THE IMAGE OF DEATH AS A TOOL FOR THE FORMATION OF NATIONAL MEMORY IN UKRAINIAN CINEMA OF THE POST-SOVIET PERIOD (UNTIL 2014): IDEOLOGICAL CONSTANTS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF MYTHS

The article examines the image of death as an ideologically loaded media textual element in the Ukrainian cinema of the post-Soviet period until 2014, which performs the function of broadcasting and consolidating elements of national memory; Through the prism of an analysis of key films created between 1990 and 2014, the author explores how death becomes not only an artistic motif, but also a political tool through which new myths of national identity are formed based on the cult of sacrifice, heroism and permanent confrontation with the "external enemy" in the person of Russia. The article emphasizes that in the context of the loss of a unified cultural code after the collapse of the USSR, Ukrainian cinema is actively rethinking archetypal models of death, abandoning the all-Russian religious and historical semantics in favor of a sacralized image of a national victim, therefore, special attention is paid to ideological constants – stable structures through which death is represented as an act of political and cultural mission. The author also analyzes the process of transformation of traditional pre-Christian and Orthodox myths, where the cult of the ancient Slavic goddess of death Morena and the archetype of the "Heavenly Hundred" become new reference points of collective memory. The conclusions of the article allow us to assert that Ukrainian cinema in the period under study functioned as a mediator of political mythology, forming attitudes that were actualized already in the post-Maidan period.