Male Images in Ukrainian Cinema: The “Weak Father” as a Sociocultural Screen Construct in the 1920s and 1930s

The article analyzes the distinctive features of interpreting the image of the father in Ukrainian cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, examines the influence of ideological and political processes of the era of Soviet totalitarianism on the development of a cultural hero, in particular the image of the father as a weak and unconscious character. Propaganda in Soviet cinema permeated all spheres of public life, and it also used all available mechanisms of influence in art. The subject of the study is films in which the father archetype is used as a sociocultural construct to create messages necessary for communist ideology. In the 1920s, the character of the father in Ukrainian cinema often embodied the type of a weak, unconscious father who, due to his ideological unconsciousness, causes the death of his child. In the 1930s, after the proclamation of socialist realism as the only correct method of Soviet art, the father character became a mere auxiliary element of films, not giving the film archetype of this period any significant meaning. This is due to the establishment of the personality cult of Joseph Stalin, which gained its own dynamics and typology during the totalitarian period. The sacralized image of the leader was supposed to replace the archaic tribal authority of fatherhood with a political party figure. The flawlessness of this person, who can be interpreted as the archetype of the Great Father in the context of totalitarian culture, was to be confirmed by works of art. For the Soviet cultural doctrine, the image of the father on the screen had to be endowed with archaic thinking. Thus, the cultural and historical connection between generations of Ukrainians was severed. The party preferred a new Ukrainian who renounced his national traits and willingly recognized himself as a submissive younger brother. The Ukrainian on the screen, often a funny but inert, indecisive, or unconscious character, in the 1930s was largely a consequence of the image of the weak father in the cinema of the previous decade.