God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December.
(J.M. Barrie)

The twentieth century will be remembered – especially in the European context – for the two World Wars, the Cold War, the rise and fall of communism and the (military) conflicts in its aftermath, and, last but not least, as a period when “coming to terms with the past” was a central theme of public discourse, particularly as channelled through the media. Commissions of truth, access to formerly closed archives and to the secret police files, the working through of painful memories – more formally referred to in some fields as “Memory Work”[1]  – and public apologies for historical actions are features that are, alongside others, part of this discourse. How these elements of the discourse are performed depends, of course, on the country and the regime which has been displaced. However, such processes depend even more on which system is established in place of the old one, because this new system will limit the ways that these processes can manifest themselves and their potential.

Before further exploring the specifics of how these processes, especially regarding Memory Work in certain political systems, are manifested, we should be aware that before this recent development that promotes the approach of remembering the (usually traumatic) past, Western civilisation had a “history of forgetting”, which started centuries ago and was confirmed, for example, by Churchill’s “Europe Speech” made in 1946, in which he seeks to leave behind the confrontational and cruel experiences of the recent war and overcome them by ignoring them (“We must all turn our backs upon the horrors of the past and we must look to the future.”) Although there is magnanimity in this approach towards one’s enemies, there is also an evasion of one’s own responsibility, and Churchill in his speech avoids criticism of the inequities of colonialism and praises Europe as the fairest and most cultured region in the world (T. G. Ash, 2002, VI).

Official acts of remembering are more often political agendas that are intended to create specific cultural contexts. The process of coming to terms with the past, in groups and individuals, is influenced by these socially constructed contexts. In reality this process is much more subtle than public discourses usually suggest, because regardless of whether it is the “remembering” or the “forgetting” that is supposedly at the forefront, the reality is that most often it is a mix of both. The present flourishing trend of memory-discourse in the public sphere and in particular in the media has naturally also left its impact on scholarly discourse.

There are numerous suggestions for why remembering has suddenly come to the fore. For example, it has been variously linked to the dying out of the generation that experienced the atrocities of the world wars and also to the desire to secure a “sense of self” in the wake of post-modern theories of a decentred human subject (King: 2000, 11). Some refer to the parallel boom in memoir-writing and confessional literature (Ugre?ic: 1998, 22), and Elsaesser suggests that because history has become more discontinuous, more is asked of memory and it has become a battleground in a new identity politics (Elsaesser: 1999: 3). My personal belief is that this development is linked to the decline of the “big” theories and ideologies that provide a collective perspective, meaning that the focus has become less on absolute historical truth than on how one receives the past.

Intervista (Anri Sala, 1998), the film I will focus on in this essay, can be viewed as part of a wider train that has seen a renewed interest in European documentary film – and especially in the complexities of history and politics in the Balkan space. This trend can be at least partly seen as a reaction to the general need to revisit history after the official end of the Cold War. To give just few examples of documentaries that re-evaluate history in the Balkans: the work of Hungarian Péter Forgács (A dunai exodus / The Danube Exodus, 1998; Angelos’ Film, 2000), German Ulrike Ottinger (Suedostpassage / Southeast Passage, 2002), Italian Angela Ricchi Lucchi and Armenian Yervant Gianikian (Inventario Balcanico / Balkan Inventory, 2000), Croatian Lordan Zafranovic (Zalazak stoljéca [Testament L. Z.] / The Decline of the Century: Testament L.Z., 1994), as well as the collaboration between German Harun Farocki and Romanian Andrei Ujica (Videogramme einer Revolution /Videograms of a Revolution, 1992). An important feature of these documentaries that seems to confirm my earlier mentioned belief is that they do not claim to present “collective truths” based on “objective facts”, but rather expound on the problematic issues of representing the past and stress the subjectivity of history. In doing this, they concentrate on personal memories and on the meaning of the past for the individual.

