The letter that started the condemnation of the 11th Song Festival in RTSH

The newspaper "Zëri i rinia", on Saturday January 13, 1973, published on its inside page a letter from a group of employees of the Paper Factory in Lushnje, a letter that preceded the strike of the 22th Song Festival in RTSH, i developed on December 25-1972, XNUMX (a letter that was also mentioned in a speech by Enver Hoxha). The members of the employee collective thus express their criticism and make the expertise of the most important festival that took place at that time in Albania.

By: Kastriot Dervishi

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Part of the letter: "We want to express our thoughts"

"Sing the successes of 1972, the heroics of work and class life, or the cooperative peasantry (not with cantatas, of course). Do these topics have a little lyricism and emotion? As if they try, suffer and struggle to imitate some singers in the interpretation of songs. Some distortions of voices, exaggerations of strained gestures, without taste, that are out of tune either with the melody or with the text, why do they enter the work?

On the other hand, we don't understand who the orchestras were competing with at some moments with those exhibitions and "virtuosity" of sax and drums?

The costumes and the toilet of some singers not only did not adhere to a line, a concept, a right combination, a logic, a fantasy of our tastes, a fashion that had our modern Albanian stamp, but in some flagrant cases, they were complete imitation, which should not have been allowed in any way, such as cowboy pants made of colored basami, "pajamas", "robe de chambre" and maxi skirts. Chains and other excessive loads of trinkets, bassets and exaggerated toilets.

A certain race to identify exactly these foreign shows and imitations was also noticed from the technical side. The cameramen seem to be anxious to zoom in on these things for us. That's where the presenters got sidetracked with that very naive text full of imitations. The imitation reached the point of "waiting" for the results from the calculator, which together with many other trifles, adding to the dose of imitations, reduced the value of the festival. Is it possible to speculate in this direction, that supposedly "this is how the youth likes it"?

In our discussions of these shows, we ran into two misconceptions. One of our "monkeys" raised his head and said: "See? Your criticism of inappropriate fashion is conservatism, because our television itself is propagandizing it!". We are attacking this view and telling them: "From the positions of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, we criticize you and television." Some to oppose liberalism, took the view: "Don't cling to the television, because it allows these things to tell the outside world, that we could eat with you!". We are also attacking this view, because we do not develop two types of arts, two types of aesthetic tastes, two types of cultures, one for itself and the other to "eat" with the bourgeoisie and revisionists.

No, we develop the art, the taste, our great culture of the proletariat, which stands from every point of view above. So also for the songs of the festival, for the lyrics, the interpretation of the singers, the orchestration, the decor, the costumes, the fashion, etc., we are not for a naive artistic level, for dogmatic molds and schematism, for falling into outdated conservative views. Not at all. We are not even for xenophobia. Let's get everything healthy from the outside world. We are ardent fighters of the new, the innovative. Let the elegance and splendor of fashion flourish in our lives and on our stages, but let everything be of sound socialist content and dressed in the form of our rich fantasy, firmly based on our land. Everything smells Albanian.

The letter was signed by a group of young workers of the Paper Factory in Lushnja:

Agron Allkanjari, mechanic
Athina Daullja, laboratory technician
Bajram Çakalli, head of the office
Bashkim Kamami, plumber
Flag Zeqo, turner
Lili Veliu, brigadier
Hykmet Koduzi, technologist
Qamil Linatopi, chief engineer
Nexhmije Këmbora, lathe
Hysen Bezati, technologist