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Human Skulls as an Artistic Tool: A Movie Can Break Taboos that a Novel Cannot

Eriona Kita Vyshka and Gentian Vyshka

The novel ‘The General of the Dead Army” describes the history of a general visiting Albania several years after the end of the Second World War, when hostilities were apparently over, with the aim of exhuming and repatriating the skeletal remains of the dead soldiers. The novel has been adapted in three movie versions, and different perspectives have been thrown over the drama of a general, losing this time a psychological war, vis-à-vis the intrapersonal and interpersonal conflicts he perceives. The movie “The Return of the Dead Army” widely and incisively relies upon skulls and skeletal remains as an anamorphic medium to illustrate how far a deeply eradicated taboo might be broken and reversed, with human bones serving as currencies for message exchange in between the movie’s personages. Differences of two diverse artistic works (novel vs. movie) that concur to such an imaging of exhumation and of the setting where this act takes place are discussed under the psychological and artistic point of views.