On December 16, 2024, the Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences hosted a theoretical seminar entitled "The theme of war in Soviet cinema 1945-1985: the problem of ending the past"
Speaker: Kruglova Tatyana Anatolyevna, Doctor of Philosophy, Professor of the Department of Philosophy, Ural Humanitarian Institute, UrFU
Abstract:
After the end of World War II, for the first time in history, a situation arose in which the entire cultural system became preoccupied with reflecting on projects for the post-war world. The experience of World War I and everything that happened in the short period between the world wars turned out to be not fully comprehended and forced after World War II to seriously think about the fact that wars do not simply end in peace, remaining behind, in the past. The experience of living through them (defeats, victories, etc.) has the most significant impact not only on the geopolitical configuration of countries and regions, but also on the entire sphere of culture, the center of which is man, his anthropological composition (losses, hopes, readiness for peace). War as a theme of art is present in the post-war world as a heavily semantically loaded resource for understanding the present and building the future. The problem of studying the theme of war in Soviet cinema is placed within the framework of the concept of "completion of the past", formulated in 1945 ("zero hour", "sanitary ditch") in relation to the German experience of experiencing and understanding defeat, guilt, responsibility and the image of a new Germany. The traumatic past, which emerged from conflicts and is potentially charged with future conflicts, must be overcome in its destructive action, that is, completed. Based on the obvious fact that defeat or victory in war is a dominant factor in post-war anthropological design, it is possible to trace the influence of this circumstance on the construction of the Soviet culture's image over time. The lecture will attempt to study the problem of "completion of the past" in the USSR using the material of war cinematography throughout all stages of the existence of Soviet culture until its end in the early 1990s.