Discourses on Memory/Remembering

Trying to follow existing theoretical frameworks in which not only the discourse around memory but its nature itself gets addressed, it becomes obvious that there exists a tension because of the occupation of the theme by on the one hand psychoanalytical and on the other hand cultural discourses. The nowadays gaining interest in memory is not a new phenomenon, but can be described as a revival or refocusing on it.[2] It was in the field of psychoanalysis that this focus found its most dominant mode of expression. The metaphorical image of the remembering of an individual that gets usually promoted by the psychoanalytical concept is the working of memory as a video-recorder or as psychic container of the unspoken secret (King, 14/15). This image supports the more popular understanding where memory is associated with the illusion of a momentary return to a lost past.

Connecting now memory/remembering with history and (cultural) collectives, we get confronted with a quite different nature of discipline, namely an experiential, contextual, and expressive one, what is also the main reason for a certain tension between the two ideas until today. Already Halbwachs (1967)[3] and later Thompson (in Jeffrey & Edwall, 1994), Zerubavel (1997) and Kihlstrom (1996, 2000) demonstrate the use of both concepts by bridging the gap between individual and collective memory.

Speaking about our participation in different groups, we have to be aware that in those certain milieus our life happened already before we know about it (Halbwachs, 42). Basically I think that those ‘in-between’ phases or interstices, in which we become step by step conscious members of groups and in which we take part in collective thinking the very first time, confronted yet with those blurred images, will still be effective later on. This is maybe one of the reasons why people, who are convinced of their rational thinking, cannot recover from early identifications with certain ideas and feelings.

When Halbwachs stresses the term ‘reconstruction’, which is the one, that also the newer approaches are focusing on, his specific idea of reconstruction is that we are reconstructing along side our other memories and alongside memories of others in already presaged channels, which can be seen as a hermeneutic approach.

Nowadays we can speak of a sort of regained territory when it comes to the autobiographical approach to memory, but still we are not allowed to forget that it derives from our experiences in various social contexts.

It is only recently that theories of memory have investigated how remembering occurs for example across generations, across regions, or across cultures. Zerubavel speaks about the social foundation of mental actions such as perceiving, attending, classifying, remembering or reckoning the time, and he states that what takes place inside our heads is deeply affected by our social environments, which are typically groups […] thought communities carve up and classify reality, assign meanings, and perceive things (Zerubavel: 1999, introduction).

The analysis of the film Intervista is a perfect case that shows the interdependence between collective and autobiographical memory and that suggests that vivid history, told by afflicted individuals rather than by a machinery that implements discourses of a ‘common’ history in order to foster one’s national identity, is always more complex and even contradictory as individuals can receive the past in part very differently from each other.

The Director and His Film

The film Intervista was realised by the invitation of the French Film school L’Atelier Video de l’Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs and produced by Idéale Audience. It was marketed in anglophone environments as Finding the Words, although the Albanian title is simply the word for “interview”. In this film the young director, Anri Sala, confronts his own mother by inviting her to examine a reel of 16mm film, found by chance while the family is moving flat, showing her from the time when she had been the head of the Communist Youth Alliance of Albania. The reel documents an interview with his mother which was recorded at the time of the Youth Congress in 1977. But it only shows black-and-white images; the soundtrack is missing. (Sala later in the film tracks down the sound-engineer for the interview who explains to him that, unlike with modern-day technology, the sound recording was made separately from the recording of the images.) The mother is puzzled as she even didn’t know about the existence of this reel, and she states that she can’t remember her words at all. After unsuccessfully trying to reveal the text by the help of different people who were involved in the interview (such as the sound-engineer) or who knew his mother at that time, Sala finally has his mother’s words lip-read by a deaf-mute. When presenting the interview with the newly added subtitles to his mother, a struggle between her present-day personality and her past one starts to form.

