The Making of the Socialist Martyr: Pjetr Llesh Doda and Rrug t Bardha

KONSTANTINOS GIAKOUMIS, CHRISTOPHER LOCKWOOD, TRUDY ANDERSON

University of New York Tirana

ABSTRACT
This paper will explore the Christian redemptive sacrificial imagery utilized in the film Rrug t Bardha in rapport with
propaganda and power positioning in socialist filmic representation. After outlining the life of Pjetr Llesh Doda, the films hero,
we shall compare the cinematographic version of his life with parallel examples from the Judeo-Christian tradition and Soviet
socialist cinematographic production. We hope to document a case-study that communism in Albania, consciously or
unconsciously, utilized the emotional and spiritual power of Judeo-Christian sacrificial redemptive examples, along with the
concept of martyrdom, in order to reinforce its ideological ends, thereby projecting the socialist regime as a religious
isomorphism.

Introduction
In this paper we suggest that, in its Albanian variant, communism developed as a religious
isomorpheme. In doing so, we by no means intend to imply that Enver Hoxha was himself a
founder of religion. His relationship to religions was, even if pragmatic at times, variously
distant, antagonistic or hostile. He was well-aware of Lenins hatred and scorn towards religious
socialists and his attempts to eliminate them, and, in fact, shared such views. In a speech entitled
Study Marxist-Leninist Theory, Linking it Closely with Revolutionary Practice delivered at a
meeting commemorating the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the V.I. Lenin Party
school in November 8, 1970, Enver Hoxha acknowledged that:
We hated religion with all the power of our reason, because the revolutionary practice of
our people had clearly brought to light the profoundly reactionary and anti-popular role of
religious doctrines, which supported the feudal-bourgeoisie of the country and the
foreigners who oppressed us. The centuries of never-ceasing liberation struggles had
made our people a revolutionary people. They could not conceive either their existence as
a people or the positive changes in their social life otherwise than by way of war and
revolution. Their uprisings have always had a pronounced anti-imperialist, anti-feudal,
anti-bourgeois and anti-religious character, of course, we cannot yet speak of inspiration
or guidance from the philosophy of Marx, which became properly crystallized among us
only after the founding of the Party. (Hoxha 1982, 816)
Indeed, by 1970 such hatred had translated in concrete flesh-and-bones actions against religion.
Under the Marxist-Leninist ideology on religion, Enver Hoxha adopted radical Maoist
approaches (cf. Hoxha 1982, 94-113) in dealing with religion so that in the course of 1966-1967
a systematic effort to deconstruct all religious customs and monuments, as remnants of
backwardness in the country, was undertaken. All religious activities were therefore banned
(Hoxha 1982, 103-13; cf. Article 55 of the 1976 Constitution of Albania) and Albania
proclaimed itself the world's first atheist state (Article 37 of the 1976 Constitution). After 1967,
the entire arsenal of communist arts was mobilized by Enver Hoxha in a conscious and
concentrated effort to discredit religion and construct a communist mythology of religion.
Alongside other artistic media, cinematography was an important ideological weapon with two
dominant communist myths on Christianity being manifest in Albanian communist

