Transformations of the hero concept in the modern Russian documentary film

Studying current trends of transformations of the documentary hero concept, we tentatively identified three most notable oppositions. The first opposition - heroes - not heroes or antiheroes. Namely, strong, courageous - and weak, poor, disadvantaged, and sometimes morally flawed people. The second opposition - a traditional society - and "marginal" people: outcasts, consciously or forced to leave the traditional society or torn from it by the will of fate. Thus, "marginal people" include representatives of indigenous peoples living "on the edge of the world", far away from civilization. Finally, the third opposition - idols and "cranks". The first opposition is based on the distinction between the moral and physical qualities. Here people are opposed to physically complete and defective, moral and immoral ones. The second opposition is based on the contrast of lifestyles, ways of life, place of residence. They are - the representatives of the big, traditional communities and the people who find themselves on the margins of society, or on the sidelines of life itself. In a word, the characters belonging to the society, and not belonging to it, the social and asocial heroes. The basis of the third opposition is the direction and the results of creative activity. In our analysis, we move from the consideration of the human household displays to high spiritual realms. On the one side there are documentary characters, preserving the so-called presumption of positivity, and on the other, we see those who, for some reason, whether through their own fault or not, are deviating from the norm, who are not noticed, but filmmakers are particularly fond of shooting them seeking to draw public attention to the sharply contrasting "normal" phenomenon of social life. Today, however, the image of documentary hero has become less monotonous. After all, in life, people are complex, ambiguous, are not well understood, unpredictable. That's why they are interesting for us. We attempted to trace the dynamics of preferences towards some types of heroes in modern documentaries. It turns out that today the interest to the real heroes stronger than to antiheroes. The present documentaries carefully study our traditional turbulent society, what happens with us than with outcasts and "marginal" people. Exotics today is no surprise. Oppositions cease to be too rigid, as they had been before. Transitions between them and their constituents are less noticeable.

Keywords

Authors

References