"And the grandmother is an ax." Victor Matizen about propaganda tricks in the film "Solveklita"

Victor Matizen

film critic

In Russia, the film “Suncroll” started, in which the Ukrainian army and mercenaries from the “Dobbats” firing with missile installations peaceful quarters of Lugansk, raping women, kill children, and they are opposed by peaceful and unarmed residents. The film is shown only on NTV and on the Internet, but it did not go out to the announced wide rental. The film critic Viktor Matizen looked at the tape and found in it all the traditional techniques of militaristic propaganda, which were also used by Soviet and Nazi ideologists.

The conversation about the "sun" would not be full without a brief excursion into the history of film propaganda.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, almost all major military conflicts were accompanied by information wars in which filmmakers took an active part, armed with words, sounds and pictures. The first references to film propagand dates back to the time of the Second Anglo-Broke War (1899–1902), during which false and documentary surveys were already used. But in full power, film -information battles sponsored by states and non -state sources of both warring parties flared up during the First World War.

The founder of the military-propaganda cinema genre was the film “Britain Prepared”, which demonstrated the power of the British armed forces and produced a furor in allied and neutral countries, released on the eve of 1915. It was followed by many ribbons, mainly English and German, in which a specific cinema language was formed (Hate Speech), which caused the audience the hatred of "him", pride in "ours" and raised the fighting spirit of soldiers. All or almost all of these brutal opuses (Atrocity Films) contained an obligatory line of the atrocities of the enemy: the destruction of houses, churches, hospitals, the destruction of cultural monuments, torture of captured soldiers, injury, rape and murder of the defenseless population (according to an unwritten minimum, a family from a man, woman and child), as well as incorrectly included the show of “their own” as their own ”as their own” as a show. good guys with a high military spirit. At the same time, no ethical norms were respected - exaggeration, falsification and direct lie were allowed.

The poster of the British propaganda film "Britain Prepared", 1915

During the Second World War, the sound cinema developed by this time improved the technique of processing the audience masses, but at the same time made certain moral adjustments related to the pathos of paintings made in the countries of the anti -fascist coalition: the atrocities of the Nazis were so terrified than the excesses of their opponents, which was practically no need for magnifying glasses and fakes.

The most disgusting exception was the Soviet film “The Tragedy in the Katyn Forest” (1944), in which the responsibility for the reprisal against prisoners of Polish officers was assigned not to those who authorized and committed it, that is, the highest leadership of the USSR and the NKVD, but to the Nazists. The gaping peaks of the Goebbels film propaganda are considered the “Jew Zyss” by Fayt Harlan (1940) and the pseudo -documentary film “Fuhrer gives Jews City” (1944) Kurt Herron, who shows (not without the influence of Soviet films about Solovki and Belomorkanal) the prosperous life of a specially created ghettho, who, together with the director, completed their lives in the life of life. Auschwitz gas chambers. Fortunately, this record holder of vileness did not produce the effect expected by the Minister of Propaganda - the war was already going on to an end, and believing Nazi lies, as well as in Germany’s victory, was less and less. On the other hand (and on the other side), at the same time, real heights also arose of propaganda, but pushing out of the truth of life, cinema - such as the “bond” (1918) and the “great dictator” (1940) of Chaplin.

One of the most disgusting examples of propaganda falsification is the Soviet film “Tragedy in the Katyn Forest” (1944)

The military clashes in Ukraine between the separatists supported by Russia and government troops that flashed in 2014 significantly changed the propaganda display: the information battles unfolded not so much between the named parties, but between Ukraine and Russia. Moscow denied its armed participation in the conflict, but directed all the propaganda forces against Kyiv - the printed press, the Internet, radio, television and cinema, and the bitterness of the parties in this virtual war is no less, and sometimes more fiercely fierce film propaganda from the Great Patriotic War.

There are references on the Internet at least two dozen films about the situation in Ukraine with a predominance of anti -Ukrainian invectors (which the creators do not want to admit). And the first place in this series in this series will now definitely take a “sun” in this line, whose name coincides with the name of the tank system of salvo fire. As some military commissariats write with enthusiasm, one volley of this battery burns an area equal to 8 football fields (almost 6 hectares), leaving nothing alive on it.

"Sun": the Ukrainian army is firing on the peaceful Lugansk school

The Suncock, according to the credits, was released by the St. Petersburg company Paritite Film, registered in early February 2021 by a certain Dmitry Zaitsev, not known in the film industry, in cooperation with the also unknown company Aurus. The same company previously produced the film “Tourist”, about which they wrote: “The advertising video of the grouping of Russian mercenaries, known as the Wagner PMC.

The production of both paintings, according to the sources of Medusa, was financed by the Kremlin cook, Evgeny Prigozhin, whose name is associated with the same PMC. He himself, in response to a request, compared Medusa journalist with a film fighting on the side of Ukraine. “Evgeny Viktorovich does not have information whether he financed the shooting of the Suncript,” the businessman’s press service answered. - It is known that at a closed show, producer Sergei Shcheglov thanked the “customer” for the idea, constant participation and sponsorship of this picture. Whether this belonged to Evgeny Viktorovich, we do not know. ”

After the premiere, the Suncroll was released in online cinemas, and on August 18 it was shown on NTV. The film’s website lists 30 cities and fifty cinemas in which it should work, however, on August 24, information about the sessions has never received, and an expert close to the domestic film distribution confidentially informed The Insider that there would be no offline production “due to the lack of two factors: the audience potential and official pressure”.