cinematography. The first myth represents Christianity as a relic of backwardness and Christian
functionaries as reactionary elements who impede the development of the new man of
socialism (e.g. Dh. Anagnosti, Komisari i Drits, 1967; and Dh. Anagnosti, Pralla nga e
Kaluara, 1987). The second myth portrays Christian dignitaries as agents of foreign states
coveting Albanias territorial integrity (e.g. M. Fejzo, Mesonjtorja, 1979). Within this
ideological framework, it is understandable why the communist regime in Albania would
actively work towards the eradication of all religious institutions and symbols.
Surprisingly, however, rather than effacing everything resembling religion, the communist state
effectively made itself a religious isomorpheme retaining the form, structure and typology of
Christian spiritual experiences in particular, thereby crossing over rigid ideological barriers
(Giakoumis 2013; Giakoumis 2014; Giakoumis & Lockwood 2015). It seems that, as devoid
from religious influences as they could possibly be, Albanian communist leaders nevertheless
understood the liminality of religious manifestations and used them pragmatically from the
outset to suit their own ends. Albanias communist leaders studied religious beliefs meticulously
until at least 1967 (Hoxha 1982, Vepra, 103-13). Their studies led to simulating religious rituals
with a socialist norm and content (Giakoumis 2013; Giakoumis 2014). The retention of religious
norms, forms, structures and functions by Albanias communist regime extended to the entire
spectrum of peoples and institutions daily and festive life; to this end all weapons in the arsenal
of communist aesthetics were utilized. The case study considered in this paper is only one of the
numerous examples from the realm of communist aesthetics that can be provided. It fits into the
context of the Albanian communist regimes attempt to replace the veneration of religious
figures (saints for Christians or babas for Bektashi Muslims) with newly-made heroes of
socialist labour.
This was certainly not the only case of a socialist labour hero made in Albania. To give but a few
comparable examples, we shall mention here Shkurte Pal Vata and Adem Reka (Giakoumis
2014):
Shkurte Vata, a member of the youth brigade of Dukagjin, was a fifteen-year-old teenager from
the village of Pecaj (Dukagjin region) who was sent, shortly after February 1967 (Albanias
Cultural Revolution), to voluntarily work on the construction of a railway between Rogozhina
and Fier. While there she was seriously injured in a landslide and passed away in November of
1967. The post-mortem utilization of the communist communications arsenal involving her
father, Pal Vata, and Enver Hoxha, aimed to turn her into a martyr and cover up the child
labours sweatshop scandal: books, essays, plays and verses were written, sketches were made
(as there was no photograph of her), songs were composed, lapidary statues were carved in her
honour (fig. 1). She was even posthumously proclaimed a party member while the place where
she was fatally injured was marked with a memorial and a statue. Enver Hoxha ordered that
trains crossing the location sound their horn as a sign of respect and even himself paid a visit to
the spot to leave a bouquet of flowers at her memorial on June 28, 1968 (Giakoumis 2013;
Giakoumis 2014).
Adem Reka (1928-1966) (fig. 2) was a dock worker in the harbour of Durrs who died on
November 17, 1966 in the course of a violent windstorm while attempting to secure a loading
crane vessel that later acquired his name. In 1966 a group of soldiers were asked to march from

Tiranas countryside to the harbour of Durrs and back again loaded with sacks of stone in some
sort of penitential pilgrimage. In the years following 1966 an untold number of visitors
amassed from all over Albania to the port of Durrs in order to pay homage to Adem Rekas
room. In 1967, Pal Vata, the father of the aforementioned Shkurte Vata, was appointed as a guide
to the spot where Adem Reka fell; thereby enhancing the blood and sweat dyad in the communist
war and work symbolism (Giakoumis 2013; Giakoumis 2014).
Part 1: The Films Background
The film Rrug t Bardha(White Road) presents a cinematographic version of the story of
Pjetr Llesh Doda (Hapsira 2009). In view that the filmic version of his story is rather different
to the protagonist real life story, it is essential to look at each of them separately. In real life
Pjetr Llesh Doda was a telephone technician who lived in the village of Domgjon, Mirdit in
Northern Albania. Contrary to the filmic romance, Pjetr Llesh Doda was married and a father of
five children, whom he left as orphans upon his death on New Years Eve of 1966 at the age of
29. On the morning of December 31, 1966 Pjetr Llesh Doda, who was the sole breadwinner of
his poor family, received a call that the telephone line to Kuks had suffered a breakdown. His
wife Liza later reported that: while he was getting dressed he told me to prepare the table and
have the New Years meal, because he was to be late (Dervishi 2009). The eldest of his sons,
Zef Lleshi, accompanied his father to the end of the village and was therefore the last to see him
before he embarked upon his ill-fated journey to repair the telephone lines.
Pjetr Llesh Doda, however, never returned home. A week after his disappearance agents from
the Sigurimi Albanias fearsome Secret Security Service visited his family and threatened to
arrest them, as they suspected that Doda had fled to Yugoslavia. It was only a week after the visit
by the Sigurimi agents that rescue teams began searching for him along the path of the telephone
cable lines towards Kuks. His body, frozen in the snow hence preserved in good condition
was discovered by shepherds in the region of Kolsh (Kuks) as many as five weeks after his
disappearance with the melting of snow drifts in early February of 1967.
The communist state at the time did not waste any opportunity in proclaiming a socialist labor
martyr of Pjetr Llesh Doda. His funeral was magnificent with Enver Hoxha himself sending
presents from Tirana, while Domgjons cooperative paid for the completion of Pjetr Llesh
Dodas home, which was still under construction when he died. Soon after his death, his wife
Liza, by way of an order from high Party officials, was appointed as a telephone operator, a
position which she held until 1994. The institution of the socialist hero / martyr was firstly
introduced in the formative years if the Bolshevik movement and intensified after World War II
in both USSR and Yugoslavia (Perica 2011, 55; Kameda 2013); the Albanian post-World-War-II
variant of the hero / martyr of the socialist labour observed here seems to combine the element of
life-sacrifice of the older model with features of self-sacrifice to achieve higher productivity
results of socialist heroes termed as Stakhanovism (Siegelbawm 1990).
The film was produced in 1973 in Bajram urri and Fush Arrz. The role of Ded (Pjetr
Llesh Doda) was played by Rikard Ljarja, while the role of Liza (her name was Albanianized to
Zana in the film) was filled by Elida Cangonji (fig. 3). Contrary to the real life of the protagonist,
in the film he is presented as having a romance with a telephone operator, Zana, and it was her
zeal towards completion of her duty as a telephone operator that made her push Ded to leave