With Intervista, the director Anri Sala, who was born in Tirana 1974 and has lived and worked in Paris since 1996, drew international attention towards his work, and since then he has established himself as an international film and visual artist. Besides filming in a more or less traditional sense, he has also worked on many multi-media projects and conceptional art works. In 2001, he won the Young Artist’s Prize at the Biennale in Venice. Frequently, as in Intervista, the soundtrack is the centre of attention of his projects. Intervista, which has a run-time of just 26 minutes, was shown at numerous international film festivals and won several prizes.[4] His films often show an approach that is between documentary and fiction and therefore are sometimes also categorised as short-films or “documentary short films” (like Nocturnes or Quelle histoire, both 1999; Missing Landscape, 2001; Dammi i colori [Pass Me the Colours, 2003]). Sala’s works, which are repeatedly described as personal and political, are usually not only engaged with (auto)biographical memory, “but also refer to a larger dimension: a society’s debate about its history” (Galerie Hauser & Wirth).

The Film’s Approach and Context

While all the post-communist countries may have basically similar experiences with regards to the development of their relationship to the past, it is worth paying specific attention to Albania’s local experience in this ongoing process. On the one hand, because its communist past was to a significant extent different from that of other communist states and on the other because the change happened with a delay, which naturally provoked a corresponding delay in the process of coming to terms with the past. Reasons for the delay are for the most part easily explainable, it stemming from the history of isolation of the country and its even stronger ideological indoctrination in comparison with other communist states.

One of the most interesting elements of the film Intervista is that the approach to exploring the material featured in the film echoes the form of the material itself, the interview. The crucial difference is that the reel shows a “representational” interview, which had the function of confirming the ideology of the time by repeating certain formulaic statements, while the interview between Sala and his mother is a very painful and intimate experience in the form of a critical personal dialogue with oneself structured around answering questions to the son. The private and emotional relationship between the two can always be felt.

It is important to remember that at the time when the mother gave the official interview, Albania was at the point of turning to total isolation, politically and economically. After the disruption of the Albanian-Soviet relationship in 1961 and the withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact in 1967, the relationship between Albania’s next pact-partner, China, started to fall apart in 1976 and would come to an end in 1978, one year after the first interview with the mother took place. Hoxha did not recognise the Cultural Revolution in China, seeing it as a revisionist move, a final parting from Marxism-Leninism, and he was not prepared for a similar revolution led by the masses. It was, therefore, politically convenient on both sides for the alliance, which included large loans from China to Albania, to cease. Hoxha’s view was that Albania should rely in future only on itself and its leader. In Albania, in contrast to most communist states, nationalism wasn’t constructed as an enemy of communism or a dangerous threat, but the Party used nationalism to legitimise itself, and this practice gained in strength in the late 1970s, as Hoxha saw it even more important to give people a sense of their past and to instil isolationist sentiments and foster a sense of ethnic compactness (Pipa, 121). In this sense Hoxha was supreme in exploiting his people’s “collective memory” to enhance the sway of his version of communism. The film Intervista was made seven years after the last communist regime had fallen apart and one year after the Civil War in Albania.

Traces of the climate of this communist period are revealed in a phone conversation between Sala and a man called “Pushkin”, who was the interviewer of his mother recorded on the film. He gives Sala information about his profession and the practices of the time around the interview only when he promises that it will not appear on TV:

I did over 2000 interviews. What could I tell you? In all my interviews, even the one with your mother, my questions were foreseeable. Just like all the answers. Even the TV audiences could predict the contents of the interview. The questions were set in advance. You could only give positive answers.

The people were not only subjected to isolation, but also to propaganda, and in many cases brutal police measures. The identification cards, that Albanian citizen were required to carry, contained family and employment information and the like. These cards secured an effective control over the population. In the Canadian documentary Albanian Journey: End of an Era (Paul Jay, 1991) a young woman, who was interviewed first in 1987 and then later in 1991, admits in the latter interview that she didn’t dare say everything she was thinking in her first interview, and even so, she had nightmares that she would be arrested. She leaves, as Sala’s mother does later in Intervista, the impression of being deeply confused, of being lost between the past and the present. She concludes, “To be precise, I do not know what we achieved and what not.”

Meeting the Past

When Sala finally succeeds in obtaining the text of the interview, deciphered with the help of a deaf-mute, and then for the first time confronts his mother with what she had said, her inner fight starts to dominate the rest of the film. Quite aside from the ideological content of the words, she couldn’t believe that this would be a way in which she would express herself.

