/BIBLIOTEKA ART & POLITIKE
The Biblioteka Art & Politikë' book series fills in the gaps in Albanian contemporary art theory and writing. As part of MANIFESTO Great Wave, two volumes are planned: a monograph on the legacy of the Albanian communist show trials by Jonida Gashi, which examines the continuation of their avant-garde and modernist impulses in Albanian Socialist Realist cinema (BAP 4); and an edited volume on autofictional writing edited by Sonja Lau (BAP 5), which considers autofiction as a response to the specific urgency in the region to develop new forms of expression in regard to historical and personal experience and a possible way to approach art, and art criticism.
by Jonida Gashi
Published by Pika pa sipërfaqe
Cinema on Trial: From the Newsreels of the Communist Show Trials to the Revolutionary Vigilance Films monograph examines the intertwining of the spheres of justice and cinematography during the period of state socialism in Albania (1944-1991), shedding light on two of the crucial periods in shaping this relationship. They include the first decade after the communist forces came to power, when the foundations of socialist legality and socialist realism art were laid, as well as the era of the Ideological and Cultural Revolution in the second half of the 1960s, when these spheres were radicalized in step with the changes that had engulfed Albanian society as a whole. The particular contribution of this study lies in establishing the relationship between socialist justice and socialist cinematography in post-war Albania within an avant-garde framework, by framing the interaction between these spheres first in terms of the fusion of art (in this case cinematography) with politics (in this case justice), and also within a comparative framework. From Soviet police thrillers of the 1930s and 1940s, to American noirs of the 1940s and 1950s, to Chinese counterintelligence films of the 1950s and 1960s, the author finds much useful in the cinematography of the opposing camps of the Cold War for elaborating on the efforts of local filmmakers to bring the fight against the class enemy to Albanian screens.