(fig. 4) and fix the telephone lines (fig. 5). The film presents the entire community of workers as
worrying about the fate of Deda (fig. 6), who was eventually found by workers of a geological
survey hanging on the telephone pole (fig. 7) after having successfully accomplished his duty.
Part 2: Parallels of Redemptive Sacrifice between Christianity and the Film
The literal and historical meaning of the word martyr is not, as it is primarily understood
today, to die for some cause or belief, but rather to witness to that cause or belief by one's life
and actions. In this more historical sense then, the essence of martyrdom is to bear witness to a
truth of greater value than the individual by means of the content of one's life. However, because
the martyr's cause was something which often times constituted a value which was often thought
to transcend mere human existence, the idea of the martyr began to encompass how the believer
came to confront the reality of his or her own death when it came to threaten or infringe upon the
ideal or cause. One major feature of the concept of martyr has always therefore been to
demonstrate a truth which transcends not only the needs of the individual, but also his or her
natural reflexes for self-preservation and happiness in favor of the greater value of the martyric
cause. In conformity to the idea, Pjetr Llesh Doda, this film's hero, is depicted as the
embodiment of the socialist worker's ideal of redemptive sacrifice for the sake of the
community-nation. In this light the personal needs of the individual, or in this case the hero, are
placed on the sacrificial altar of the needs and happiness of the community.
By utilizing the literal and symbolic metaphor of the telephone network, the film presents the
hero's primary role and mission as a kind of linking together of the community at the expense of
his own satisfaction and happiness though this does not involve dying until the end of the film.
It is no accident then, that in the film's opening scenes the audience is provided with the
knowledge that our hero's work is his first and greatest love. In light of this, he has little or no
time for romance or the fulfillment of his other personal needsthough he does in fact possess
such human and personal needs and struggles to attain them in so far as he is able. However, in
contradiction to such personal needs, and as the film progresses towards its final climax, our hero
prefers instead to continue undaunted in his mission. In this way he is lead like a sacrificial lamb
towards the offering up of himself for the greater good of the nation.
In depicting the hero in precisely this light, the makers of the film drew directly, though probably
unwittingly, upon Judeo-Christian religious themes of sacrificial redemption: sentiments which
had longstanding saturation within the greater Balkan atmosphere and culture. In order to better
understand how such themes came to occupy the main content of the film, however, it is first
necessary to understand how these ideas were originally understood within their religious
context. The redemptive sacrifice of one on behalf of many is central to Christian belief,
according to which, first and foremost, Jesus Christ offered up his own life. This he did in order
to, in one sense, redeem the entire community of Christians, and, in another sense, the whole
collective human race so as to become the savior of all men. [1 Tim. 4:10] One may contrast
this with the death of Socrates who died so as to maintain his notion of truth, but not to redeem,
or for the sake of, the larger community per se. With this concept in mind, the Apostle Paul, who
was steeped in Jewish religious imagery, expresses to the Christians of his own time that Christ
loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice... [Eph. 5:2] Elsewhere,
when writing to the Corinthian community near Athens, he again draws upon the concept by
speaking of Christ as a paschal lamb which has been sacrificed on behalf of the community. [1