This confrontation with a previous period of one’s life, especially in these times of the flourishing of coming to terms with the past, is an experience that at any one time will be happening a multitude of times at many other places. What makes Intervista unique is its lack of concern for the “end product” of remembering that characterises many similarly themed but narratively more traditional documentaries – the final statement, such as the one described above given by Pushkin in Sala’s film. Instead, Intervista tries to follow the inner process of remembering that happens “before” one comes to a clear statement on one’s past (which does not necessarily have to happen at all). Although the film is a highly constructed product – surely there were some discussions with the mother before starting to film her, and it is undoubtedly a “selection” of her answers to different questions that we see – still the pieces we are able to watch have the potential to let us participate in the “journey” back to one’s past, in the struggle for survival by trying to explore, accept, and integrate this “real” past into the present life.

Another basic insight of newer theoretical approaches in regard to the memory-discourse is that the phenomenon of “remembering” as an “activity” and the concept of “memory” as a “thing” need to be differentiated. In addition, it was only in the mid-1980s that a clear distinction was made between at least two different kinds of re-collective experiences: remembering, one’s concrete awareness of oneself in the past, and knowing, one’s abstract knowledge of the past (Tulving: 1985, in Kihlstrom, Kim, Dabady: 1996). And finally it was discovered by more recent authors (Kihlstrom, Kim, Dabady: 1996), that the traditional remember/know distinction obscures further important phenomenological distinctions, notably feeling (intuitive knowing) and perhaps even others, such as believing, and that these “memory qualia” are differentially associated with one’s confidence level. All four qualities can be observed in Intervista, but predominantly it’s the “remembering” which is explored. The decision of the director to almost exclusively show interior scenes reinforces the focus of this inner process of remembering.

The Process of Remembering

In this section, I would like to invite the reader to participate in the mother’s process of remembering step by step through which we will also learn gradually about her present life.

At the beginning the mother is amused by the fact that this reel (without soundtrack) exists at all, and with a breeze of charm she says to her son, “It’s from the time I was a militant,” and she laughs. One of the first images of the reel we see is of the mother – then a very beautiful woman at the age of 32 – taking her place on a stage besides Enver Hoxha. When he looks at her, she instinctively feels his attention and responds to it by turning her face directly up towards his face and adoringly smiling. Now, in the present time, as she follows these pictures she shakes her head and in doing so indicates to us her astonishment at her behaviour. The flat, she is living in at the present represents a bourgeois life-style with an artistic ambience. After we see the masses applauding Hoxha, there is a cut and the interview with the mother starts. From her body language and face gestures it shows highly professional acting in the traditional sense. And as the soundtrack is at this time still missing, the body language leaves a more persistent impression in the viewer than it would do in combination with the sound.

The subtitles, once added with the aid of the deaf-mute, consist of sentences saying, for example, that the struggle against imperialism, revisionism and the two superpowers is only possible if youth unites its efforts under the guardianship of the Marxist-Leninist Party. We see the mother sitting on the couch, looking at the screen, then again the black-and-white image of her during the interview in her youth. The text continues, “Examining the current political situation, not only in certain countries but around the world as well, and by discussing problems, we can appreciate the importance of a people’s revolutionary movement.” Suddenly she stops speaking and moves back with her body and smiles with a mixture of shyness and awkwardness. The viewer realises through this behaviour that the official interview is over. By the rupture in her body language, it becomes clear that she was more performing than answering the questions spontaneously.

Although at the very end of the process the mother will accept that this part of her life is part of her life history and step by step will be able to also explain her motives for her behaviour, at this time the mother still is stunned, “It’s absurd! I just can’t believe it! It’s just spouting words […] I know how to express myself! It’s not the political view, but it makes no sense.” The son persistently reminds her that there aren’t any cuts in the film. He continues with the question how she feels that it took deaf-mutes to read into her past. With a soft smile she replies, “It’s an irony of fate!” Soon after this she admits that her generation was living in a deaf and dumb system, where they only spoke with one mouth and one voice. But she also stresses that things weren’t all black and white: “We could live, fall in love, have children…” In saying this, she presents a powerful self-image, but she soon continues in a mixture of exhaustion and irony: “We thought we’d change the world, and little by little we lost everything. Our generation was the victim of past errors, whereas our parents were luckier. They’d just won the war and everything was possible.” We now face another black-and-white image – a victory statue on the left of the screen and on the right the slogan, “Long live the revolutionary spirit!”