The action of this film, supposedly based on real events, is preceded by a muddy animated screensaver, in which a bearded old man with a huge bear sitting around the fire in the forest (a hint of Russia, which was obviously unplanned by the authors) is frying on a spit of the head of a rooster, eagle and a dove, and a exaggerated laughter sounds. VSTOK (the picture is poorly mounted) is given a captive that after the coup on 02/21/2014 began mass speeches against the policy of the new regime, which violated the rights and freedoms of the inhabitants of this region, which caused the sending of regular troops to the south-east of the country of regular troops and “volunteer battalions, a large <How was it established? - VM> some of which were compiled by criminal elements, looters and nationalists, ”who began“ mass extermination ”and“ virtually widespread genocide of the Russian -speaking population ”.

Further, with reference to the UN, data are given that over 6 years, “the number of victims has reached 44 thousand”, but is silent that these are injured on both sides and that the number of those killed among the victims of about 13 thousand. In other words, even before the start of the picture, the guilty in all these crimes is announced by Ukraine.

Then there is the first episode containing the above template: cars with the “Dobrobatovites” roll up to the village, good fellows come out, one of whom immediately shoots in a man who works in the garden, finishes a wounded with a shovel, rapes and kills his wife, and the second, young scumbag, is enough for the baby and, as can be seen in the shadow, breaks his head about his head on the head The wall, while the second couple robs a neighboring house, simultaneously killing the owner and the mistress. The unnecessary atrocities of the enemies are not motivated by any more common place of propaganda paintings, starting from the great “battleship of Potemkin”, where the captain of the ship, adjusting the naval orders, orders to cover with a tarpaulin (?!) And shoot the sailors who just refused to have lunch, and the tsarist authorities send troops in order to shoot a purely peaceful crowd at the North The staircase leading to the port.

However, the beginning of the “sun” reminiscent of a line from a song from the time of the Second World War, which the street boys sang even for a long time: “I go into the first oncoming house, an old woman with an old man live there. The old woman rushed at her feet, I had a butt in her ear, the old man killed her boot ”, and the children's teaser of the same years:“ The chip is heated, killed my grandfather with a shovel, and the grandmother with an ax. ”

"Sun": Dobrobatovites kill peaceful Lugansk inhabitants

In subsequent scenes, the atrocities of the regular Ukrainian army are imitated: the mockery of the militia with cut tendons on the “heel”, as “Ukr” affectionately says, looking at the bloodied prisoner, who is kept in the open air in a wooden cage of half -meter heights, it seems, for the only purpose - to urinate on him from above. And most importantly - the shelling of civilians by the notorious "sun", which destroyed, as far as one can judge by the screen explosions, the number of fixed bodies in the frame and extrapolations on Veskadr squares, more than more children than in the genuine report of the UN monitoring mission, which died about 152 years old, from April 2014 to April 2021 years.

And for the contrast, the humanism of the rebels, outraged by these atrocities is depicted: their commander performed by Alexei Kravchenko (invited to be associated with the sign role of the affected by the fascists of the teenager in “Elema Klimov), lets go on all four sides of the two lords-dobrobatovites. But he could have killed, as stated in a famous joke about Lenin.

The propaganda film and some other characters are characteristic. The old singing teacher (Vladimir Ilyin), who, together with the little schoolchildren, covers the fiery wave, because of which he immediately signed up in the militia and soon dies with the weapon and book of Richard Wagner in his hands. Another captured Ukrainian volunteer-sound, letting himself a bullet in the head from the consciousness that his former comrades are doing. The American military rank, which informs that freedom and democracy are lucky. Other foreign mercenaries, including a descendant of the SS, reporting that he arrived in Ukraine in order to continue the case of the ancestor (!), And his comrade, going to bite whiskey with corpses and drinking the corpses of whiskey. And as a cherry on the cake, there is a valiant Donbass warrior, with the meaning of the composer's composition, who is considered a spiritual father and the actual symbol of Nazism from the dead hands of the chorist.

What the authors of the film wanted to say this is unknown, but even the ardent supporter of the militias expressed himself about the finale as follows: “A fat hint of a“ Wagner Group ”, decorated and rudely that it causes an attack of nausea.” In general, the spectators of the “sun”, as always in such cases, were divided into two camps: some considered him “the best Russian film over many years”, others - that “Donbass looks profitable against its background. The outskirts of Renata Davletyarova, as a result of a survey of three dozen critics, recognized as one of the worst films of 2018.

The reviewer of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta believes that the “sun” - “heartbreaking” and “reliable story about what happened to the Russians at the very borders of the Russian Federation”; REGNUM observer - that the scenes of atrocities are not admiring horrors, but “an attempt to reach out to the soul of a modern medium -sized viewer swimming with fat”, which “teaches decency and responsibility”, and the Echo of Moscow calls him “a monstrous fake” and a “total lie”.

As for the “real events” at the basis of the film, by which its authors mean the inhuman actions of only the Ukrainian side, the no less criminal actions of the separatists are listed in the submarine of the UN report, but there is no hint of them in the Sun. And this in itself characterizes the author’s position, which is extremely far from a bona fide study of the causes of the war and the motives of its participants, which the creators of the picture did not give the opportunity to speak out on the merits.