Cor. 5.7] Paul's language here is an overt typological reference to the liberation of the Jewish
nation from slavery in Egypt. This took place through the event of the Passover, where a lamb
was sacrificed and its blood was placed on the wooden door frame of every Hebrew, thus
prefiguring the deliverance of the entire nation from bondage. In this context the blood of
Christ's own sacrifice on the wood of the Cross would have been a vivid and direct typological
fulfillment of the deliverance located in the Passover to those familiar with the Old Testament
symbolism and myth.
For the most part, Christianity adopted and adapted its own perception of the sacrifice of Christ
on the Cross from the analogous Old Testament Jewish practice of animal sacrifice for the
remission of sins done on the Day of Atonement (Yom HaKippurim). [Lev. 16; Num. 29.7-11]
According to the Biblical tradition, two goats would be selected on this day in order to
symbolically receive and bear the burden of the sin of the whole people through the laying on of
the priest's hands, at which point one of them would be driven out from the community into the
desert to die, and the other sacrificed and offered to God for the sake of the community. For
Christians all such symbolic sacrifices came directly to apply to Christ's own sacrifice. Thus
when the nation's traditions and freedom to practice its beliefs comes to be hypothetically
threatened by the Roman authorities in John's Gospel, Caaphas, the Jewish high priest of the
time, responds to the concerns of the community-nation by proposing instead the eminent death
of Christ in accordance with the same religious and Biblical imagery:
Caaphas, who was high priest that year, said to them, 'You know nothing at all; you do
not understand that it is expedient for you that one man should die for the people, and that
the whole nation should not perish.' He did not say this of his own accord, but being high
priest that year he prophesied that Jesus should die for the nation, and not for the nation
only, but to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad. So from that
day on they took counsel how to put him to death. [John 11.49-53]
Here the striking parallels with our film's hero begin to come into focus. Like Christ, Pjetr Doda
needs to die in order to gather together the nation by linking them through the telephone grid.
Jesus' mission occurred during and around the Jewish feast of the Passover, while the mission of
the film's hero corresponds to the festivities of the New Year, perhaps meant to suggest some
notion of rebirth and renewal. More parallels appear as the film approaches its climatic and
sacrificial denouement. Our hero stumbles about through the snow as if bearing the burden of the
people through an invisible cross on his personal road to Golgotha. And perhaps most important
of all, our hero, like Christ, appears to die suspended on a tree or telephone pole (Fig. 1).
The theme of the wood or the tree as a platform of redemptive sacrifice which, as mentioned
above, traces itself back to the Passover feast of redemption from the Hebrew people's
enslavement to Egypt features prominently and repeatedly throughout the film. It is striking
that the film in fact opens with our hero mounted on a telephone pole; and in the emotionally
powerful closing frame we again find our hero crucified and hanging on the pole (Fig. 1). This
coincides with the arrival of the geological survey workers who have come to take him down
from his cross. Panoramic shots of telephone poles appear throughout the film, complimented
as they are by the repeated presence of New Years trees, which look like and resemble
Christmas trees in every way. After our hero's demise in the final shot of the film, the pole is

