This film is an exploration of the phenomenon of war from a philosophical and visual point of view, as well as its expression through the means of animation art using scanography. Through the creation of the stop-motion animated film “Men in dark times”, the task is to comprehend how war affects human nature, turning a person into an instrument of destruction, and how visual images can express the inhumanity and absurdity of violence.

The expression “men in dark times” goes back to Hannah Arendt’s collection of essays of the same name, “Men in Dark Times” (1968), in which the philosopher discusses the fate of individuals who find themselves in conditions of political catastrophe, war, repression and social obscurantism. However, despite the atmosphere of darkness, these people do not lose the ability to think, feel, and act.

War is not only a historical fact, but also a traumatic experience of generations, which is preserved and transmitted in collective and cultural memory. Even after the end of military actions, traces of destruction continue to exist in language, in images, in family stories and in visual codes.

The focus of the study is an attempt to express the idea of human disappearance in war as a process: not through plot narrative, but through fragmentary, silent visual images. Particular attention is paid to the visual metaphor of destruction, deformation and disappearance – as a reflection of the philosophical idea of ​​the loss of a person in inhuman circumstances.