propaganda

Roland Sejko’s doc “A State Film,” culled from a vast archive of official footage made under the regime of Albanian strongman Enver Hoxha, is a fascinating study in the power of image and myth.

Screened in the main competition at the Czech Republic’s primary annual nonfiction film event, the Ji.hlava Intl. Documentary Film Festival, the compilation of carefully constructed images for the masses contains much to unpack, says Sejko.

“I’ve been working for several years with propaganda film archives — first with Istituto Luce Cinecitta, and also with the archives of the Albanian communist regime,” Sejko says. “Both contain thousands of films created to construct a political narrative, often with striking cinematic ambition.”

The genre is one Sejko explored in his previous film, “The Image Machine of Alfredo C.,” screened in 2021 at the Venice film fest. That film tells the true story of an Istituto Luce cameraman who filmed Mussolini and fascist propaganda, and, eventually, the head of communist Albania.

“It was a hybrid film, but during its making I realized that the vast Albanian film archive — and the central figure of Enver Hoxha — had never been narrated exclusively through their own images.”

So Sejko, as a professional archivist and head of the editorial department for Italy’s Cinecitta Luce, set about analyzing and curating from the decades of state propaganda films.

“The Albanian propaganda newsreels and documentaries clearly bear the mark of Eastern Bloc cinematography,” Sejko says. “The first Albanian camera operators were trained by Soviet masters — starting with Roman Karmen, the legendary chronicler of revolutions and wars.”

“There was never a manual for the propaganda cameraman, no written rulebook for how to film a regime. Yet something invisible governed their images. A First of May parade filmed in communist Albania looks strikingly similar to one filmed in Moscow or Bucharest or Sofia in the same years.”

Indeed, the images of cheering worker heroes and dancing girls in traditional folk garb seen in “A State Film” are hauntingly familiar.

Spanning the post-WWII years, with Albanians urged to “obey and execute the laws of the government” while honoring heroes’ bloody sacrifices, the footage makes clear Hoxha’s devotion to Stalin and Yugoslavian dictator Josip Broz Tito.

Outsize portraits of all three are hauled down endless streets as crowds of obligatory fans parade their wheelbarrows, shovels and carbines. Praises are sung for industry while defensive bunkers, of which Hoxha build hundreds of thousands, withstand test blasts, proving their readiness to stand up to decadent imperialist forces from the West.

Dogs and guinea pigs are sacrificed, presumably to test exposure to potential gas attacks.

And all the while, there’s always another rousing patriotic song for the peasants to sing.

“It is not just the cameraman’s technique that creates this resemblance,” Sejko says. “It is the vision of the world being shown: always the same choreography of collective joy.”

That said, as audiences take in “A State Film,” they begin to perceive that the images have been somehow distilled. Then they may notice the soundtrack, with the original heavy-handed narration replace by the sounds of the breeze in trees, birds chirping and feet tramping unpaved roads.

“In official propaganda films — newsreels, documentaries, parades — the narrator’s voice was not descriptive but prescriptive: it told viewers what to think. Replacing it with another commentary, even a critical one, would have meant repeating the same mechanism.”

“So I removed not only the voice but the whole original soundtrack, keeping only what was real — applause, songs, speeches. I built a new, realistic soundscape with footsteps, murmurs, creaks, silences, as if the scenes had been recorded live. This new texture restores the images’ physicality and opens a space where sound itself becomes a narrative tool.”

Add to this the intercutting of footage from Hoxha’s personal archive, showing moments away from the cheering masses, invariably featuring drives in the dictator’s favorite black Mercedes, and a striking contrast emerges.

These motifs take on a symbolic value, according to Sejko, and suggest the loneliness and isolation of power. “A State Film” raises the question of how forms of propaganda have changed, while also forcing uncomfortable realizations as to how many of the classic tropes are still being rolled out today.

“A State Film” has been described as demonstrating “how the archive is not just a repository of images, but a tool for interpreting and rewriting history.”

Indeed, the chilling parade of carefully staged scenes does seem to transcend the framework of national history, and, as the director says, explore the function of the image in the political sphere, and its ability to create collective memory.