again pictured empty and vacant, with the implication that its symbolic value transcends the life,
needs and existence of our hero-worker. This is done in much the same style as one might
observe Christian films of or before the period depicting an empty cross in the closing scene.
Furthermore, the recurring depiction of trees and poles throughout the film evokes strong
parallels with the Cross and sacrifice of Christ, which is likened explicitly to a tree in Saint
Paul's letter to the Galatians: Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a
curse for us for it is written, 'Cursed be every one who hangs on a tree'. [Gal. 3.13]
In much the same way the presence of trees throughout the film points toward the witness or
martyrdom of latter Christians ascetics such as the so called stylites who ascended platforms
and remained there in order to carry out extreme forms of asceticism. The representation of
stylite-saints was quite wide-spread in post-Byzantine monastic architecture in Albania and
beyond. Here we will cite two such examples from the catholicon of the Monastery of Dryano,
Bularat, Dropull, Gjirokastr. (Figs. 8-9)
If we accept that one of the main purposes of the film is to depict its hero as embodying a spirit
of redemptive self-sacrifice for the sake of the community, then it is quite easy to begin drawing
strong parallels with Christian religious imagery and thought. In addition to this, the film's hero
is portrayed in such a way as to awaken an idea of martyrdom and witness by means of his
bravery and self-denial, sentiments which were extracted directly from the Judeo-Christian
tradition. It is ultimately in this sense that our hero can be considered a socialist martyr.
Part 3: Socialist Realism
When comparing the film "White Road" with the tenets of Soviet Socialist Realism, one finds
adherence to, but also deviation from, these operations of propagandistic power positioning. Of
the tenets of Socialist Realist film: Utopia, the "new" man/woman, movement of periphery to
center as evidenced in transmigration, transmogrification and/or transgression, the double
narrative system, the stakhanovite, the party member or representative, and the cult of
personality, "White Road" displays only aperture and has a possible party member representative
in the figure of the manager (Anderson, 1995). Although it has the simplistic Socialist Realist
film story of a hero and his task, it does not have the fulfillment of the task and the reward. This
is not unusual, as it is late in date1974. In the Soviet Union Socialist Realism has faded with the
cultural "thaw" of Krushchev in the late 1950's, which had allowed the infiltration of
"Modernism" into Soviet film. Modernism in film included a hero on a journey of self-discovery,
a "flat" narrative with no resolution, life as a problem and the world without structure. There was
an absence of bi-polarism with grey areas instead of black and white, a belief that there was no
longer a God and that the only choice was a personal one--right or wrong. The endings were
open, but with aperture in the sense of questions left unanswered. In the Soviet Union, the
cinematography and topics, as well as narrative structure, had become much more experimental,
although scripts were still heavily censored. In Cuba, although the tenet from Socialist Realism
of sacrificing the personal for the greater good remained in place, the focus also became centered
on how the individual might achieved this in their daily life. Cuban cinematography had always
been experimental since the 1959 Revolution, and had been infused with Modernism, as in the
film "Lucia" (Humberto Solas, 1968), and did not follow the classical narrative structure of
Aristotle in filmic drama. In China, the heavily censored Maoist years following the 1949
Revolution were also coming to a close, ending the films types such as "The White Haired Girl"

(Choui Khoua, Bin Wang, 1950), or films about Chinese female basketball players and team
spirit.
The strategies of power positioning in Socialist Realism, and in media and propaganda generally,
included: the transgression of literal, cultural, societal and parental boundaries; the movement of
woman from periphery to center; transmogrification and transmigration to male and/or power
images as in, for example, clothing or profession; the use of a double narrative system; the use of
aperture at the end of a film; the validation and invalidation of images and narratives; and the
strategies of normalization and enunciation, all of which lead to power positioning. In the film
"White Road" one finds societal boundaries in place with the socialist norms of 1974, and
therefore no need to highlight a societal transgression in contrast with the past. The hero in
Socialist Realist film of the Soviet Union was usually a woman, but here the hero is a male
telephone lineman, Doda. The head telephone operator at his center is Zana, his girlfriend, who
is indeed important since she is the hub that connects society and all communications must go
through her. Yet she is not in the power position of the hero, as she is merely an 'operator', and
she must rely on Doda, who has the actual power to connect the lines and repair them.
There is no double narrative system, which is usually a budding romance narrative put on hold,
and a second narrative of the heroine performing her task for society taking its place. When the
socialist goal is achieved, usually an amazing work-related task has been carried out by a heroworker (stakhanovite), the first, original narrative of the romance is returned to and the
hero/heroine is given the ability to complete the romance as his/her reward for putting the
societal first, before the self. While Doda is certainly self-less in the Social Realist sense, putting
his work first as does his girlfriend, the two narratives of romance and socialist task are
consistently interwoven, and the delay is that of Doda missing a New Year's party celebration
while he is fixing the downed lines. In the film, the two characters seem less stereotyped than the
Soviet Socialist Realist film of 1934-1954; the two characters seem thus more human and
flawed. Doda, for example, is a good guy and throws snowballs (fig. 10), playing with the kids;
he is also respected by his friends but not completely confident in his relationship with Zana, as
she has another suitor, an intellectual poet/teacher, who is seen as the lesser man by all when
compared with Doda.
The romance, however, is very chaste and pure, following the Socialist Realist lines. In the
former Soviet Union there was no sex in film until the late 1980's and 1990's, starting with the
film, "Little Vera" (Anderson, 1991). Here, in "White Road", Zana blows a chaste kiss to Doda,
gives him a New Year's card and they discuss (with a background of romantic music) their gifts
for each other via a telephone line, while Doda is out in the forests repairing lines. There is a
physical distance kept between them, even when they are together. Their main topic of
conversation is their mutual work. As in most Socialist Realism, the machine is worshipped, and
there are repeated and highlighted shots of the beauty of technology (phone lines in the
mountains), and the necessity and strength of technology to the socialist project. The telephone
center, and operations are shown repeatedly with loving respect, for example.
The main Socialist Realist strategy used in power positioning is that of the hero worker, who has
the necessity to put the social task and duty before all individual concerns. But Doda is seen as
flawed, not invincible. In his last outing to repair lines in a ferocious snow storm, to connect