The image again vanishes and we still observe his mother from the same camera angle as before. She informs us convincingly that if she could go back, she wouldn’t act differently, and that she believed in what she was doing, that much she could say.

We suddenly cut to an old couple in their desolate flat. We learn they were in prison at the time the mother gave the interview, and the extremely comfortless state of her flat makes it clear that these former prisoners are also at the margins of present-day society. The old woman, who knew his mother, differentiates her approach to the past by letting Sala know that there were those who knew what was going on and those who continued to cling to their ideals: “Your mother was a young militant, honest, sincere. I don’t think she acted out of hypocrisy. She believed in those ideals, she really did. Then came the great disenchantment. We touched bottom in a system meant to create the ideal society.” Yet, when Hoxha died in 1985, only a few Albanian eyes were without tears (see, for example, footage in Equinox, Kutjim Cashku, 2002). In Albanian Journey: End of an Era, even young people interviewed as late as 1987 speak partly passionately about their pride of the survival of the nation and their optimistic belief in their social ideas. Only three years later, in 1990, voices of this same youth state in the documentary that the former regime has left nothing for them. This is a proof that not only historical discourses will be always open for further retranslations in future, but also the personal history of the individual.

Once again, we are confronted with Sala’s mother; her face now nearly fills the whole screen and the image is very dark. Compared to the ironic distance she managed to keep until now she seems to be much more moved and sensitive. She tells us, that the commandments of communism were to be honest, socially-minded, idealistic, energetic, optimistic etc.: “I was all of those things. I still am that way.” It feels as she is now very much fighting herself and we even can see tears in her eyes. Her face finally covers the whole screen, when the son asks her, if the enthusiasm in the archive footage was real. She states, “I can talk to you about concrete experience, about the efforts of young people. We built all the orchard terraces. We built the northern roads. We built the railroads. It was ‘real’ Anri, because we ‘were building’.” It sounds as if she is going to justify her youth in front of her son, and this statement leaves also a strong impression, because it is the first time that she addresses her son directly by his name.

After a few more repetitions of the image in which she is standing next to Enver Hoxha, she gradually approaches this official past critically and with a certain distance, and, with applause for Hoxha still fresh in our ears, she recalls that hysteria, the delirious enthusiasm of congresses and ceremonies of state, was a forced enthusiasm, that it was a crowd’s hysteria for its leader who was like an icon: “The further away the Leader was, the more mythic he seemed… The closer you got, the more banal he became, until he lost all significance.” At the end of the film, when she is suffering even more from finally having to accept that this reel shows a “real” part of her life that she has already left behind her, she admits in her confusion that she probably wouldn’t have agreed to give the interview to anybody else other than her son.

