Agency and structure in Albanian post-socialist cinema: Lessons from three films

Ridvan Peshkopia American University of Tirana
Lars Kristensen University of Central Lancashire
Thomas Logoreci Marubi Film Academy

abstract
Post-socialist societies struggle with contradictions between traditional social struc tures and the newly emerging free individual.1 While the former represent communi tarian solutions for social malaises, the latter reflects the ontological changes in these societies as they embrace western-style capitalism. Artists live amidst such struggles, interpret them artistically and discover ironies that often leave audiences perplexed about human fate in this new social order. Often, philosophical answers are given unintentionally, and the possibility that neither the free individual nor social struc tures will prevail leads to fatalistic conclusions. On one hand, such conclusions reflect the artist’s difficulty in finding a moral compass during the hardships of tran sition; on the other, they reflect the sustained will of the intellectual fight for agency. We will consider the background of three post-socialist Albanian films: Gjoleka djali i Abazit/Father and Godfather (Dhimitër Anagnosti 2005); Tuneli/Tunnel (Ilir Butka 2002); and Parrulat/Slogans (Gjergj Xhuvani 2001). Anagnosti’s film is a traditional historical drama; Xhuvani offers a ‘modern’ art-house cinema model; while Butka has appropriated an experimental, ‘video-art’ mode of film-making. The struggle between the individual and social structures leads to differing narra tives in each of these films; yet in none of the cases can the outcomes be celebrated as victories. We argue that the Albanian post-socialist cinema is not merely a recycling of outmoded models. Instead, these film-makers tackle this agency–structure conflict head on, producing varying outcomes that are quite often fatalistic rather than opti mistic, rendering this cinema a different hybrid altogether. ...
....
Tunnel The short film Tunnel, written and directed by Ilir Butka, examines to a large extent the film-maker’s own physical and intellectual journey during the 1990s. Butka graduated in 1989 from the University of Tirana’s Institute of Fine Arts, and began working with the state-run film enterprise Kinostudio Shqipëria e Re. In March 1991, he moved to Italy, where he developed a career as a mural painter and restaurateur. He returned to Tirana in the mid-1990s to pursue a career first as a prize-winning painter and then as a TV and film producer.
Butka’s art practice combines an unquenched curiosity of the inner human and an active interest in the outer individual, namely its interaction with the rest of society. He navigates through these notions with the intuition of an artist rather than with deep intellectual meditation.15 This is also visible in the film, which stylistic traits include muted sepia tones, a hand-held camera, with tight framing, shooting on found locations and a heavy reliance on actors and their performance as the central image. It is a short film made for distribution outside the usual lines of mainstream cinema consumption, and it leans more towards artist film production and specialist film festival as its exhibition form rather than popular cinema production. In Tunnel, an anonymous young man in his early to mid-30s (Artur Gorishti), very likely a middle class resident of the capital city, takes a train trip through much of the country then returns back to the central station where his journey began. We are introduced to this character as he descends from the station steps on to the tracks before an intertitle which asks the  question ‘Are we going inside the tunnel or the tunnel is coming inside us?’ This clearly suggests that this film is concerned both with crossing terri tory and with internal discovery. Silently, the man makes his way among the other passengers, all of them non-professional actors whom Butka cast during the shooting. He finds a compartment and then sits chewing sunflower seeds, a unique form of relaxation for Albanian men during the 1990s. An older man joins him (Mihal Rama); he is bigger in stature and unshaven. He sits silently and lights a cigarette. As the train enters a tunnel, a brawl erupts in the pitch black cabin between the two men and, for one who knows Albanian, the cause of the exchange becomes clear only when the train is again in daylight. We see the two men standing nose to nose, arguing vehemently over whether the door of the compartment should remain open or closed, and weirdly changing positions in that argument (the lead character who began arguing that the door should stay open ends by closing it and vice versa). In a few seconds, the men sit back silently and begin playing chess. They exchange cigarettes and light them for each other, a sign of respect among Albanian men. Then we have the first dialogue, with the second man asking the first about his destination. He responds: ‘I’m leaving’. Then he adds that he is done with this place and that he has decided to begin his tour of the world and maybe come back some day. Then: ‘There is only one problem; I don’t know where I am going’. A teenager appears. We learn that he is Deni and is migrating to Greece; he has been there before. Then, the first traveller asks the teenager Deni the odd question: What was he called in Greece? ‘Dhionis’. ‘Dhionis?’ ‘Dhionis’. This conversation parodies the tendency among Albanians to change their origi nal names in order to conform to the cultures of their countries of migration. A major infringement upon individualism notwithstanding, it remains the only negotiable territory left open to social structures. Not even his aged mother left behind and the bleak perspective of finding a cemetery lot for her prevents our main character from departing from his homeland. The rest of the film places our character amid several landscapes typi cal of post-communist Albania of the 1990s, each as surreal as the next. The time spent alone also suggests reflective decisions that the lead char acter takes away from his environment. His silence and the single close-up we see of him suggest his tumultuous inner world, but ultimately we are left in the dark about what is happening within. Perhaps, as the opening intertitle suggests, the tunnel is beginning to enter inside of him. Finally, the film ends as it begins, with our main character climbing the same stairs that we saw him descending in the opening before boarding the train; he has returned to the place of departure. While this ending can be seen as the inability of the character to thoroughly disassociate from structures, such as geographical landscape and rail tracks, already in place, he nonetheless makes his journey where he engages freely with the chance encounters with his co-passengers. The narrative mode is neutral, thus marking an achieve ment of the director who has managed to keep this journey intact by his personal emotional experience. Tunnel is a dithyramb for the victory of the individual against social structures. The latter appear here and there, but we find no reason to believe that they affect or have the potential to alter our character’s choices; at the most, they might change his mood, not his itinerary. The social structures are like the linking spaces between railway carriages, of which we get repeated shots throughout the film. In this space, we see each carriage’s buffers rubbing against each other and the chains that link the two vehicles, but also the constant running tracks behind, as if super imposed onto a void created from indiscernible ground. Just as the linked carriages, nothing seems to stand in the way of our protagonist. His dark journey echoes the film’s brooding style, but conforms to the return narra tive so important to many Eastern European films of the post-communist era. Interestingly, Gjergj Xhuvani’s most recent film Lindje, perëndim, lindje/ East, West, East (2009) is precisely a return narrative, where a bicycle racing team gets stranded abroad and have to cycle their way home to Albania in the chaotic time following the Communist regime’s fall. In contrast to Xhuvani’s film, Butka’s Tunnel leaves no room for celebration of the return. The return of our character to the same stairs where he began his journey leaves us perplexed about his individual victory which, at that point, takes the connotation of a Pyrrhic victory, with only the lead character compre hending its spiritual toll 

Article in Studies in Eastern European Cinema