Kosovafilm is a public film production, distribution and screening company which was established in 1969. Together with RTP (Radio Television of Prishtina), the company had a major role in the development of the cinematographic culture in Kosovo. It produced more than 35 films, including fiction, documentaries, and animations. Kosovafilm has also imported and distributed more than 200 films, mostly from Europe and the US. However, the revitalization of the film production in Kosovo coincided with the beginning of a political repression against the country in the early 1980s in Yugoslavia.

Kosovafilm: Fragments screened 5 films from those divisive years, including films by well-known directors such as Isa Qosja, Besim Sahatçiu and others. In addition to aesthetic values ​​on the one hand, through their cinematic metaphors, enigmas, mysteries and tensions, the films present a glimpse of the contradictory existence of a country.

The screening of the film ‘Proka’ was accompanied by a live conversation between the film director Isa Qosja and the program curator, Tevfik Rada.

Below, we bring you the full conversation.

Tevfik Rada: Thank you very much for coming, for accepting our invitation for an interview, Mr. Isa Qosja.

“Proka” is your debut film, my favorite film in this program. But before we come to Proka, I will ask you some questions about your artistic background. How got you to cinema? What were your studies like at the academy? What films did you make before “Proka”? What were your short films as a student and who did you collaborate with at the time?

Isa Qosja: Before I went to the Academy, I was an actor at the Prishtina Theater. I spent about 10 years as an actor. If anything can be said about those 10 years, about their worth in my artistic life, then I can say that experience helped me later with directing. However, the question arises: ‘why would an actor leave the stage to get behind the stage?’. Let’s just say I had exhausted my interest in the stage. So, I played some roles and saw there’s so much an actor can do. He plays one character, continues with another and so on. So, I continued with my artistic interest aiming at directing. Of course, directing was a field not well researched for me, in terms of the overall concept. In terms of what I had to do in the future, directing was quite enigmatic because I knew there are a lot of arts being synthesized within directing. The film synthesizes the art of literature, the art of music, the art of photography, of course, and the personal art of thinking. I was motivated by this profession. Remember, creativity is motivation. It is not just going behind the camera; you have the actors in front of you and you do whatever you want. No, motivation is very important. I became a directing student at a not very young age, sometime around the age of 29. 

What did I work on as a student? I worked on some of the classic assignments, on some of the ideas that were the fruit of my curiosity about certain topics that for me constituted research towards my creative identity, but that presented more and more dilemmas in all directions and situations. 

The moment I watched Fellini’s film Amarcord, I told my professor ‘I do not want to study directing further’. ‘Why?’ – he asked, surprised. ‘Because I will never be able to do something of such a high ideo-aesthetical level.’ So, my dilemma of continuing my studies lasted for a while. I took it very seriously. However, I continued with the conviction that I should dedicate myself even more to this craft. In my third year, I made a film based on Beckett, which no one ever intended to make into a film. Beckett was theater. Somehow a guaranteed failure. It is very static and stable on stage, but not an experiment for film. However, I made a short film that was rated quite well so at the end of the year I worked again with another Beckett text. I was obsessed with Beckett’s texts. So, at the end of the third year, I shot and made a stage film called “Ah Joe”, a film and theater play with which I graduated. Faruk Begolli played in it, and this marks his first appearance on the theater stage. Half of this film was theater and half film. The moment Faruk, who played John, enters the stage, he enters through a stage designed film strip, and so the projection ends with his entry on stage, where the play begins. The moment he leaves the theatrical stage, he does so by coming out through the same performance of the film strip. The exterior was filmed accompanying the actor, wherever he acted. This experiment was much liked by professors and viewers. My other student short film was ‘The Suicide Squad’, also a research topic. Which of the characters carries out a suicide most effectively? These and some others are my films from the time I was a student at the Academy of Film, Theater and Television in Belgrade.

Tevfik Rada: And where are these films?

Isa Qosja: They are at the Academy. The Academy of Belgrade preserves all these films and I think that every student who studied there had to leave the films in the student archive of the Academy. It’s quite logical to put films there, it’s reasonable. Unfortunately, I did not have the vision to take any with me then because I considered that when I close that chapter over there, I do not need that part of my biography.

Tevfik Rada: When did you come from Belgrade to Pristina?

Isa Qosja: I came back in 1982, I worked in Prishtina television for three years, in a show called ‘Late Hours’. A three-hour show with a journalist who now lives in the US, Hys Shkreli, who in my estimation has been very talented in his work as a journalist.

Tevfik Rada: As far as I know, directors in Yugoslavia were employed as freelancers (independent artists), meaning they did not have a regular employment contract.

Isa Qosja: It depends. So, there were some, but there were also those who were regular.

Tevfik Rada: “Proka” was made in 1984. Can you tell us a little about the technical details, how it was made, how the film was financed?

Isa Qosja: I want to reveal a detail that I have not revealed before. When I switched from working at TV Prishtina to Kosovafilm, I was offered a project called ‘The Bridge’. A qualitative scenario themed around a bridge that was worked on by day and demolished by night. This topic is familiar to us, but it was developed into a very attractive scenario. The budget for this project was about one and a half million marks and this amount was provided. My friend Agim Sopi had a script called ‘The Man from Soil’ and the director of Kosovafilm at that time was a man whom I remember with great respect, who is no longer among us, Azem Shkreli. I said to him, ‘Azem, why aren’t we sharing this budget with Agim’s project?’. I had already read ‘Proka’ as a treatment so we decided to divide the budget; he made the movie ‘The Man from Soil’, I made ‘Proka’ and we forgot ‘The Bridge’ which had the highest cost, since it required the construction of a bridge by The Holy bridge of Gjakova. Its scenography was costly. So that project was forgotten and in the meantime the budget for filmmaking started to decrease hence as the time went by, the commitment to art in general, dropped down.

Tevfik: The movie “Proka” is very interesting, and it has an anachronism, something that I think was done intentionally. For example, there are inquisitions, but there are also officers with weapons, there is a village that is backward, undeveloped, a village that is full of water but does not have technology to use water. The timing of the film is also a bit vague, however I think there is something at least on a symbolic level that resonates with the nationalist atmosphere of Yugoslavia, which became clear during the 1980s. What do you think about that?

Isa Qosja: The film goes beyond local frameworks. How? Through the costumes, the people who naturally behave between what is called a civil and religious behavior, between what is called religious and servile to the ascendancy, so these are the elements that open the frames for it to be a universal film. These relationships exist in every country, the secular and the religious, the relationship between those in power and those who are always subject to power. Of course, other relations too such as those of the human with their ambitions and desires. I here had the basic purpose of sketching an autochthonous man who can also resemble the fate of a Mexican, Portuguese, Peruvian person that mainly deals with his work, ideals, illusions, dreams, commitment, efforts, but in our environment this character always becomes the focus of the obsession and the curiosity of others, and this curiosity produces punishment. This is tragic. So, we, who want to do something completely personal, are obsessed with the punishing curiosity of others. This is an evergreen topic in this country and many others, but in provincial settings, more or less, this is a crucial topic. I think that ‘Proka’ aims to portray this phenomenon and then come others where the properties of people are naturally scattered in different fields and directions and those properties are either self-managed or managed by others. They are mostly managed by others, and we always come to a bad conclusion. I do not make movies with a happy ending; I try to show what should not be done. So, if serious scenes dominate my films, I do it so that people can see how bad it is, how worthless it is, how troublesome it is and how unacceptable their behaviour is. Imagine if people were to invest as much positive energy as they do on negative energy, how much more beautiful this world would be. A wise man once said: ‘when you deal with trivial work, you do not have time to deal with important work’.

Tevfik Rada: What was the reaction of the audience and critics in Kosovo and Yugoslavia towards this film?

Isa Qosja: The reactions were mainly of the ideo-aesthetical level. I remember the critique of a good film journalist in the former Yugoslavia named Mitić who wrote that every picture of this movie looked like a fresco hanging on the wall. For me this diminished the ideological impact of the film. In my work I try to make sure that each frame has an aesthetic dimension, even when dealing with drama or a cold atmosphere, I have to see the cold to warm up. In our environment there were those who asked questions about where this event takes place. I remember then there were journalists who asked why there is no folklore incorporated in costume design, scenography or in the dialogue, you know, to identify the place and time of the event. It is natural that in the first films of our cinematography this dimension is required, it is natural because we were marking the beginnings of our autochthonous cinematography. Up until then, the main investors in the construction of the basic infrastructure of filmmaking; directors, cameramen, actors and generally technicians, were from other republics, mainly from Serbia. Generations that came back from Zagreb or Belgrade enabled the beginning of the production with complete infrastructure here in our country; screenwriters, directors, cameramen, actors, scenographers, costume designers, voice actors, all. So, the Kosovar film started to be produced.

Tevfik Rada: In your next film ‘Guardians of the Mist’ dating back to 1988, the character is again a lone dissident intellectual, opposed to Serbia’s police and secret services. However, unlike ‘Proka’ this time, the film takes place openly in Ranković’s era. Within the Kosovafilm: Fragments program, we have seen other films where I can say that the open or secret reference to Ranković’s time is one of the most important. For example, in ‘The Wind and the Oak’, but also in ‘The Man from the Soil’. How do you see this anachronism of the ‘80s? How was the atmosphere back then?

Isa Qosja: Of course, our cinematography had no political purpose, however that arrhythmia had to be addressed because it was necessary. Thus, some of the good works, to call it conditionally good were born, through the treatment of this topic which disturbed the artistic and political opinion in the former Yugoslavia. Without modesty, I can tell you that a bit of credit for the contribution to the most articulated rebellion of the Albanian people of Kosovo in those years belongs to these films, namely ‘Man from the Soil’, ‘The Guardians of Mist’ and ‘The Wind and the Oak’. I consider that this contribution was welcomed both politically and artistically by Slovenian and Croatian creators. Serbian journalists and public opinion described them as nationalist films. I do not think so. However, after a few days of screening in Prishtina, the film was prohibited in Prizren, on the sixth day of its screening, as far as I remember.

Tevfik Rada: The film ‘The Guardians of the Fog’ was the last film produced by Kosovafilm, right?