The Newly Translated Past and its Impact on the Mother’s View of History

In the last part of the film, we feel that the process of recalling is coming to an end and that the sentences of the mother are developing towards a conclusion. We see her now again in a bright room and her face still fills nearly the whole screen. She finally lets us know: “I’m frightened because I don’t see a way out. I don’t understand what’s happening anymore. I am frightened. I am very confused.” She is now less emotional than before but very serious and straightforward in expressing herself, as at this advanced moment she is already more and more able to accept her feelings and to partly explain their causes. She further states: “The recent events [i.e., the Civil War][5] have crushed lots of hopes. It’s as if a destructive force had swept away all constructive energy. I’m frightened. I’m frightened for you and me.” Although she expresses her fear in this last part of the film, she leaves a stronger impression than in scenes before. She continues that if this country has a future, he’ll have one, too. But if it doesn’t, neither will he. Then we are watching for a longer time her face, while she keeps silent. Finally she concludes: “I think we’ve passed on to you the ability to doubt. Because you must always question the truth.” In the background we see a painting, which only lets someone intuitively understand, that it represents herself. The involvement of this painting on a subversive level indicates the difference between the “real person” and a “constructed abstraction” of the same person and has the purpose to underline the message of her last sentence, recommending we always question the truth. This symbolically should tell us, that we most often see things from only one side, but the “truth” is always more complex, often contradictory and at the same time in part elusive. While the mother is consciously integrating her past as the head of the Communist Youth Alliance of Albania into her life-story, she also automatically redefines the image she has had of herself. What she recommends to her son she in reality is recommending to herself, and she integrates it into her new approach to the “historical truth”.

Conclusions

A basic observation regarding the camera’s involvement is that most images of the reel as well as most of the images of the “present time” fill the whole screen. Both realities, the mother’s past and present, have equal size during this process. This decision regarding the same positions of the camera when addressing different temporal contexts helps to foster a more or less balanced dynamic of the process, going back and forth between the different locations of history.

The mother’s process of recalling the past and arriving at a new kind of relationship with it follows a certain structure. The process starts with distanced irony, goes on to renunciation of the repressed “reality”, with a painful inner fight between two “personality histories”, and ends with a mixture of conscious fear and confusion but finally also with an adapted conclusion by writing history anew after having changed the relationship not only to the past but also to oneself. This observed process can be linked to Steedman’s approach that suggests that the past gets continuously modified by the experiences of the (periodically retranslated) self, who is doing remembering ‘a’ past, not ‘the’ past (Steedman, 29).

If we compare the statement of the former sound-engineer in Intervista, who is now a taxi-driver in Tirana, with the one of the female archivist in another film about Albania’s history, Biografi (Eline Flipse, 2001), we see further how differently the “subjective” views to the past can be manifested. The former sound-engineer lets us know that he prefers the present’s fear of the street, robberies and muggings, to the fear of the old times when he was terrified of a technical hitch during interviews with the nomenclature. For him, the first kind of fear ends, but the latter one only ends with death. The female archivist in Biografi answers in an interview that the only reason she stays in Albania is because of her good memories of those old days, of the enthusiasm she used to have. Although this can be seen as proof of the selective quality of remembering, both interviewees will share a common collective ground to a certain extent, having both lived in one and the same society.

At the end of Intervista, we are left with a critical approach to the truth as such. But which truth we are looking for? The mother’s? That of history? And if the latter, what could be a definition of the “historical truth” or the reality in historical discourses? Is it more “true” that the ideology was one-sided or that, as the mother tells us, building railroads by the youth was a “real” thing. If one strongly believed in the ideals, was this feeling then not “real”? Who defines the criteria of selection that should be the objects dealt with and explored, when writing history? And we also have to be aware, referring to the question of whether theories of memory/remembering can hold across generations, that each generation – a historically specific group – has its own vantage points from which to view things and experience them. In Albanian Journey: End of an Era, the older generation states in July 1990, a time when many people, young ones especially, fled to Italy, that life has improved and that they couldn’t understand their children who had left. However, many of the youth didn’t compare, as the older generation did, present-day life with the past one, but with their perceptions of the West, and they would argue that there is still no freedom of speech in Albania. And yet, as Intervista reveals, we have in addition different approaches of individuals of one and the same generation to the past, as these individuals have once again different criteria for defining the (existing or desired) “real”.

Just as Zerubavel notes in the passage cited in the introduction, both will share a common collective ground to a certain extent, having been living in one and the same society, which affects at least in part what “takes place inside our heads”. But still the subjective approach can be, as can be seen in Intervista, quite distinctive in how someone receives his or her past. But where is the significant border between the two qualities? And which determines the other in a more dominant way?