Kuks with Tirana and Shkodra, and thus keep the socialist community intact, interconnected,
and informed and functioning, there is intercutting to various individuals who use the repaired
phone lines. He is the important locus who makes this possible, yet he is physically vulnerable.
He loses his gloves, and falls and hurts his knee, and as he struggles to follow the line to repair
the last breakage, he becomes disoriented and stops to sleep and eat some of his frozen bread
(fig. 11). This vulnerability makes the film less schematic than the regular Socialist Realist film.
The most interesting point is the end of the film which uses aperture the lack of a finalized,
teleological closure at the ending with all the narrative strings tied up. But whether this is from
the Socialist Realist project's influence, which used aperture as a mise en abyme means to be
didactic and say that 'as in film so in life,' so that the audience should and feels that they could
mimic the Socialist Realist hero/heroine in real life, or if it stems more from the aperture found
in modernist film, where the hero is on a life journey with no certainties and no answers in the
end, is arguable. There is a feeling of melancholy at the end of the film, as the members of the
geological survey rush forward to rescue Doda (fig. 12), a Christ-like figure frozen to the top of a
telephone pole. As they gather around his body, like the onlookers on the Mount for Christ, it is
uncertain whether he lives or dies. Certainly this climax is meant to be a focal point of the film,
as the last scenes contain the only special effects. As the rescuers rush towards to his frozen,
perched body, he sees them from his point of view. He then "sees" a similar POV shot in green
tinting (fig. 13), and then another similar shot in negative stock film (fig. 14), with a return to a
re-play of the original shot of the rescue team rushing forward. This is very disorienting and may
mean to mimic his snow-blindness, or his subconscious perceptions. When he was on the pole
and beginning to freeze in previous shots, his psychological voice-over lead to flashback shots of
his previous New Year's party with Zana, his comrades, and foregrounded cultural dancers. With
this highlighting of the unconscious mind, and the melancholy atmosphere created by lack of
closure coupled with a mystical cinematography of the snow scenes, the film has a reminiscent
feel of Tarkovsky's modernist Soviet films. So the end of "White Road" leaves one with more
questions than answers, and while emphasizing the hero-worker and his/her necessity of selfsacrifice for socialism, it curiously also undermines the power position of the Socialist Realist
project itself, by aperture, keeping the question of Doda's survival open and mystifyingly
haunting.
Conclusions
As we have demonstrated, the film exhibits few of the traits typically found in Soviet Socialist
Realist films. It does not have the periphery to center movement of a female protagonist nor of a
representative of a minority, the former a hallmark of Soviet Socialist Realist film. Instead it has
a white male protagonist. The female character is relegated to the position of the girlfriend, the
"waiting woman". Since there is no periphery to center construction in the representation of the
hero, there is also none of the contingent transmigration, transmogrification or transgression. The
film ends with an aperture dissimilar to the aperture of Socialist Realism. In Soviet Socialist
Realist film, the ending was left open in a mise-en-abyme effect to didactically illustrate "as in
film, so in life". The "Rrug t Bardha" film certainly does not suggest that the viewing public
should crucify themselves on telephone poles as a mirror of the Socialist Realist filmic hero.
The film also has no double storyline, but rather a single narrative. The romance is not put on
hold in order to solve the dilemma of the political project's problems first. The typical male

