Cultural Hero and Screen Hero: Essential Characteristics of the Image

Screen arts — cinema, television, multimedia — have become the dominant means of representing culture. Today, the screen hero is pushing the literary hero out of the cultural space. It occupies a leading position in audience reach and public awareness. Moreover, the screen hero is a mirror of culture and the result of reflection on how an artist (in our case, a director or screenwriter) sees, feels and understands a modern person. The article reveals the essential characteristics of the screen hero and the cultural hero as a more extensive phenomenon of which he is a part. We define their place and functions in the sociocultural space, the methods of their communication with the recipient. The formation of the phenomenon of the cultural hero began in antiquity. Therefore, we analyze its essential characteristics through the theory of myth (E.M. Meletinsky, M. Eliade, M.M. Bakhtin, K. Levi-Strauss, C.G. Jung, J. Campbell). We also consider the shadow side of the cultural hero — the trickster. He is the forerunner of the antihero in screen culture. The screen hero is a modern form of the cultural hero. Therefore, he adopts mythology and basic essential characteristics from his predecessor. However, the screen hero is a more complexed phenome- non of encoded cultural text. It is born at the junction of the millennial canon of representing a cultural hero and new artistic and expressive means of the screen.