If, apart from all those critical voices we have been confronted with, the mother in Intervista believed in her ideals or the female archivist in the film Biografi feels this comfortable relationship to “her past”, we cannot deny these feelings as facts either. But of course we have to be aware that these facts are selected ones too and that they only show part of a whole. In her essay (Not) Writing History: Rethinking the Intersections of Personal History and Collective Memory with Hans von Aufsess, the historian Susan Crane asks when the personal becomes historical. And she answers it with the statement, “Whenever one is thinking about oneself historically” (Crane, 1996). Trying to answer the question of whether it is the subjective approach which determinates the collective perspectives on history (known as historical and officially sanctioned discourses) or the other way around, I would tend to say that this can’t be verified in a general way, but will depend from case to case. But what can be concluded in the end is that there is no theory that is totally free of traces of one or several biographies of its/their creators.

Endnotes

[1] “Memory Work” can be defined as the process in which an individual (perhaps a psychiatric patient, although the term far from only applies to “ill” people) or a society tries to recover, explore and integrate traumatic memories, such as those associated with wars.
[2] The first time within theoretical discourses in history when there could be observed a gaining importance was towards the end of the 19th century. The new focus on memory then was part of the secular drive, which replaced the soul with something which was defined as knowledge (Hacking, in King, 11).
[3] Halbwachs died in the Buchenwald concentration camp at the end of World War II.
[4] For example, Best Documentary, 2000 Brooklyn International Film Festival; Best Documentary, 2000 Williamsburg Film Festival (New York); Best Documentary, 1998 Belfort Film Festival (France); Best Short Film, 1998 Amascultura Film Festival (Portugal); Grand Prize, 1999 Estavar Festival (France); North American Premiere, 1999 Vancouver Film Festival.
[5] The Civil War was caused by the collapse of investment “pyramid schemes” in early 1997 in which $1 billion of personal savings, equivalent a third of Gross Domestic Product, was lost by as many as 300,000 Albanians (Financial Times, 4/3/97, in Saltmarshe: 2001, 61). Albanians lost faith in the government, which appears to have sanctioned the national swindle and demanded the resignation of the president, Sali Berisha, who duly left office a few months later in July 1997. The Civil War resulted in more than 1,600 deaths. There exist several other Albanian films which also deal with the Civil War in Albania in 1997, e.g. Equinox (Kutjim Cashku, 2002), Super Balkan (Fatmir Koci, 1998).

References

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Douglas Saltmarshe. Identity in a Post-Communist Balkan State: An Albanian village Study (Aldershot – Burlington USA – Singapore – Sydney: Ashgate, 2001).
Carolyn Steedman. Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (London: Virago, 1986).
Dubravka Ugresic. The Culture of Lies. Antipolitical essays. Trans. from Serbo-Croatian to English, Celia Hawkesworth (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998).
Eviatar Zerubavel. Social Mindscape: An Invitation to Cognitive Sociology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999)

Filmography:

Albanian Journey: End of an Era (Paul Jay, USA, 1990)
Angelos’ Film (Péter Forgács, Netherlands/Greece, 2000)
Biografi (Eline Flipse, Netherlands, 2001)
Dammi i colori / Pass Me the Colours (Anri Sala, Albania/France, 2003)
Danube exodus, The (Péter Forgács, Netherlands, 1999)
Equinox (Kutjim Cashku, Albania, 2002)
Inventario Balcanico (Angela Ricchi Lucchi & Yervant Gianikian, Italy, 2000)
Missing Landscape (Anri Sala, Albania/France, 2001)
Nocturnes (Anri Sala, Albania/France, 1999)
Quelle histoire (Anri Sala, Albania/France, 1999)
Suedostpassage / Southeast Passage (Ulrike Ottinger, Germany, 2002)
Superbalkan (Fatmir Koci, Albania, 1998)
Videogramme einer Revolution / Videograms of a Revolution (Harun Farocki & Andrei Ujica, Germany, 1992)
Zalazak stoljéca (testament L. Z.) / The Decline of the Century: Testament L.Z. (Lordan Zafranovic, Austria/Croatia/Czech Republic/France, 1994)

Created on: Saturday, 9 December 2006 | Last Updated: 9-Dec-06