Isa Qosja: No, I also worked on ‘Kukumi’ within Kosovafilm.

Tevfik Rada: I mean before the war.

Isa Qosja: Yes. Before the war, yes.

Tevfik Rada: In what year was ‘The Guardians of the Fog’ banned in Prizren?

Isa Qosja: In the year ‘87 or ’88, right? You can correct me if I am wrong. It was banned and it has not been shown since then because of the violent measures and a whole history of events that followed until the liberation of the cultural space in Kosovo.

Ares Shporta: What was the role of filmmaking in the ’90s and what were the opportunities within the impossibility to deal with film in Kosovo in the’ 90s?

Isa Qosja: Well said, opportunity within impossibility, this is what it actually was. It used to be very difficult to go out with a photographic camera on the streets. A photographic camera. 

Not to mention the film cameras. I did however write a screenplay for a TV film. The question arose though ‘Where to shoot it?’. We did not dare to do it outside so we shot it in Isniq, inside a tower. The whole film was shot there. Istref Begolli, Nexhmije Pagarusha, Mentor Zymberaj, Anisa Ismajli and others played in it. That was in 1990, as far as I can remember. We got the technology from Slovenia, the cameraman as well. So, even if we were trying to shoot something, we had to go inside, in the interior, to avoid being seen on the street by any circumstances. The police stopped me once, found some pages of the director’s book, took me to the police station and detained me until the evening.

Ares Shporta: What is the name of the film and can we see it somewhere?

Isa Qosja: Mentor Zymberi was its producer and he should have it.

Tevfik Rada: What is the name of the film?

Isa Qosja: “The Living Sphinx”. So, it had nothing to do with Serbs. However, everything that smelled of art had to do with Serbs.

Ares Shporta: As a film and cinema community, how did you experience the gradual degradation, closure, and non-return of cinemas to the public space in Kosovo? That is, during the beginning of the ‘80s we had 42 cinemas, if I am not mistaken and in 2013 when this cinema was reopened (Kino Europa), only the ABC cinema operated in Prishtina. How did you experience this and was there any mobilization, any request to change the situation on your part?

Isa Qosja: The experience of a creator whose cultural spaces are usurped is terrible. You can guess. It was pointless for a regime to think that the cinema was a place where enemies could be forged. That is why cinemas were closed. There was no more scent of movie theaters. There was no longer a projector beam, a meeting place for filmmakers. Yet we met in peripheral cafes and almost did illegal work by talking about art and projecting some ideas for cultural activities. This also happened with my TV film that I talked about earlier. In the cafe ‘Prestige’ I met Istref Begolli. He came with a notebook with wide lines, one or two pencils, and an eraser. We talked about his role; he took notes. We discussed and we were happy we could do that. Imagine, Istref Begolli, an acclaimed actor with such a rich career, appreciated all over, was forced to work this way. At the corner of a café in the outskirts. What a miserable situation!

 I was still going to Kosovafim and one day the director of Prishtina television came to me and told me ‘You are being expelled from Kosovafilm for non-compliance with the measures. Everything went under the control of the police authorities.

Beyond the questions, I want to say that currently and fortunately, Prizren is the capital of culture in our country. Here we have a festival that is very important. People around the world have asked me about DokuFest, expressing a desire to visit the festival and Prizren. Directors, distributors, film selectors. In addition, you have creators, so you have people who articulate the cinematic voice quite powerfully around the world and you have many reasons to be on the forefront in the realm of cinematic culture. I am happy that this is the situation, and I am happy that this happened exactly in Prizren. Despite the fact that I wished the hall could be full tonight, this in no way denies my desire to come to chat with you and people who love cinema. I wish you all the best and hope to see you again.

Tevfik Rada: Thank you very much. 

This interview was made possible through the “Cultural Spaces of Kosovo” project, supported by the European Union.

During the first two decades of socialist modernization, a very small number of films and documentaries were made in Kosova, compared to other Yugoslav countries. Out of 2977 productions (both fiction films and documentaries) that were made throughout the period of former Yugoslavia (1945-1966), only 32 films and 9 documentaries were made in Kosova. No local director contributed to their making and there are no films in the Albanian language from that time.

Unable to represent itself, Kosova was instead presented from the outside, through the imaginary of Mitrović, which Vehap Shita rightfully identifies in his assessment that “we have become recognised by the wider Yugoslav public and the world of cinema through the films of Žika Mitrović.” (Shita, 1962, p. 841)Therefore, the question that should be posed to start this analysis is: In what way does Captain Lleshi represent Kosova?

According to Vehap Shita, both of the Captain Lleshi films (Captain Lleshi and Gunfight) are artificially constructed, populated with untypical things, and misinformation. Moreover, he states that “Mitrović’s Captain Lleshi, especially in the second part of his cycle in Gunfight, has very little to do with who we are and is not created or imagined according to our perspectives and worldviews. ” (Shita, 1962, p. 841)

If the epic figure of Captain Lleshi does not represent the true face of Kosovo, as Shita says, then what was the main motivation for Mitrović to create such a film? Was Captain Lleshi a film commissioned for a particular political cause or was it just a good commercial opportunity, for financial gain and easy entertainment without having to worry about the consequences that such a representation might have carried?

In Albanian literature there are two different interpretive variants regarding the metaphorical messaging of the character of Captain Lleshi, and his ideological structure is constructed precisely on the basis of these two main components.

The first component is that which states that the film reveals a certain historical period and events that are generally considered as a sensitive and controversial topic within the Kosovar discourse. Consequently, it differs from other partisan films in that it does not show the fighting between the partisans and the Germans (except at the very beginning of the film)—as we are used to seeing in most partisan films—but focuses on the suggested local contradictions between the partisans themselves, namely Captain Leshi, and the ballistic gang led by Kosta, who count amongst their members, Ahmet, the brother of Captain Lleshi.

The second component is that which reveals that the whole cinematic adventure tries to be presented from a tacitly imaginary, or fantastical point of view. That Mitrović was not only satisfied in using the classic American Western style to reap success with his films, but that he also tried to incorporate ‘oriental’ visual elements (the spectacular clash between partisans and ballists at the Teqe of Saraçhana Helveti) and elements of ‘the exotic’ (the appearance of Albanians in traditional national costumes in the city tavern in Prizren), to stimulate in the public what is known as ‘the charm of the unfamiliar.’

Literary critic Vehap Shita is concerned with the second prong of these ideological forms, more precisely, in the cultural representation of Kosovo within these films. Here we are again, making reference to Shita, as it was he who  made a cursory analysis of Mitrović’s films in his article ‘The Cycle Captain Lleshi and the Yugoslavian western’, published in the cultural-scientific journal Përparimi.

Shita claims that “while [in his]documentaries it seems to me that he followed a very good methodology [in his] presentation […], in the feature films thematizing our province, Žika Mitrović is more one-sided in terms of the motives or the treatment, and the genre he has chosen for their treatment.” (Shita, 1962, p. 837).

Finally, Shita emphasises that although Mitrović simply did not have even a basic understanding of the past or present, nor the psychology and mentality of the Kosovars, he does not consider “that his undertaking has bad intentions.” Shita insists that Mitrović was in a hurry when he completed the cycle of Captain Lleshi (especially Gunfight), and it was for this reason that he did not go deeper into the cultural heritage, in particular, the folklore and customs, and was instead informed only by things discussed here and there, and from reading sensational reports from certain journalists. (Shita, 1962, p. 840).

On the other hand, we also have the perspective of Arben Xhaferi, in the article ‘Captain Lleshi or Modeling of the Acceptable Albanian’, who insists that the realism of Captain Lleshi was not merely a commercial accident, but “an invention of the Yugoslav (Serbian) intelligence services of Ranković’s period, the Chief of the police and the security services of the country who [would] leave their posts in the IV Plenum of Brioni (1966).”

Moreover, Xhaferi emphasised that Captain Lleshi represents “a ‘positive’ model of the Yugoslavised Albanian; loyal and brave, who pursues, punishes, and liquidates Albanian ballists and nationalists that hindered their integration into the new system.”

In my opinion, both critical views of Captain Lleshi are one-sided and limited, because they concentrate only on one ideological component of the subject. Xhaferi tries to interpret Captain Lleshi from the political context, however his writing is permeated by a subjective and sensational momentum and indeed, a populist tone, full of preconceived categorisations, conjectures and assumptions, unable to argue them according to a theoretical-scientific methodology. Whereas Shita, although more objective, has a typically literary approach, focusing more on the description of the psychological motives of the characters and of the subject, but leaving aside the influence of the political and institutional circumstances of the country at the time.

Regardless of the fact that in Captain Lleshi, Mitrović tries to show the resistance in the partisan liberation war, we cannot say that it is a revolutionary film that shows the collective spirit of the partisans and a people’s mobilisation, but rather that it idealises and glorifies the superiority of the individual who is largely based upon the conventional standards of American Western commercial films.

In order to better understand the symbolic meaning of Captain Lleshi, we will take another critical journey, adapting Will Wright’s structuralist theoretical concepts in his important book Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western.

Will Wright has stated that the Western is a myth for contemporary American society. He challenges the theoretical views of Levi Strauss and other anthropologists, that primitive societies have myths while modern societies have history and literature. According to Wright, modern America has myths that resemble popular stories and the Western is one of them. 

Making a detailed analysis of Western films, Wright comes to the conclusion that the mythical structure of the classical Western has three sets of main characters; the gunman, the homesteader and the rancher, who can then be interpreted in three mythical guises as the hero, the society, and the villain. These characters operate through an oppositional structure of identification: inside/outside, good/bad, strong /weak, wilderness/civilisation.

As we will see below, the opposition inside/outside presented by Wright cannot be said to fit perfectly onto the oppositional structure of Captain Lleshi. Nor is the wilderness/civilisation contrast applicable to Captain Lleshi’s narrative—although these two categories are similar, Wright maintains that they are not identical.

According to Wright, in contrast to the inside/outside dichotomy, society and the villain are internal units of differentiation aimed at prosperity, while the hero, arriving from the mountain symbolises the outside. In Captain Lleshi, even though the ballists identify with the perpetrators, they stay away. Even Captain Lleshi, who is considered a hero of the time, is not fully accepted in society due to rumours that his brother killed innocent civilians along with the other ballists. He also does not come from the village but rather from a rich family of beys.

