The above clipping, part of an article published in Përparimi Journal in 1964, addresses the situation on the cultural front of the modernization process of Kosovo. In the text, the author, Rexhep Zogaj, stresses the slow “rhythm of cinefication” in the region as compared to other cultural and educational fields. At that time, the development of cinema was almost synonymous with other socio-cultural developments in the country; when going to the cinema would provide a ticket to contemporaneity. It also marks a social context in which cinema was seen as a didactic device—rather than mere entertainment—easily mobilized for people’s self-education or propaganda.
At the current moment, cinema and “cinefication” are no longer the dominant cultures of our time. Moreover, cinema is significantly transformed and privatized due to the neoliberal state’s unwillingness to mobilize it for other purposes rather than business or profit. The history of Lumbardhi Cinema is a good example of such transformations: from a massive and modern cinema, in a traditional and conservative city, to an almost archaic building in the middle of an increasingly privatized public sphere. The history of the building stages the social, technological and political changes at a micro level. Although the physical side of the building didn’t change much, people’s relation to it continuously changed over time. This leads us to the obvious affirmation that the cinema as a social relation and film as a cultural form are organically linked with broader historical and political transformations. It is not only that in order to understand the cinema, one has to understand history; in order to understand history, one has to understand the cinema.
This is the paradigm that initiated this series in the blog towards pursuing an open-ended inquiry in order to understand and intervene in the political and artistic configuration of cinema and its intersection in the context of Kosovo. The idea is to learn how cinema was thought and practiced at various concrete points in history. Being aware that cultural forms are never isolated and narrowed down to a national or geographical context, the series will cover texts and translations that will help us to posit this history in the international address. The inquiry will also include essays, articles, interviews, translations, film interpretations, archival reproductions, critiques and memoirs.
This research is neither nostalgia for the cinema of the past nor a call back to the “good old days”. It is more about presenting the forgotten moments of the future buried in the past and configuring its relation with our contemporary world. The great Peruvian intellectual Jose Carlos Mariáteugui, while writing about how to theoretically grasp the contemporary world, suggested that the best way to understand and communicate our time is perhaps to see it as a bit journalistic and a bit cinematographic, but not a static panoramic picture. Hence, the aim of these series is not to give an overview of what happened in history but to delve into and analyze its concrete moments in order to extract the subjective attitudes in and against the objective conditions.