THE DICTATOR’S LIVING ROOM
W W W. EL EN A D O R F M A N .C O M
This series of photographs was taken in the home of the former dictator of Albania , Enver Hoxha. Hoxha ruled Albania from 1941-1985, and his house remains nearly exactly as it was when he left it thirty five years ago. Recently, I was granted rare access to make these photographs. To this day, few people—and nearly no Albanians—have ever been inside.
OBJECTS OF SURVEILLANCE: 1941-1985
THE CENTRAL STATE FILM ARCHIVE In an effort to control the political narrative during the Cold War, the Hoxha regime built a Kinostudio, with a robust cinema program that created 271 feature films, thousands of newsreels, documentaries, animations, and audio recordings between 1953-1991. Unseen since the fall of the Cold War, this collection is a trove of highly esthetic mid-twentieth century propaganda. The Soviet Union helped establish the Kinostudio, which produced a legion of politically flattering and sophisticated films reflective of the influence of the Russian avant-garde and Soviet Social Realism. Not only were these films widely viewed by Albanians, they also circulated in China, with whom Hoxha aligned after his split from the Soviet Union. This small selection of photographs represent some of the remaining prints stored in hand-made production books. Ignored since the fall of Communism, all of the photographic negatives are accessible in the Archive, although in distress due to a poor-storage environment. None of this material has been seen before.