Within the good / bad, the hero and society stand out as good, and the villain as bad. This identifying contradiction is partly applicable to Captain Lleshi. At first, he does not want to give the piano to the music teacher. This shows the dilemma and class conflicts between his traditional past and the altruistic role he is expected to assume in the new communist collective society.

In the strong/weak binary, the hero and the villain represent the strong whilst society is weak. Ballists and partisans in this instance represent the powerful while society is presented as a group that constantly needs protection.

Throughout the film, at no juncture does society  appear in its collective form, except for a short moment, on the scene when through the loudspeakers we hear the news announcing that allegedly Ahmeti, Captain Lleshi’s brother, was executed by the state for treason. But even in that momentary image, the mass is not presented as an active subject, just a passive listener, everyone stays calm and no one reacts. This scene is in contrast to the last sequence of Isa Qosja’s film Keepers of the Fog (Rojet e Mjegullës). There, the collective scenes of the masses are shown from a distance, as well as the mobilisation of the masses as an active and conscious subject equipped and ready to fight political injustices as a precursor to change.

The final contrast of the oppositional identification is one of the most important ones present in Captain Lleshi. This is best achieved in its setting, in the city tavern in the centre of Prizren, in an effort to include all the different social, national and religious strata.

Here we find a strange scene that shows the image of a woman covered by a veil, sitting at a table, rocking a baby in the cradle among drunk men smoking and singing the most grandiloquent song in Captain Lleshi. We do not know if through this scene Mitrović wanted to present an Albanian, Turkish or Bosnian woman, nevertheless, the symbolism of the woman, with the veil and cradle, exhibits nothing but the long-standing, orientalist discourse that the problem with high birth rates in Kosovo lies in the practices of “religious backwardness”. I do not believe that Mitrović could be so careless as tomake this very well prepared scene, for the purposes of spectacle alone.

We have a black-haired tavern singer, Lola, who most likely serves to symbolise the Roma woman. I infer such, referring to the actress’ earlier role in the film The Roma Woman (Ciganka), and given the general Western template where singers, waitresses and entertainers are in most cases Indigenous Americans or Latin American. As a Roma woman, she represents a more disadvantaged societal stratum than the other woman featured in the film, the blonde teacher at the school of music, for example. While the teacher presents the prototype of a moral woman, Lola symbolises an empty-minded woman that Captain Lleshi may treat as a sexual object.

The only category that is missing in Mitrović’s imaginary social structural stratification are undoubtedly not the ballists, because they, like the others, identify with the feudal mindset. It is rather the music teacher who came from Belgrade to set up new cadres by teaching in Prizren. She symbolises the upper classes in the sense that she arrives from a civilised urban centre to educate and establish law and order in a ‘wild’ province like Kosovo. The educator from Belgrade is from the capital of a nation-state while all the others represent the categories of ‘nationality’, a term that has been among the most hotly contested topics Yugoslav literature—whether or the ‘nationalities’ are equally entitled to their citizenship. Captain Lleshi also tries to show the partisan war as a resistance born of urban areas, and not of the broader peasant masses.

In short, Mitrović’s Kosovo appears as a counter-productive place, forgotten by history, the tavern symbolises the only social institute, and that there is nothing but chatter and drunkenness in the city’s cafes for cultural activity.

What is also important in the structure of a classical Western is the functional dynamics of the structural narrative that develops in the plot. Wright identifies 16 functions of structural order:

1. The hero enters a social group. 

2. The hero is unknown to the society.

3. The hero is revealed to have an exceptional ability. 

4. The society recognises a difference between themselves and the hero; the hero is given a special status. 

5. The society does not completely accept the hero. 

6. There is a conflict of interest between the villains and the society. 

7. The villains are stronger than the society; the society is weak. 

8. There is a strong friendship or respect between the hero and a villain. 

9. The villains threaten the society.

10. The hero avoids involvement in the conflict. 

11. The villains endanger a friend of the hero. 

12. The hero fights the villains. 

13. The hero defeats the villain. 

14. The society is safe. 

15. The society accepts the hero. 

16. The hero loses or gives up his special status. (Wright, p. 49).

Here we will not stop to analyse the development and functional structural order of the subject of Captain Leshi, but we will briefly address one of its functions, namely point 11. Although at first glance, it may seem that Captain Lleshi does not have a friend that the ballists could pose a threat to, it is the Captain’s brother who is endangered by them. As one scene shows, while Captain Lleshi looks at a photo of his youth with his brother, he enters into nostalgic memories and searches for the reason for Ahmeti’s involvement with the gang. As such, he makes no attempt to shatter the gang because it poses a threat to the society, but does so to save his brother. In this respect, the message of the film is reactionary because its action is driven by individual, biological kinship and familial bond rather than by any larger ideal that implies sacrifice in the name of a wider interest of the people. 

Following the breakdown of Tito’s relationship with Stalin, Yugoslav cinema found itself in an unenviable position due to the cessation of financial aid. This caused the limitation of film productions and later provoked a reaction from artists and directors. With the ideological break-up from the USSR and the change of political course, Yugoslavia began to look to the West for an acceptable cinematic model that would be in line with official state goals. In contrast to European films that portrayed reality from a critical perspective, Yugoslavia turned to the entertainment model of American cinema. This cinematic style, in addition to attracting wide publics, was also useful in fortifying the ruling Yugoslav ideology.

The reorganisation of cinematographic policy, in parallel with the economic model of the socialist self-government, enabled the decentralisation of state cinematography in favour of small film houses to allow for free competition.

The system of market competition enabled the cinema houses to automatically violate the supervisory rules set by the state film commission.

Within this vacuum of cultural reforms, companies used the opportunity to invent more sensational and interesting script topics in order to attract as many spectators as possible. Undoubtedly, historical-nationalist themes were among them.

One such example of this trend are the films of Mitrović.

Mitrović has been criticised in Yugoslavia for the nationalist tendencies in two other films, such as those in Thunderous Mountains (Nevesinjska Pushka), which tells the story of a Serb-led uprising in 1875, against the Ottoman Empire, and The March on the Drina (Mars na Drinu), about the Battle of Cer against the Austrians during the First World War.

One of Wright’s central theses is that “the narrative structure must reflect the social relationship necessitated by the basic institutions within which they live. As the institutions change […], so the narrative of structure of the myth must change.” (Wright, p. 186)

As such, the film Captain Lleshi excels in reflecting the then economic and social institutions, as well as the hidden political tensions of the late 50s, as in most cases, the films made at the time talk more about the time when they were made than about the time they refer to.

^[1]   For more information on Kosovar cinematography, read the text by Petrit Imami ‘Film in Kosovo after the Second World War’ (Film u Kosovu Posle Drugog Svetskog Rata), and ‘The History of Cinematography and Television in Kosovo’ by Shukri Kaçanik.

^[2]http://www.zemrashqiptare.net/news/15403/arben-xhaferri-kapiten-leshi-ose-modelimi-i-shqiptarit-te-pranueshem.html

^[3]  Will Wright, Six Guns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western (Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1975), 185.

Let us look more closely at some of the statistics here. Pietro Germi’s drama film The Railroad Man was screened nine times, totaling the attendance of 4389 people. Another great classic, Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying was also screened nine times, in front of 4433 people. On the other hand, King Vidor’s American Western, Man Without a Star, was screened twelve times with an attendance of 8133 people. However, the most watched film, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, was the orientalist comedy of Gregory Ratoff, Abdulla the Great. The film was screened fourteen times in which 9118 people came to watch it. 

In the end of his article, Mekuli points out that Prishtina, with its growing population, needed more than one cinema, and that the new cinema that had recently opened could not meet the needs of its public with its old equipment and narrow hall. He does not name this new cinema hall, however, according to the Rilindja archives, on 25th of May 1959 a new cinema called Vllaznimi was opened in Prishtina. Kino Vllaznimi was the second cinema of the city after Kino Rinia, and it was inaugurated with a presentation of Edmund Goulding’s classic film, Grand Hotel. During the 1950s, the inadequacies of the cinema halls in Prishtina was a frequent topic of discussion. Alongside Mekuli’s article, we present a short inquiry into the question of the need for a new cinema in Prishtina, which was published on 8th of February 1958, in Rilindja. 

Sezgin depicts a curious period of Lumbardhi Cinema. The scene takes place in what is now known as the green room for meetings, which used to be a buffet, later turned into a café-bar where the carefully studied characters within the article — some of whom worked at the cinema — used to hang out every evening for many years until the property of the cinema became a contested site, with the intention that it would be turned into a parking lot. 

More than just nostalgic writing, this is documentation of the heretofore invisible people, who took care of the cinema and were the living archives of decades of Lumbardhi’s internal, day-to-day operation. What Sezgin calls ‘the provincial modernism’ of this group of elderly men, to differentiate from a more classist approach, was in fact a group of outcasts in whom Sezgin and his friends found a mirror for how they perceived themselves in Prizren.

The derogatory term ‘qyli’ (the peasants, the villagers) used here to point out the savage attitude towards the cinema more so than to make a distinction from the ‘kasabali’ (the citizens, the civilized) is deeply ingrained in Prizren’s mentality, luckily vanishing slowly as a more nuanced understanding of both is coming to surface. The writing is filled with descriptions of local characters and characteristic elements which bring it closer to the literary genre of nonfiction. ‘Taksirat party’ is a rich document of a specific period of Lumbardhi that we are glad to have at hand in such vivid colors.

TAKSIRAT PARTY 

Dedicated to Babo and Gjabir

This is a sociological and anthropological story about a very interesting community in Prizren, which will soon disappear. I will not narrate it in an academic way, since there is not space here to contain the specificities and peculiarities of the case. This is a story about people, all of them well beyond their 60s, who regularly gathered at the buffet of the Prizren cinema to discuss everything there was to discuss regarding Prizren, Kosovo, the wider world, and other things. I, along with my friends, first met them at Dokufest in 2004, having fun with their big, cheap, cold beers in Nikšićko bottles. These beers were the reason we quarrelled with some people, and were the reason we created and distributed a zine, Valdrin Prenkaj and I named “Fantazin”, which will forever be remembered as the little scandal of the festival, and as a very interesting experiment from the underground. But this is a different story. 

