War has a woman's face: the image of women in Soviet military cinema during the “movie shortage” period

The article reveals the main features that make up the image of a Soviet woman during the Great Patriotic War, presented on cinema screens in the postwar years. In modern conditions, the interest of domestic researchers (historians, art historians and culturologists) in gender issues has grown enormously, however, female images in films on a military theme shot during the post-war “Malokartinye” (“Movie Shortage”) period have not yet become the subject of independent historical and cultural research. The main attention in the article is paid to four feature films made by Soviet directors in the period from 1948 to 1950. Relying on the research methods of military anthropology, visual anthropology and imagology, the author of the article highlights the main mechanisms of representation of the image of the Soviet woman, corresponding to the historical realities of the post-war period. The author comes to the conclusion that, in general, these films bear the imprint of the previous wartime patterns of visualization of women in the Great Patriotic War, however, they show the first signs of a transition to the cultural and historical content of female film images characteristic of the military-patriotic direction in the cinema of the Cold War and the Thaw. Female images in general are becoming softer, more plastic, and increasingly perform the function of supporting images for the disclosure of male characters in movies. Women’s cinema images of “movie shortage” period were designed to preserve the memory of the Great Patriotic War in the form in which the war was reflected in the mass consciousness of society directly during the periods of hostilities and in the form of indirect artistic reflection offered by the creators of post-war films.