School of Film, Anthropology and Philosophy

Yugoslavia ultimately was -as well as these magnificent films that were made there -one grand illusion. A big story. With Tito as a storyteller. That's basically what he did. Tito told the Yugoslav people a really good story. A story people wanted to live in. And when the story-teller died, the country collapsed."

Interview with Marian Ţuţui, artistic director of the Divanul Degustătorilor de Film şi Artă Culinară / Divan Film Festival, which takes place each year at the end of August in Cetate, Romania and is now in its fifth edition.  We met with Marian to speak to him about the state of Balkan cinema, film festivals in the region and “Balkanism” in general.

Interview with Eno Milkani, the artistic director of Balkan Film and Food Festival, now in its fourth year, which takes place each year at beginning of September in Pogradec, Albania. We met with Eno to speak to him about the story behind his festival and Balkan culture in general.

The transition from state socialism to democracy in Eastern and South-Eastern European countries has produced revisionist political, historical and social discourses, and consequently a renewed interest in national cinema historiographies, accompanied by early film re-assessments. In 2004, the discovery of the Serbian epic film Karađorđe ili Zivot i dela besmrtnog vozda Karađorđa/Karađorđe or The Life and Deeds of the Immortal Vozd Karađorđe (Serbia, Ilija Stanojevi c, 1911) in the Austrian Film Archive prompted a ceremonial premiere in Belgrade and subsequent screenings on national television and at silent film festivals. In Romania, Nae Caranfil used the making of the first Romanian feature fiction film Independen ̧ta Roma^niei/The Independence of Romania (Romania, Grigore Brezeanu and Aristide Demetriade, 1912) as a backstory for his big budget fiction film Restul e ta!cere/The Rest is Silence (Romania, Nae Caranfil, 2007). For the celebration of the 100th anniversary of Albanian independence, a documentary Albanie 1912 (Albania, Eol C ̧ashku, 2012), which combines earliest surviving footage of Albanian views and autochrome photographs from the Albert Kahn archives in Paris, was produced and consequently screened throughout the country. This essay argues that these films function as contemporary memorial spaces (Pierre Nora) for a renewed national discourse due to the fact that the archival images predate the socialist history of each country. The contemporary reuse and reinterpretation of these early moving images allows them to become visible, collapsing the time space distance and blurring premodern and the postmodern nationalist ideologies.

The globalized any-place, no-place atmosphere, underscored by monochrome cinematography and bare settings, allows the story to function as an allegory of the contemporary world. The satirical attitude subverts the dominant discourse and questions common beliefs through witty exchanges, while the punchline ending offers a form of liberation and psychic release.

Comedy and comic conventions offer the possibility for laughter as a therapeutic and liberating force, as well as provide reflections on the absurdity of the everyday through the use of humour and chaos. This paper examines how Balkan comedies during the state socialist period used traditional comic conventions to offer critiques of the political and social systems, through analysis of three films: Ciguli Miguli (Branko Marjanović, Yugoslavia, 1952, released in 1977), Koncert në vitin 1936 (Concert in 1936, Saimir Kumbaro, Albania, 1978), and Господин за един ден (King for a Day, Nikolay Volev, Bulgaria, 1983). Drawing on the stylistic and visual conventions of silent comedies, these films create a range of comic characters and situations: the misadventures of peasant Purko in King for a Day, the water fight between musicians in Ciguli Miguli, and the policeman’s mannerisms in Concert in 1936. Furthermore, some common characteristics inherent to the cinema of Balkan countries in this period will be identified, such as the struggle between the value system of tradition vs. modernity, civilisation vs. primitiveness, European-ness vs. Balkan-ness, suggesting that such Balkanist constructs which continue to feature in popular cinema in the recent period, did not disappear but were internalised by the communist ideologies.

This paper examines how certain contemporary audio-visual works from post-socialist countries in the Balkan region, employ archival footage from the communist period, to address and problematize the notion of remembering and suppressing national history through collective memory. I specifically focus on the work of the Albanian artist, Armando Lulaj and his videos Albanian Trilogy: A Series of Devious Stratagems (2011, 2012 and 2015) exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale. By re-using images and narratives produced during Enver Hoxha’s regime, and still ingrained in Albanian visual memory, these films provide alternative readings of Albanian history from the Cold War to the present day. What is more, some of this archival material is made public for the first time, while the rest has been dormant and purposely forgotten in archival vaults. Lulaj’s playful excursions, create connections between a problematic and suppressed past and the difficult and selective present, by juxtaposing evocative and politically charged visual records and contemporary footage of artist’s commissioned performances.

VOL. 90 (DECEMBER 2018) BY ANA GRGIĆ We met Ivan Salatić at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival, where he presented his debut feature about a young woman and her hometown. Salatić speaks about the idea behind the film, the filmmaking process, and the challenge of making films in a small country.