Half a litre of cold, 50cent Nikšićko beer was reason enough for us to start bothering the elders of the cinema buffet. At the time, Montenegro was not yet an independent country, and the Nikšićko beer could not be found anywhere else. To put it in colloquial terms, at the time, Nikšićko beer was not considered a politically correct beer in other bars. We were intrigued, how this beer was here and who were these people drinking it? When we started going back to the cinema buffet, even after Dokufest, the only reason was to warm ourselves up before hitting the city and the nightclubs. But more and more, we started thinking of the buffet as an attractive prospect to the clubs which, for us, were increasingly transforming into very boring and conservative spaces, where people had fun for the hundred-thousandth time to the idiotic sounds of the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Depeche Mode, sometimes Nick Cave. The passivity of repetition started to become unbearable, and so we slowly began staying at the buffet all evening, and would go straight home after, not into the city as before. Thereupon the buffet became our only underground nightlife. 

I feel it is now my obligation to clarify to the reader as to why the cinema became so important to us. Naturally, the Nikšićko beer was not reason alone, the main reason was these older people we encountered, the informal group called Taksirat Party or the Party of Taksiratlis, the Party of the Wretched, who each and every night talked over beer, cards and dedikodi (gossip). Their stories were full of interesting anecdotes, their irony and lively jokes, shameless, and the endless talks were truly the lifeblood of the city, as I and my friend who went there recall it. 

Now for a little anthropology. The Initiation. The Initiation into the Taksirat Party developed thus: At the beginning the Party would immediately familiarise the newcomer (in our case me, along with my friends) with their embodied knowledge of the city, so that the newcomer would become interested in details about this family she/he would come to belong to, how they function and where they live. If you were suited to their cartography of the city, they would call you kasabali and everything would be fine, you could join the gang. Kasabali meant, first of all, that you lived in the city, and second that your behaviour was befitting of a citizen, which meant not behaving as a qyli (a villager). Thereby, not to be stingy, to know how to have fun, to live, to love journeys, to know how to swim and how to eat well. Of course this reads as a petit-bourgeois philosophy, but in Prizren it can be something other, a provincial modernism. If any reader of the Pallanka Philosophy (provincial philosophy, in the words of Radomir Konstantinović) should come back with questions, the Party of the Wretched in the cinema would convince her/him of the veracity of that book, and would enable her/him to scientifically verify the anatomy of this provincial thought. According to the theory of the Party of the Wretched, it was not only important to live in the city, but to behave like a citizen, as I explained earlier. Hyshit lived in the city centre, but did not have a single quality befitting of citizenship by this rubric, and was therefore known as a villager. He was the least attractive in the whole Party. Boring like a villager. The rest of the members of the Party of the Wretched knew everything about the city. They knew with cadastral precision all of the (old) addresses and locations, all of the secrets held between families and an entire lexicon of untold stories. For us, most of these stories constituted a completely new experience of the city. 

The ritual. The stories would begin like this: Almost every night Valon would announce the recent death announcements in the city to the buffet crowd. Those in the Party, would scrutinise it in detail and tell Valon when and where the funeral would commence, and he would later join it, all the way to the cemetery, and eventually get money for it. This was his favourite hijink. Whilst for the Party this was a cause for some analysis, naturally the analysis of life and identity of the deceased. Valon was the true spectacle of the Party from the cinema. A disabled borderliner, he would not speak anywhere but in the cinema. There, he communicated everything with Gjabir, who was the only one who could understand his language (Valon’s vocabulary was in its entirety different from the rest, for every single thing he had his separate system of description. Whereas Gjabir, apart from the three official languages of Prizren, also spoke Romani, plus the language of Valon!). Valon had different names for everyone, Mongol, Ybe, Pope… He used to call me Rambo. Gjabir told us that a professor of defectology, some psychologist, was really astonished when he saw Valon able to speak at the cinema, since from the time of school he had been mute. 

Certainly there were other rituals and stories. The most intriguing were the stories told by the late Babo (or, The Motor). He had fought alongside the Italians against the Partisans, something that had soon become boring for him, but he had been able to learn Italian. The story of his trip to Malmo, Sweden, was interesting. He was constantly talking about the big bridge and the cabbage he had seen in a park there, and that he had been unable to take it with him (which made him feel somewhat badly). Babo was the head of the Party. The number one of the TNT band, as we called him. The whole Party was like Alan Ford. The other members of the Party were Gjabir (the manager), Haxhi Boza, Abdullah, Eran (the youngest member), Byka Tada and Hyshit. Of course, we were not members, but we had fun and we appreciated the ever present hospitality at the buffet, and the pleasure offered to us by this friendship, one now on the brink of extinction. 

I would not like to seem like some romantic, with my nostalgia and my conservative fatalism; as the intention of this text is something altogether different and has a different politics at its heart. This is a story entirely opposed to the foolish and deleterious decision to demolish the cinema, a decision that will destroy the largest cultural manifestation in Prizren (that is, Dokufest) and which has already destroyed the Party. This is a decision that could only be made by people whom the Party would deem worthy of the label “qyli” or “those who know nothing of the City, but only think of money”.  

Nota bene by Sezgin Boynik

The editors of the Lumbardhi blog recently asked me if they could reprint “Taksirat Partisi” as a document of the time, to which I agreed. It should be read as exactly that. Considering its prominent placement in the blog, I feel an obligation to add some further clarifications. 

Soon after it was initially published, I disowned the text and completely distanced myself from its arguments. Though not from its spirit. This text was written hastily; if I remember correctly, in a bar in the midst of all the commotion of Dokufest. It is the product of a combination of politics, punk and libido. Indeed, I wrote it, but it was a distillation of collective confusions, contradictions, and despairs that we all felt at that time. It was, if I remember correctly, 2006 or 2007. We were all depressed by the fact that this community of older people, living completely outside of the grasps of consumerism and neoliberalism, would soon disappear. And with them the whole cinema, and any other place which was no longer generating money. 

In the text, I wrongly accuse the “peasants” as being responsible for the plunder and pillage of such public institutions, and for the destruction of public space that occured after the arrival of the second millennium. This must be corrected; the privatisation, neoliberal plunder, wild urbanisation, and the illegal appropriations did not happen spontaneously, they were not the result of primitive kleptocracy, and it was not because of the insatiable greed of poor peasants. It was the outcome of well-organised parcelling, involving people with Master’s and Doctoral degrees, members of international construction boards, respectable and wealthy citizens. 

You can read more on the concept of ‘cinefication’ in Kinofigurimi’s first entry at BLLOGU.  Just three years before the publication of this text, the same author also published a short article called “Dinar — The almost crucial moment in the politics of Bistrica Cinema’s repertoire” in the Rilindja Newspaper, in which he criticised the profit-oriented management of Kino Bistrica. The arguments within this article are analysed in an upcoming book on Kino Bistrica’s history which was prepared within the context of Lumbardhi’s research programme ‘Kinofiguration’. 

The first Albanian feature film was Fëmijët e saj – (Her Children), 1957[1], directed and written by Hysen Hakan, who premiered it as his graduating work in Czechoslovakia where he studied at the time. The short film has entered the history of cinematography as the first artistic production of Kinostudio “Shqipëria e re” (The New Albania), founded in 1952. Being an industrial production of Kinostudio, Fëmijët e saj, as a film, implies in a Lacanian way, that parole (aspect of artistic individuality, the author’s voice), belongs artistically to langue / the language of the cinematography of socialist realism, the only langue artistic method allowed in the Socialist Popular Republic of Albania, since 1953, when it was approved by Albania’s League of Writers and Artists, until the change of the political system, in 1991.

In addition to the influence of authorial discourse (parole) through the language (langue) of political power, the theme of the film — vaccination-immunisation of Albanians to resist infectious diseases — was not the fruit of Hysen Hakani’s creativity, but an instrumental part of the programme. To sensitise people towards government campaigns, the Albanian Labour Party aimed for the good health of the New Socialist Man. While, as a genuine artistic interpretation of the author, it can be called the dramatic idea of ​​the film, or story concept: Fatimja (Marije Logoreci), lives in a mountain village with her young son, Petrit (Xhemal Berisha). He dies, infected by the bite of a rabid dog, because his mother, instead of sending him to the hospital, as suggested by the village teacher (Naim Frashëri), had sent him, on the advice of a religious villager, Beqir (Loro Kovaçi), to a witch or folk doctor, Hall Remja (sic) (Bejtulla Turkeshi).

From the narrative point of view, the script in this work of Hysen Hakan, has a classical division into three acts — beginning, development, conclusion/exposition, climax, denouement (Poetics, Aristotle) ​​— where the psychological development of the character of Mother Fatime is at the very centre.

Act One: The photography, in the first photograms of the film, frames — in an extreme long shot — a pastoral, mountainous landscape, with a few simple wooden houses. A cry is the connecting bridge through which the director chooses to lead the spectator, escorting them from the classic, romantic background to the second frame — medium long shot — where this time the frame captures an almost crawling child being pulled hard by a woman. Further, outside the film’s objective diegesis, a laugh precedes and connects the third frame, where, through a holistic shot — master shot — to complete the first scene of the film, in addition to the woman and the child — who persists in his resistance — enters a man in a suit and another woman in a nurse’s uniform, holding several ampoules for injections in her hand.

The voice (the cry of a child and the laughter of an adult), mounted in a choral form with the gradual shots chosen by the author, communicates to the spectator the dramatic range of the event.The text begins “Kadri, do not shame your mother!” uttered by one we soon understand to be the village teacher, then the “mother” replies, “No comrade teacher, Kadri will honour me!”. So from the beginning, we have an educational (via the teacher) and health/sanitary (via the nurse) message enforced on the resistant-child subject. This message is conveyed to the child through psychological pressure, exerted by adults, through the two main keywords of Albanian traditional and canonical culture: shame, towards the other (teacher, nurse), and family honour (mother).

Meanwhile the nurse fills the syringe (Hakani uses a detail shot, or insert, the opposite pole of which, in the history of world cinema, can be seen in an extreme version in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction).

