and Yury Dud’s YouTube film Kolyma – Birthplace of Russia’s Fear). KnE Social Sciences, 319-330. DOI:

  • Rosemary, G. (2017). Archetypes on the couch. In G. Rosemary (Ed.), Bridges. Psychic Structures, Functions, and Processes (pp. 104-127). Routledge. DOI: 10.4324/9781351313643-10

  • Savelieva, E. N., & Budenkova, V. E. (2017). The concept of the other as a manifestation of national and cultural identity in Soviet and Post-Soviet cinema. Vestnik Tomskogo Gosudarstvennogo Universiteta. Istoriya [Tomsk State University Journal of History], 45, 114-119. DOI:

  • Sputnitskaia, N. (2018). Elements of the figurative structure of a science fiction film: a commentary on the script Morning Star by Aleksei Tolstoi and Samuil Bolotin, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, 12(1), 58-66. DOI: 10.1080/17503132.2018.1422222

  • Teplova, E. (2020). Vizual’nyye obrazy sovetskogo detstva [Visual images of Soviet childhood]. Etnodialogi [Ethnodialogues], 3(61). DOI: 10.37492/etno.2020.61.3.008

  • Trofimov, A. V. (2020). Vizual’nyye obrazy Velikoy Otechestvennoy voyny v sovetskom poslevoyennom kino [Visual images of the Great Patriotic War in Soviet post-war cinema]. Istoricheskiy kur’yer [Historical courier], 3(11), 113-124. DOI:

Copyright information

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

About this article

Publication Date

28 December 2021

eBook ISBN

978-1-80296-119-5

Publisher

European Publisher

Volume

120

Print ISBN (optional)

-

Edition Number

1st Edition

Pages

1-877

Subjects

Culture, communication, history, mediasphere, education, law

Cite this article as:

Nekita, A. G., Malenko, S. A., Smirnov, V. A., & Spornik, A. P. (2021). Archetypical Visualization Of Childhood In The Cinomythology Of A Soviet Man. In D. Y. Krapchunov, S. A. Malenko, V. O. Shipulin, E. F. Zhukova, A. G. Nekita, & O. A. Fikhtner (Eds.), Perishable And Eternal: Mythologies and Social Technologies of Digital Civilization, vol 120. European Proceedings of Social and Behavioural Sciences (pp. 292-298). European Publisher. https://doi.org/10.15405/epsbs.2021.12.03.39