Images of death in cinema: philosophical and cultural analysis

The article presents an analysis of drive to death as a phenomenon of human existence, based on the doctrines of Z. Freud, K. Jung and K. Schmidt-Hellerau. Death as a static state of the biological system determines the instinctive tendency of a person to self-preservation of life, which is rooted in the unconscious sphere, alienated from consciousness. The attraction to death manifests itself in the form of symbols, images in borderline situations, which are actualized not only in the process of sleep, but also in extreme external conditions of existence - war, revolution. According to M. Heidegger, in the gap between the true existence of a person and his inauthentic existence, a personality is formed contemplating death as the content of its future. Using the example of cinema, it is shown that each person has his own face of death. Through the opened image of non-existence in consciousness of the individual, the active attraction to life is repressed. Schmidt-Hellerau, describing the energetic passivity of drive to death, introduces the term Lethe (oblivion), pointing to its mythological meaning, which actualizes the state of forgetting life, its displacement through turning to the symbol of death, into the inner world, into the sphere of unconscious.