Kadri, already calmed down, is injected with the vaccine.

The nurse then asks the “mother” if the young child is her son. “No, I have no children!” she answers, shocked. The nurse waits for the child and woman to leave then asks the teacher why the woman is shocked. Then the teacher (symbol of the emancipatory knowledge of scientific socialism and historical materialism) begins to tell the “ancient” occurrence of Fatima, paving the way for flashback (at the end of the film the spectator learns that the time frame of this flashback is 13 years , i.e. the year 1944, the month of August, before the liberation of Albania and the installation of state socialism).

It is important to note the choice of the words of the director-screenwriter. After the phrase “ancient occurrence” – and not “old occurrence”, as would be the correct linguistic form for narrating an event involving a living person (mother / Fatime) – we have an attempt by the author to expand and exaggerate the semantic field of the film narrative. This is demonstrated by the not at all accidental use of the superlative habit in question, which is emphasized through the diction of Naim Frashëri (unnatural pause between the words “ancient” and “occurrence”) and even more pronounced by the character interpreted the teacher, presumably the one with a rich and confident Albanian language vocabulary. Thus, through this strategy, the semantic field of the film narrative expands, which, through Fatima’s personal tragedy, opens the way to the metaphorical, symbolic and paradigmatic reading of ‘the backward’ Albanian context along its past, shortly before state socialism or distant to the end of time. After all, the author’s aim is to highlight the past – whether the recent one 13 years ago, or the distant, “ancient” one and to emphasise its contrast with the new socialist world made into a reality.

Act Two. The “ancient occurrence” which the teacher indicates, opens up, with an unusual setting,-  “the village seemed desolate.” This setting contrasts with the bucolic image of the mountain village amidst a diverse flora. Thus, after we see a child (almost a baby) being fed by (probably) his sister (their clothes are poor, just like the house in the background) while the mother is filling water in the well (we can easily conclude that the water flowing inside the house does not exist), we understand that the desolation reins in the life of the villagers and not the village itself.

A woman’s  scream is immediately heard in the background giving the alarm: “Rabid dog! Rabid dog! “, are her words. With a load of wood on her back, which confirms the desolate condition of the villagers, the woman who is giving the alarm, passes in front of the house of the characters we just saw, running and terrified. Instantly, the mother of the children releases the winch and the bucket of water falls out of the well again. She runs towards the children and pulls them towards the house. The older girl remembers the plate of food left in the square and returns to pick it up. Her mother follows her and pulls her back towards the house without letting her reach for the food plate. Hence, we understand that, the risk of viral infection, as a result of the bite of the “rabid dog”, for the villagers of “ancient” times was more of a priority than any job (mother leaves the job of filling water), even more important than food.

[Intermezzo. At this point, it is time to open up a parenthesis with the actuality of Hysen Hakani’s film. So, as the author presents the events, every “ancient” villager knew how to isolate themselves in voluntary lockdown, without the need for coercive (schedule) and threatening (fine, prison) measures of the Nazi government of the time (recall that the event is August of ’44). Thus, the comparison with the actuality of the COVID19 pandemic, with us, as hyper-technological and super informed citizens, and our contemporary democratic governments, is much needed and useful. The simple conclusions of this comparison can be drawn by anyone, but the purpose of this text is to highlight the complete erasure of concrete cultural knowledge or knowledge about the things of the life (viruses, for example) of “ancient” peasants and our ignorance towards them.]

As stated, the rabid dog fatally bites Petrit, Fatime’s son, who sends him to Hall Remja for treatment. From the semantic point of view of the Eisenstein style of editing found in Hakani’s images [2], it is important to note that, the syringe detail (mentioned above), as a solution to the viral infection problem, rhymes with the dog’s mouth detail (Detail Shot), a direct agent of the virus transmission material. Also the same image rhymes with the detail of the plate that releases magic vapors in the hands of Hall Remja (Detail Shot), the indirect, immaterial agent of virus transmission. These are the only details (Detail Shots) of the film, which constitute the semantic essence of his dramatic idea.

This second film by Hysen Hakani [3] also shows a kind of theatrical sensitivity of the author (characteristic of his films), which does not depend only on the participation of some of the most famous actors of the Popular Theater troupe, Naim Frashëri, Marije Logoreci , Pjetër Gjoka, etc. This theatrical sensitivity is also noticed in the transformation of the textual material. The most obvious example of the author is that (as seen from the images below) with the character of Petrit, who lies ill and, quenched by thirst, seeks to drink by uttering the words “water, water” (ujë, ujë in Albanian). Hakani, by working on the voice as sound and not just as text, conveys the irreversible transformation that the person affected by the rabies virus undergoes. Thus the pronunciation “uuuuuuj, uuuuuuj” of the words of the text transforms Fatime’s son almost into a small dog, which cries, adding pathos to the most painful scene of the film, Petrit’s death.

Act Three. Hakani actualizes the transition to the last act by overlapping a field-plan, where the full shot of Fatima kneeling and leaning face down on the day of her son’s death, recovers with her being between children jumping happily, 13 years later.

The text of the second act closes with the cry of Fatime’s lament “My Son!”, While in the third act, the teacher closes the text accompanied by the return from the flashback:

“That is what happened 13 years ago. Now, she [Fatima] works in our kindergarten. The children love her very much and call her mother. She loves them too, as if they were her children.”

The moral of the fable told by Hysen Hakani leaves no room for doubt: the only solution to get rid of viruses is science, implied not only through its results (antiviral vaccines), but also as an approach against the backwardness of people’s folk superstitions. And science for Hakani was that of scientific socialism propagated as the emancipatory agent of the people by “Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re” and the art of socialist realism.

[Epilogue. This text is written in the framework of an invitation extended to me by the friends at the Lumbardhi Foundation of Prizren, to be included in the section of their blog Kinofigurimi. We previously agreed to go to a text on the retroactive purpose of cinema of the period of socialist realism (1953-1991), which interests me because I have long wanted to write something about the much debated current issue in Albanian public opinion, for decades now , the screening or not – due to the ideological and propaganda overload – of feature films of that period. My telegraphic answer to this question is what director Kristaq Dhamo said, almost a year ago, in 2019:

“Art is art. In every age, good or bad, it is a sign of history. And history must be respected. To be criticized, but to be respected. To ban movies, I think is an idiocy.” [4]

But, beyond the answer which is more than enough to close the useless discussion on the screening or not of the feature films of the Albanian socialist realism, two questions arise: What is the retroactive goal coming out of Hakani’s Fëmijët e saj? What is the purpose of the analysis of this film?

As far as Hakani is concerned, he leaves little room for the interpretation of the plot of this film: scientific socialism is the solution against the infectious viruses and folk superstitions of the people that, as intangible agents, transmit it. But something must also be noted that, if not evidenced, could pass as a complete condemnation of folklore and folk medicine by Hakani, which in my opinion is neither in the intentions of the author nor of state socialism. This is most evident in discrediting Hall Remja’s character within the script:

Fatima – Hello!

Hall Remja – Hello! What do you want?

Invitation – My boy was bitten by a rabid dog.

Hall Remja – What dog was it, red or black?

Fatima – For God’s sake, I do not know.

Hall Remja – Do not worry, I will cure the boy in seven days.

Moreover, the speculation on Hall Remja, preceding her text, is also shown by the director through the image, as in the case of the bag of food that a fleeing customer (Marika Kallamata) leaves in her hands,  after she has provided the service.

And that the film’s approach is not intended to completely and dogmatically condemn folklore and folk medicine is also confirmed by Fatime’s recovery, which seems like a magical and triumphant miracle over her tragic past, materialized by children’s dance, which brings to mind not only the folk dances of the Albanian people, but also the dances of magical rituals. The latter could by no means be openly promoted in the art of socialist realism, and I do not believe they are conscious references by Hakani, but they can certainly be interpreted as part of his creative imagination. And it is the configuration and research of the creative imagination of the artists of socialist realism that this text also has as its main purpose.

P.S. : Conclusions … to avoid an ending. The period of state socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat in Albania, consequently the art of socialist realism, are extremely complex and are often analyzed through the prejudices and clichés of public opinion, especially the contemporary mass media. And it is precisely due to this complexity that we must turn our eyes back, to the not-so-“ancient” history. For example, focusing only on today – when through the mass media bombing Albanians are subjected to lockdown or coercive measures not only voluntarily, but compulsorily, in a completely arbitrary way, unconstitutionally and illogically – what approach is needed towards medicine as a science and the folk medicine? What role do they both have and should they play in our lives? How much attention is paid to the speculative profits that arise not only with viruses, but also produce them? From this point of view, Fëmijët e saj, socialist realism, state socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat, through their specific discourse, seem much more emancipated and emancipatory than what, in general, the discourse of contemporary politics and the scene of today’s Albanian art offers.

I want to close this article with an interpretive fugue of the last scene of the film Fëmijët e saj, which aims not to exhaust, but to further add to the complexity and the need to study the language of art and film (not only) of socialist realism and the questions that it resonates towards our contemporary actuality.

After the children’s dance that marks the magical miracle of triumph over Fatime’s tragic past, we see the latter in the closing scene leading a row of children following behind, imitating Fatime by opening their arms in the shape of wings and the flight of birds. As mentioned above, the director clearly works and opens the metaphor of the story of Fatime, a child of her children, as a sacred paradigm (like Saint Mary, daughter of her child, Christ) of Albanian history, rooted in culture, customs and the canonical tradition (shame in front of the other and the honor of the family / mother mentioned in the opening of the film). Thus, Fatime, after losing her biological child and realizing the mistake, is transformed, as the opposite pole of Hall Remja (halla- aunt, in Albanian, is the father’s sister), into the closest person, the symbolic mother, of all the children at the kindergarten where she works and, metaphorically, of all Albanian children. And it should be remembered that the symbol of Albanians is the eagle. But the opening of the wings and the flight of a bird with the little birds following it (Fatima and the children of the kindergarten) is more like a chicken coop, similar to a domestic and domesticated bird. Some questions arise: what can this tell us about the current situation of Albania and Albanians in the time of COVID19, about medicine as a science and folk medicine, about the obedience to the coercive and arbitrary measures of the government and the infantile treatment of Albanians, about the ethics of private benefits when public health is at stake? Of course, these are not questions addressed to us by Hysen Hakani of 1957, but by his artistic creativity, timeless, like that of any artist worthy of being called as such.

