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VISUAL STRATEGIES OF REPRESENTATION OF THE WAR IN SOVIET “FICTION-DOCUMENTARY” CINEMA IN THE LATE STALINIST ERA // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2015. Issue 4 (6). P. 28-46

The article examines the effect of the victory in WWII on the status of the Stalinist regime and on the representations of power in Soviet war films. Already in the last stages of the war (e.g., Fridrikh Ermler’s The Great Turning Point) the experiences at the frontline and on the home front were being transformed into a narrative of Victory, which started to replace the Revolution as the focal point of the myth of creation of the Soviet nation; the creation of a “useful past” was initiated. These moves were then fixed in a range of socalled “feature documentaries” that were supposed to recreate on the big screen the history of victorious “Stalinist blows”: Igor Savchenko’s The Third Blow, Vladimir Petrov’s Battle of Stalingrad, Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Fall of Berlin. These films had a particular kind of poetics and were very different from the pre-war Staliniana, giving a visual form to the transformed myth where Stalin was no longer just Lenin’s confidant, best pupil and heir, but where he was the only saviour of the country and the winner in the great war.

Keywords: late stalinism, soviet cinema, Great Patriotic War, representation of power, Fridrikh Ermler, Vladimir Petrov, Mikhail Chiaureli