Cultural orientation of the “mimicry” society. The search for national self-identification in contemporary screen art

The purpose of this article is to study the peculiarities of the behavioral manifestation of Ukrainian screen characters in order to identify qualitative features characteristic of the Ukrainian mentality. This will allow us to determine the themes of screen works that will be relevant for the contemporary Ukrainian viewer, which will improve the qualitative and quantitative characteristics of Ukrainian audiovisual art. The methodology. Five scientific sources were studied (one dissertation, one collective scientific work, and three scientific articles), which allowed us to analyze the relationship between the behavioral reactions of the screen character and the nature of fear that was formed in the process of adaptive transformation of society. On the example of the films “The Guide” by Oles Sanin, “The Red” by Zaza Buadze, and “The Rising Hawk” by Leonid Osyka, the main themes and conflicts that characterize Ukrainian identity were identified and formulated. The results of the study demonstrate certain stable psychophysical reactions displayed by the screen character in a situation of existential conflict caused by the historical development of Ukrainian society. The nature of fears, as the main instrument of the motivating impulse in the process of forming cognitive, emotional and behavioral reactions, is determined by the level of the scale of the hero’s own identity recognition. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the author’s attempt to consider the conflict of the Ukrainian screen hero as a value clash between the goal-setting of a free individual and a society that has undergone adaptive transformations, which is realized through the manifestation of a certain behavioral nature of screen characters. The practical significance of the research findings will help in the process of creating new screen works. This will increase the attention to Ukrainian cinema.