The original article was written in Albanian.

Romeo Kodra holds a Master in “Theory, Techniques and Management in the Arts and Entertainment” (Degree Category: Entertainment and Multimedia Productions) Faculty of Human Sciences, Bergamo University of Studies, Italy. He is an Invited Researcher at Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art (INHA – Paris) – Program Profession Culture 2016, International Affairs’ Department of Ministry of Culture and the “Lead Expert Evaluator” of “Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency” (EACEA) and “European Cooperation in Science & Technology” (COAST) of European Commission.

Romeo’s interests regard research on challenged spaces between the political power and arts in modern, transitional and contemporary societies as well as the polyphonic organization of spaces and artistic productions. This interest in practice is explored through video art, performance, theater, curatorial events, photography, writings on culture, art and critique of art.

Kodra lives and practices his activity between Tirana, Bergamo and Helsinki.

1] http://www.aqshf.gov.al/arkiva-1-1.html?movie=24 (link consulted on 26/12/2020).

[2] Hysen Hakani in a long television interview, broadcast in 2009, on the show “Histori me zhurmues” (Noisy History), mentions, in addition to Soviet films circulating as part of his academic training in Prague, the influence of Italian neorealism in his work, without giving details of where this influence consisted, except in the choice of location (the animal pantry of a Tirana house “where cows and chickens were heard”, but which are not part of the sound of the film and do not fully explain the influence of neorealism). Link consulted on 26/12/2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXPNFoqU6Nc

[3] His first film is also a student work “Hotel Pokrok”, shot in Prague in 1956. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0314181/ link consulted on 28/12/2020.

[4] Link consulted on 28/12/2020 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoTXfAiIv9w

Can you tell us about your artistic and political formation? 

After I finished high school of art, I decided to start studies at the faculty of applied arts where I became fascinated with byzantine wall paintings. I was always dreaming of becoming a painter, but very soon after I finished the faculty, I started with my PhD studies at the University of Arts in Belgrade. I can tell that this study helped me a lot to form my artistic views, not to see only through visual lenses but rather to think theoretically. This led me to a formation of a very strong political standpoint in art, which still is an important take in all steps of my production.   

Your artistic practice extensively deals with archival materials and creates a “counter public sphere” to the official narrative of post-Yugoslav conflicts. With this political horizon in mind, you have re-actualised fragments from the archival documents by hand copy. Your work in “Four Faces of Omarska” is very impressive in this sense, since it mobilises a great deal of documents (newspaper clips, excavation logs, sketches) in order to show an often-repressed violent history. Can you tell us more about the research process of your works?  

My engagement in the group Four Faces of Omarska (FFO) was extremely important for what will come later. I was working with extraordinary people and I had a chance to meet many people who committed their entire lives to certain engagements. This taught me to think politically, to be aware of the ethics of art. On the other side I was always fascinated with collecting, preserving and excavating old collections of documents, lists, maps, images etc. In parallel with my engagement in the FFO, I was leading my own investigation. I already had my personal archives with the material which later become key to some of my future works, which I am still developing. I started with the very basic material, such as an archive of old newspapers but later it developed to more serious court and state archives. Depending on the source material I am researching, the outcome is always different. 

What is your relation with the technique of copy? What kind of possibilities does hand-copying open to the specific themes that you are dealing with? It seems there is a temporal tension in your works, as you could slow down the fast representation of quickly forgotten and repressed moments by your artistic elaboration.

The process of reading and researching was an important part of the work itself and I wanted to make the outcome of this process visible, so I started redrawing the material I was researching. If you read something that is often disturbing, you have difficulties and I felt like making this even more present, so I started slowly repeating the content, letter by letter, page by page, the entire content. There is a certain potential in the medium of drawing, in time of superfast production of digital content, that we cope to perceive. Drawing is almost as subversive as it could be. I created this simple technique. It contains transferring the exact material on paper, and then I draw with black ink and brush covering the traces of the copy. This is a very slow and meditative process. I spend hours in the studio working on one piece. Having in mind that the source material is often something that is highly negotiable or suppressed, you can tell that this is even more difficult sometimes, as you have to be inside that content a hundred percent or you make a mistake. 

In 2016, you opened your first solo exhibition in Kosovo called “Drawing Rectification” as part of the Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina annual exhibition program, based on bureaucratic documents, lists and other archival material around the Bajtajnica mass grave. Could you tell us more about the process of producing these works, the exhibition and the reception of it?

This exhibition was really important to me, but at the same time very difficult. It was my first single exhibition in Pristina and I was very anxious about everything. I had great support from Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art which, for the purposes of this exhibition, renovated this beautiful old boxing club. I was offered little help from a few institutions and we used this to build a really nice White Box inside this ruined interior, that is still in use I think, which makes this exhibition even more important. 

The work I was showing originated from a series of my previous works, mostly connected with the archival research I did in The Hague tribunal archives. It was partly about the exhumations held in 2001 in Belgrade and I had a lot of work on this, but we also had some other works. Like the commercials about the state based banking system in the ‘90s which helped to steal money from people and lead the war in ex Yugoslavia. 

Speaking of perception, I was intrigued that the public in Pristina had not much more knowledge about the Batajnica mass graves than people in Belgrade, for example. This was something I never expected. On the other side as I was already on the bus back to Belgrade, I received a call to present my experience at the Cultural Center REX in Belgrade. It was an exhaustion that lasted for over 6 hours. Everybody had something to say. I still don’t know what this discussion was about. 

Last year you opened your exhibition called “Kino” in Lumbardhi and later in Kombank Dvorana, after a research in the archive of the cinema. The exhibition presented a fragmented and multi-layered constellation from the Lumbardhi archive. Can you tell us more about the research process and the exhibition in Prizren and in Belgrade? What are your opinions about the politics of this multi-layered history that is full of common but also harsh episodes? Can you tell us about the reception of the exhibitions?

“Kino” was maybe one of my best experiences so far. I think it is because I had real friends and colleagues as partners on this project, there was mutual trust and everything went beautifully from the very beginning. Everything started when Ares from Lumbardhi foundation called me one day to ask if I would be interested to look at the archive of the cinema, which I accepted immediately.

The history of this cinema tells a lot about the history of Yugoslavia and how this process of dissolution went through years. Also when you observe the material you can tell about the background of the cultural politics and relations between states. It was a real journey in the past, I really enjoyed it. Also worth mentioning is this very rich visual content of the archive. Among lots of bureaucratic documents, I’ve found lots of movie posters from the ‘70s, ‘80s and 1990s. It worked perfectly with the boring lists of sold tickets in the ‘60s for example.  

We had the first show in the very space of Lumbardhi cinema in Prizren and it worked as if it was always there. Later the exhibition traveled to Belgrade and we managed to show this in the hall of Dom Sindicata, which is an old Union House, now named after a bank from Belgrade. These two shows in my opinion showed perfectly the multilayered history, the rich history of cinematography in Yugoslavia, from a small local cinema, deep in the south all the way to one of the most powerful Union Houses in the state back at the time. 

Your ongoing exhibition in Belgrade reproduces the war diary of Ratko Mladic. Can you tell us about this exhibition a bit? What are the local and international reactions to this work? 

The exhibition was just closed last week after two months of being open, with a presentation of a long awaited art-book and now is the time to collect the impressions, but definitely this made an impact and there were lots of reactions, from home and abroad. I was working for a long time to create this series and it was really nice to finally see it all framed on the gallery walls. This was supported by the Belgrade based office of Forum ZFD which supported me for a long time and it was presented in Eugster||Belgrade, a gallery I am working closely with during the last period. The exhibition as you know contained a series of 400 drawings, all handmade in ink on paper and framed in single wooden frames, creating a kind of never-ending installation that occupies the entire space of the gallery. The exhibition is now dismantled but we made an art-book which contains reproductions of all 400 drawings.          

Between 1945–1985, more than two-hundred films that dealt with topics about Partisans were produced in Yugoslavia^[1]. Without any doubt, we can conclude that no other genre platform had such a strong imprint on the Yugoslav film production. We could also add that it was one of the marking features of the Yugoslav film abroad. In this text, I am interested in the most experimental and innovative period of the Yugoslav film production between the 1960s and 1970s. Yugoslav films that entered the international stage could roughly be perceived as produced for two international audiences: firstly, the independent auteur films which received different awards and mentions at film festivals (Cannes, Berlinale, Karlovy Vary etc.); secondly, the more mainstream films, such as Štiglic’s Ninth Circle (1960), or Bulajić’s major blockbuster Battle of Neretva (1969), nominated for the best foreign film at the Oscars. 

The Battle of Neretva was the most expensive production in the history of both the Yugoslav and the post Yugoslav film. Estimates range from five to ten million dollars at that time and it took almost two years to produce it. This film included sections of the Yugoslav People’s Army, which offered its manpower and infrastructure to the film crew’s disposal. The casting was composed of such international stars as Orson Welles, Yul Brynner, Franco Nero, Sylvia Koscina and Sergei Bondarchuk, while Pablo Picasso designed the poster for the English version of the film, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra composed the music. The film crew pursued a strong advertising campaign abroad, which made it an instant success. In Yugoslavia,  more than 4.5 million spectators saw it in the first years of the release, while outside Yugoslavia around 350 million people.

The film plot focuses on the turning point for the partisan liberation movement, which fought for the survival of the general command under Tito and found themselves besieged by multiple fascist armies and collaborationist forces. It presents the epic overcoming of the siege as well as it portrays the heroism and sacrifices of the Partisans, including their humanity towards their wounded and typhoid-ridden comrades. The film lasts for almost three hours; it is accompanied by dramatic music and, seen in retrospect, it has started functioning as a part of the collective memory of the central battle of the liberation struggle. We might even argue that it became the most important visual and popular monument of the partisan struggle. People may have forgotten much from the textbooks; some may remember fragments from personal testimonials, or documentaries, but many from older and even some from the younger generations hold onto specific passages of this film: the legendary singing of the wounded that helps Partisan fighters push back against the Nazi annihilation, the resilience of Partisan fighters in the wake of being well-equipped and outnumbering the enemy. Such cultural artifacts played a vital role at least in achieving two tasks: firstly, these partisan films became Yugoslavia’s most celebrated film product on the global film market; and secondly, in Yugoslavia itself such films helped to mythologise the official memory on the Second World War and enable the actors and topics to enter into Yugoslav popular culture.