mentor in the figure of the manager or political advisor is present, but the hero cannot really be
classified as a "Stakhanovite", a hero-worker, who has overcome all obstacles in order to lead on
the pathway that the common herd will all later be able to follow. Socialist Realism in film had
long since faded away as Krushchev had begun his cultural "thaw" in 1954, and by 1974 most
filmmakers in the Soviet Union were aware of Modernism in film and the French New Wave. It
had influenced film styles for over a decade in the Soviet Union and in the Eastern bloc,
particularly in Czecheslovakia, Poland, and Hungary. Tarkovsky's film style would be closer to
the ending of "Rrug t Bardha" than any Socialist Realist Soviet film.
Some of the reasons why the film varies from a Soviet Socialist Realist model include the history
of Socialist Albania, the changes over time of the Socialist Realist expectations in film, and the
post-Soviet transition syndrome. Albania was closely aligned initially in its post-World-War-II
socialist history to the former Soviet Union, but broke from its bloc in circa 1961, then aligned
with the Chinese Socialist bloc, but again began to break away in 1971. It is worth noting that the
Chinese, during their Cultural Revolution, followed the Socialist Realist line strictly in film and
opera, for example, in "The White Haired Girl".
By 1974 Albania was in the throes of an isolated socialist dictatorship and needed to establish
models of its own. In such a quest, the Albanian communist regime retained many of the
ideological elements of the former socialist regimes such as the concept of the socialist hero who
lost life for the greater good. Taking this model it invested it with the new properties of labor,
though, as mentioned above, in a dissimilar way to the Stakhanovite movement. By exploring
this new martyr-making movement in Albania we have tried to document a case-study that
communism in Albania, consciously or unconsciously, utilized the emotional and spiritual power
of Judeo-Christian sacrificial redemptive examples, along with the concept of martyrdom, in
order to reinforce its ideological ends. There seems little doubt that the cinematographic
representation of a man sacrificing himself for the sake of the nation, by dying on the wood of a
tree, drew directly upon inherent Judeo-Christian religious and cultural values that had been
deeply saturated into the fabric of the Balkan psyche for many centuries. By utilizing precisely
such imagery, then, the socialist regime in Albania effectively projected itself as a religious
isomorphism.
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Fig. 1: The memorial built at the spot where Shkurte Vata was lethally injured.

Fig. 2: Statue of Adem Reka (1928-1966), hero of socialist labour, Durrs harbour.

Fig. 3: Rikard Ljarja as Ded (Pjetr Llesh Doda) and Elida Cangonji as Zana in the film
Rrug t Bardha (White Roads), 1974, directed by Viktor Gjika.

Fig. 4: Rikard Ljarja as Ded (Pjetr Llesh Doda) leaving the telephone centre to go and fix
the telephone lines, film Rrug t Bardha (White Roads), 1974, directed by Viktor Gjika.

Fig. 5: Rikard Ljarja as Ded (Pjetr Llesh Doda) fixing telephone lines, film Rrug t
Bardha (White Roads), 1974, directed by Viktor Gjika.

Fig. 6: Dedas friends worrying about his fate, film Rrug t Bardha (White Roads), 1974,
directed by Viktor Gjika.

Fig. 7: Rikard Ljarja as Ded (Pjetr Llesh Doda) in the last scene of the Rrug t Bardha
(White Roads), 1974, directed by Viktor Gjika.

Fig. 8: St. Symeon the Stylite from Mandra, 3rd quarter of 16th century, Dryano Monastery,
Dropull, Gjirokastr, S. Albania ( K. Giakoumis).

Fig. 9: St. Daniel the Stylite, 3rd quarter of 16th century, Dryano Monastery, Dropull, Gjirokastr,
S. Albania ( K. Giakoumis).

Fig. 10: Rikard Ljarja as Ded (Pjetr Llesh Doda) throwing snowballs to play with the kinds,
film Rrug t Bardha (White Roads), 1974, directed by Viktor Gjika.

Fig. 11: Deda seriously injured tries to eat some of his frozen bread, film Rrug t Bardha
(White Roads), 1974, directed by Viktor Gjika.

Fig. 12: Members of the geological survey rushing to rescue Doda, film Rrug t Bardha
(White Roads), 1974, directed by Viktor Gjika.

Fig. 13: Rikard Ljarja as Ded (Pjetr Llesh Doda) seeing a POV shot in green tinting, film
Rrug t Bardha (White Roads), 1974, directed by Viktor Gjika.

Fig. 14: Rikard Ljarja as Ded (Pjetr Llesh Doda) seeing his rescuers in negative stock film,
aperture of the film Rrug t Bardha (White Roads), 1974, directed by Viktor Gjika.