MONTAGE OF MEMORY: PIONEER HEROES IN SOVIET FILMSTRIPS

Abstract

This article examines the specifics of commemorating child heroes of the Great Patriotic War in filmstrips during the Soviet period. Filmstrips could draw on both journalistic texts (newspaper reports and essays) and fictionalized biographies of child heroes of varying lengths and genres. While wartime newspapers were the primary source during the war — lending a melodramatic lens to depictions of children’s heroism, literary works became the primary source of filmstrip text almost immediately after the war, subject to abridgement and other modifications by screenwriters and filmstrip editors. The fictionalization of facts about child heroes in both literature and filmstrips relied on existing adventurous narrative techniques.
Military-historical contextualization, including the visual representation of wartime realities in filmstrips, localized adventure tropes that had become traditional in children’s reading by this point. Beginning in the mid-1960s, the use of eyewitness and visual traces of the authenticity of events helped overcome the dissonance between the stereotypical nature of adventure and the actual participation of children in military operations of the Great Patriotic War. The montage of temporally distant events and practices served the same purpose, combining wartime representations with contemporary ritual practices of hero veneration. This montage of heterogeneous and heterotemporal narrative elements defined the filmstrip’s unique character as a medium for the late Soviet war memory.