Any critical and independent filmmaker that wanted to make a film on the topic of the Partisans in the late 1960s or early 1970s had to pose a serious question on how to proceed further, since such hard to beat popular and spectacular images as those created by this film immediately emerged in front of the eyes. It is also true that most, if not all critical filmmakers, shared an open sympathy with the partisan struggle, but the central challenge was to find a way of affirming the partisan liberation while being able to articulate a non-partial view and differentiate itself aesthetically from the established film genre. Despite the difficulties of such a task, a number of critical film directors made some fascinating Partisan films that expressed their dissent either in terms of its aesthetics or by choosing a more complex narrative structure.^[2] In this text I would like to present the visual and alternative memory strategies realised by Želimir Žilnik in his »Uprising in Jazak« (1973), according to which, the film remains as the most delicate bottom up reconstruction of partisanism and antifascism in (post)Yugoslavia.

Žilnik’s bottom up reconstruction, or on the “banality of goodness”

Želimir Žilnik is not famous for his films on the partisan struggle, however I would argue that he is the most important film author that has always taken sides and has inscribed in the very method of his film-making, a spirit and body of the partisan struggle. To make a film in a partisan way is a defining mark, differentia specifica of Žilnik’s now more than 5 decades long film activity. Uprising in Jazak (1973), as already his earlier works from the 1960s,^[3]  uses a method that holds onto traces of fictive and documentary »material« and testimony, which is sustained without the complete blending of one into another. Furthermore, the plot itself is based on a semi-prepared scenario, which demands both a degree of spontaneity in meeting and encountering the mostly amateur cast and a high level of focus on the part of the director, film crew and actors in dialectical responding to the situation of diegetic and real time and space. The trajectory of the plot and editing often gives the spectator the feeling that it could have developed in multiple ways.

But if the late 1960s were the most productive historical moments for cultural and political activities, where his pioneering and critical methodology came into existence, and where many film-directors experimented, then the early 1970s saw a conservative backlash and intensified political pressure on cultural workers. Despite this backlash, and being very conscious about potential consequences of persisting in producing such critical films, Žilnik goes on and produces one of the most exciting films, a true legacy of antifascist film methodology. Uprising in Jazak (1973) radically disturbs the dominant way in which Partisan struggle had been narrated, represented and finally remembered. 

Uprising in Jazak departs from a shaky camera travel. The car with a film crew arrives to Jazak, almost 30 years after the end of WWII. They start interviewing people, including true witnesses and antifascists from the wartime period. A story of a local villager upon the arrival of the Nazis is accompanied by the visual passage of a shaky camera, the sound of moving tanks and shooting airplanes that attack and occupy the village. Žilnik makes the clear decision that he will not film and interview the national heroes, Partisan or communist leaders of yesterday or today, but the normal villagers, either supporters of the Partisans or those who eventually became Partisans. A large majority of these protagonists are neither politically ‘articulate,’ nor do they fit any heroic image of a Partisan fighter. What they do, however, is simply tell their stories in their own language. They speak of the arrival of the Nazis, then they show the camera the places where the torture took place and the techniques were used – and where the executions took place. But they also speak about their ways of resisting, how they performed the Partisan oath, where and how women were hiding and feeding Partisans, but also where they were hiding guns, food and transporting them to the Partisan fighters. 

Žilnik thus openly counters the mainstream film representation that postured Partisan fighters as heroic figures that were seen as fighting and shooting the fascists. Such heroic partisans emblematized the figures of major sacrifice and were posited as a sort of »absolute good« that cannot and should not be questioned in aesthetical terms. I would suggest reading Žilnik’s move as a stark opposition to absolute heroes/ and the absolute good. Inverting Hannah Arendt’s term the »banality of evil,« (1977) Žilnik’s reconstruction of memory attributes to local villagers an aura and ethical attitude of »banality of good«. Since we all encounter the expression in an absolute term, the “radical evil” prevents us from thinking about the Nazi politics, the everyday dynamics of Nazism, and the question of collaboration – where the aforementioned is often explained as a sort of “banality of evil” and as people’s readiness to denounce Jews and political opponents of the Nazi authorities. If such a view at least attempts to understand why and how Nazism worked, then much less is written on the gestures of resistance, emancipation and liberation during the Second World War. This is why Žilnik’s memory strategy is of use for anyone interested in the deployment of the »banality of good«.

»Banality of good« is not to be understood as some sort of philanthropy on the part of those privileged enough to continue their normal living in the Nazi occupied Europe, nor does it refer to the noble gestures of rare individuals within the collaborationist apparatus (e.g. Schindler’s list). Rather, I argue that this rational choice to revolt could be part of a persisting ethics of the »banality of good«. How to understand the infrastructure of resistance in such dire circumstances of the occupied cities or villages, where any gesture and activity of resistance was immediately condemned to death? Žilnik’s film succeeds in displaying the antifascist community in Jazak in multiple gestures and activities that perform resistance. Žilnik’s response to heroic gestures entails the images and words of the resisting masses, of those from below that were allegedly not ‘dignified’ or ‘educated’ enough to remember or to be remembered, to narrate and represent the central event of the socialist Yugoslavia.

Some would commend Žilnik for conveying a more realistic and ‘truthful’ account of the Partisan past than the majority of Partisan films made at that time. This might as well be true, however I think that the more important observation is to focus on the manner of how the film was made. The film’s form consciously rejects any kind of aestheticization and this is not only the consequence of a lack of material means for the film’s shooting. Žilnik’s use of the »raw image« (see Levi 2007)^[4] and the allegedly amateurish cutting that recurs in his work, are not a sign of laziness on the part of the editorial team, nor of poor technical equipment, but they rather express their conscious opposition to the aestheticization of the Partisan struggle. The raw film material, raw peasant life, the raw circumstances of war and the struggle for survival and liberation form a neorealist metonymic line of equivalence to Žilnik’s arrival and his take on Jazak. Furthermore, Žilnik openly rejects the dominant mode of representing the war as a spectacular form that focused solely on the Partisan battles, or on underground resistance in the urban centres. This is a film that shows how the vital infrastructure of the partisan liberation worked, and already realised a promise of a new world. Its primary political subjects were peasant masses. 

Uprising in Jazak, as the name suggests, is a short film on the uprising of peasants. It explains why and how they struggled for the Partisan cause and not for the local collaborationists. Žilnik’s perspective in this film is directed from the standpoint of the ‘masses’ and could be seen as a reconstruction of testimonies from below, the film version of the »people’s history of resistance« (Gluckstein 2012). These people are not only subjects worthy of political attention and media archive, but they became subjects that remember for us, for the Yugoslav society and beyond. Žilnik also added an important layer in the format of a participatory survey, an addition in line with the Italian workerist tradition, which introduced collective participatory interviewing. This is masterfully inserted into the film dynamic, where the central events of village life and the resistance are narrated by the different voices of the participants. Their reconstruction is not simple and individualistic; during the filming these voices contradict each other and thus renegotiate the reconstruction of his/her/their stories. The impossibility to resist and create another alternative world is what I called partisan rupture (Kirn 2020), and the way how artworks worked on it, commemorated with the partisan remainder, is the difficult task undertaken by Žilnik here. The constant movement of the plot is dynamised by the switches in camera movement and the changes in focus to different storytellers and multiple voices. This reconstruction takes the shape of a collective bottom-up process of a memorial narrative and imaginary of Partisan village community-in-resistance. There is not a single voice, nor retrospective Communist Party history of the Partisan struggle, but a mosaic of all those who participated in it. Due to the scarce material, spectators have to imagine – with the help of sound and different film devices – locations and objects that are missing on the set. For example, once Žilnik’s film crew arrives in the village, the story brings us to 1941 and the arrival of the Nazi planes and tanks in the village. The film crew’s car is turned into a tank, and we see the images of the village and villagers from the moving car, which due to the conscious shaking of the camera and the editing of the sounds of moving tanks, imitate a tank passing through the village.

The collective and renegotiated memory of participants of the liberation struggle arrives to a clear political conclusion for their and our present: the epic battles and the victory of the Partisan struggle would not have been possible without broad popular support, especially from those in the countryside who sacrificed their lives, but also preserved their dignity and practiced mutual aid. In more historical sense, the countryside provided the struggle with the key infrastructure and the most vital means of reproduction for the entire Partisan movement. Žilnik’s film makes a significant shift from the conventional portrayal of civilians and farmers as passive victims of fascism, or civil war, and rather stages them as the central protagonists of antifascism. They become representatives of the everyday ‘banality of good,’ of those millions who supported and struggled all along the war. This memory strategy consists of a memorial re-enactment of people’ history with inventive and at first glance raw aesthetical means. The core of Žilnik’s method succeeds to put at display: how normal villagers became protagonists who took a clear side in the war; how 30 years later they become carriers and negotiators of public memory; and also how film itself politically and aesthetically practices how to make film in a partisan way. Uprising in Jazak re-enacts the uprising of the peasant masses, intensifies their echoes and visions, disturbing the dominant field of vision/narration in partisan films of that day. 

Concluding: From partisan production to dissemination

The very last partisan gesture comes at the very end of the film production. In the moment when the film was edited and prepared for the first screenings, it was – as was customary – sent to the commission that controlled film production in Vojvodina.^[5] This commission rejected it as unfit, to quote from Žilnik’s personal archive. It was designated as “an untruthful representation of the People’s Liberation Struggle […] while Žilnik offends the revolution by engaging a group of bumps who allegedly represent Partisans.” Neither Žilnik nor the protagonists took this judgement of the film lightly, as one can imagine. In yet another dramatic post-filmic unfolding of affairs, Žilnik, together with the most determined villagers-Partisans, entered the municipal office of the regional ministry of culture in Novi Sad. Having arrived without a formal invitation, the villagers display their 1941 Partisan memorial plaques, which confirm that they fought for the PLS from the very start of the war. They rush into the office of the then minister Djordje Popović whom they force to tear up the decision to ban the film. After a formal apology – “banning the film seems to have been a mistake” – Popović granted their demand and gave his permission for the film’s distribution. The film’s distribution can be seen as yet another continuation of Partisan politics by other means – a means that resisted the regional bureaucracy and its attack on the partisan art. This is how the Partisan memory of villagers, and Žilnik’s methods of production and dissemination, come full circle. The first projection took place in the village cinema a few days later and Žilnik recollects that the cinema was completely full and the showing concluded with long standing ovations. Uprising in Jazak was screened a few more times in the surrounding villages and in March 1973 at Belgrade’s short film festival, where it received several positive reviews and was warmly received by the audience. In April, the film went to the Oberhausen Film Festival and afterwards was withdrawn from distribution until 1984 when Žilnik finally received a copy of it. 

All in all, Žilnik’s treatment of the partisan topic at the time, its permeated spectacular imagery and mythologising tendencies that helped reproduce the socialist authority, come forward as one of the few ways to successfully address the partisan rupture, the way to represent and commemorate from below, to cultivate revolutionary resources and genuine popular solidarity spanning beyond party lines and spectacular lenses of high budgeted spectacles. Such filmic retrieving of the fragments from the past can bring to us a much needed dosage of inspiration for struggles on the authoritarian horizons.

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York, Penguin Books, 1977.

Badiou, Alain. Metapolitics. London, Verso, 2005.

Buden, Boris. Uvod u prošlost. Novi Sad: Kuda.org, 2013b.

Gluckstein, Donny. A People’s History of the Second World War. London, Pluto Press, 2012.

Kirn, Gal. Partisan Counter-Archive. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020.

Levi, Pavle. Disintegration in Frames: Aesthetics and Ideology in the Yugoslav and Post-Yugoslav Cinema. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2007.

Levi, Pavle. “Cine-Commune, or Filmmaking as Direct Socio-Political Intervention” (in Serbian), 2009. http://zilnikzelimir.net/sr/essay/kino-komuna-film-kao-prvostepena-drustveno-politicka-intervencija-1, Accessed 12 December 2019.

^[1] This is a thoroughly revised and shortened section from the chapter 3 of my book Partisan Counter-Archive (De Gruyter: Berlin, 2020).

^[2] Aleksandar Petrović’s Tri (Three, 1965), Štiglic’s Balada o Trobenti in Oblaku (Ballad of the Trumpet and the Cloud, 1961) Čap’s Trenutki Odločitve (Moment of Decision, 1955); Bauer’s Ne okreči se sine (My Son Don’t Turn Around, 1956). Secondly, there were films that had a more neorealist influence devoid of any heroism in the life of the Partisan struggle: Veljko Bulajić’s Kozara (1962), Mutapdžić’s Doktor Mladen (1975), Živojin Pavlović’s Zaseda (Ambush, 1969) and Hajka (1977). Finally, there were horror and surrealist films such as Puriša Djordjević’s Jutro (Morning, 1967) and Miodrag Popović’s Delije (1968); fourthly, there was a range of films that included a more complex depiction of the collaborationists, but also their authority from Lordan Žafranović’s famous film, Okupacija u 26 slika (Occupation in 26 Pictures, 1977), to Miodrag Popović’s Čovek iz hrastove šume (The Man from the Oak Forest, 1964), and also Vukotić’s Akcija stadion (one of the first Holocaust films from Yugoslavia, 1977).

^[3] Early films such as Unemployed (1968), Black Film (1971), Uprising in Jazak (1973) and the feature film Early Works (1969), which all appeared as part of the production house Neoplanta in Novi Sad. There is a great documentation made by Žilnik and Kuda.org (Novi Sad) on Žilnik filmography (https://www.zilnikzelimir.net/), see also book from Buden (2013).

^[4] Pavle Levi lucidly highlighted the political dimension present in this film method. Žilnik’s film characters most often “represent border examples […] between existing societies (within which they have no place) and possible, alternative, reorganized societies (within which – if these societies at some time were to be established – they would have clear and more stable identities). These characters are […] the material for a process that Etiènne Balibar described as the constituting of ‘the people,’ which is initially non-existent because of the exclusion of those who are considered unworthy of citizenship.” (2009, online)

^[5]  For details on the production process, see the personal correspondence with Želimir Žilnik (2018).

Gal Kirn has a PhD from the study program Intercultural studies of ideas at the University of Nova Gorica in Slovenia. He has since worked, among other places, at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Humboldt University in Berlin, GWZO in Leipzig and at TU Dresden. He has published on diverse topics from post-Fordism, and Yugoslav black wave cinema to Althusser and the critique of neoliberalism. His latest books deal with the topic of partisan struggle and socialist Yugoslavia, albeit from different angles. Partisan Ruptures was published by Pluto Press (2019) and deals with politico-economic investigation of the rise and demise of socialist Yugoslavia, while The Partisan Counter-Archive (De Gruyter, 2020) works on the triangulation of politics, art and memory on the case of partisan liberation struggle. He is currently Visiting Professor at Cultural History program at University of Nova Gorica.

From that day on, this traditional and conservative city possessed a cinema built by the state. The door of the cinema was looking towards the riverside, provoking the modernisation of the city. Directed towards the Stone Bridge and Shadërvan, it became an imaginary and cognitive door as much as a physical one. On one hand, the traditional motifs were being reproduced “outside the door”; and on the other, the constantly moving, “unrestrainable” images “inside the door” were changing in 24 frames per second. Those two realities were in continuous conflict. 

Through time, the population of the city increased. A garden cinema was opened next to the building and a road was built between the Bistrica cinema and the Bistrica river. Thus, the people that wanted to buy tickets and the cars that wanted to pass through the road became a headache for each other. Hereby, the two most important elements of modernity, “the cinema” and “the road”, came face to face: The cinema acted more generously in this special case.

Here is the first report that arrived to the administration of the Bistrica Building for closing the door looking south.

 23.07.1965. Written by the director of the Prizren Internal Affair Secretariat. In the report titled “Measures to be Taken for the Safety of Cinema Audiences”, it is stated that the cinema door opening to Mose Pijade street should be closed, that the crowd formed at the entrance of the door both interrupted the traffic and endangered the safety of the people there, and that if no action is taken, the necessary actions to stop the activities of the cinema will be carried out by the Internal Affairs Secretariat.

22.09.1965. In the report sent by the Internal Affairs Secretariat, it was emphasized that the measures taken by the Bistrica cinema during the last 2 months were limited to changing the opening direction of the door (from outside to inside) and that these measures were not sufficient. In the text of the decision, it was underlined that if the requested regulations are not made within 1 month, the activities of the Bistrica cinema will be stopped.

While we witness the continuing rhetoric of the Ministries of Interior and their affiliated organizations in the documents dated to 1965, we see how the issue of “national interest”, which functions as a legitimation tool, is instrumentalized in the process of the door’s change.

22.10.1965. The management of the Bistrica cinema attempted to change the placement of the door and contacted neighbor Shemsije Kovaçi, to discuss the possibility of demolishing her house and moving the cinema entrance there. An apartment worth 6 million dinars was offered to the family in return for the expropriation of their homes. Shemsije Kovaçi, who rejected the proposal, then sent her husband, Xhevat Kovaçi, to the Prizren Municipality and Housing Affairs Directorate to express the family’s opinion on the matter. In his statement, Xhevat Kovaci emphasized that “they would not object if the expropriation of their house will be an action planned within the scope of “national interest”. But if their house will be the only estate to be expropriated, he continued, they would be against this decision and would expect the management of the cinema to agree with them.

08.11.1965.  The situation was summarized in the letter sent by the Prizren Municipality and Housing Affairs Directorate to the Bistrica cinema and it was stated that the expropriation of Shemsije Kovaçi’s house was not compatible with the national interest and that the issue was considered within the scope of Bistrica cinema’s financial interest.

22.11.1965. Bistrica Cinema’s Management summarized the attempts they had made so far for the change of the entrance door. They stated that they were unsuccessful in this regard, and invited all relevant authorities to take initiative and cooperate to find a solution to the issue. In the same article, it was also stated that the closure of the only cinema in Prizren would have very negative effects in terms of the cultural and artistic life. In addition, the successes and vividness provided by the Bistrica cinema was explained and added to the text.

13.12.1965 – The last article in 1965 on the subject of the change of Bistrica Cinema’s entrance door was written by Muhamed Shukriu, the Director of Municipality and Housing Affairs of Prizren. Shukriu presented two alternatives in his article, the first of which was the expropriation of the houses of the Kovaçi family. He emphasized that this could be only done in agreement with the landlords. As a second alternative, it was stated that some shops and houses, which were expropriated before, could be demolished in Ramiz Sadiku Street. In the latter’s case, it was stated that the expropriation costs would be covered by the municipal budget, and that only the entrance door and ticket office should be built by the Bistrica Cinema.

In the report written by the Bistrica cinema administration (dated 22.04.1966) for the Prizren Municipal Affairs Unit, it was stated that the south-facing door will be closed and the new door will be opened on the east side, in accordance with the decision of the Interior Secretariat. The permit had been applied for the assembly and the construction of the ticket office.

The last article on this subject in the Lumbardhi archive is this report of the permission request. It is seen that the two alternative proposals suggested by Shukriu were implemented and the entry directions of the cinema building were changed to the east. The door entrance used by Lumbardhi Cinema today is the door entrance opened in 1966.^[2]

The meaning of the door which we come into contact with dozens or even hundreds of times in daily life, is actually much more abstract and political than we are used to think. While the door provides privacy and security to the people, it also offers freedom. Because you can experience other “worlds” through the gates. 

^[1] Within the scope of the research we have done so far in the archive of the Lumbardhi Cinema, the earliest date of film screenings in Prizren is 1924. This data will be corrected if new information is found during the ongoing research.

^[2] The door that is used today was changed recently (in 2020). We do not have more detailed information on whether another door was installed before the door was changed in 2020 (after 1966).

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.