The Flutes of Gramsh in Hollywood’s “New Ulysses”: A Meditation on the Pastoral Voice, Cinema and Our Aural Memory.

There is an almost mystical moment when one sits before the great screen to watch a new cinematic rendering of the Odyssey. For me, this new journey with Homer’s hero awakens a long, unbroken chain of precious memories that reaches far back into childhood.

I first encountered the story of the voyage of the king of Ithaca on the cinema screen at the age of five, beneath the high ceiling of Kinema Republika in Tirana, accompanied by my father and my brother, spellbound by the magic of Circe, the Cyclops Polyphemus and the sirens of the sea. It was that monumental 1968 Ulysses, in which the incomparable Bekim Fehmiu played the king of Ithaca — the cunning Greek hero who wandered the seas for ten years after the Trojan War.

The film was frequently shown on Albanian television, embodied in an ambitious miniseries directed by Franco Rossi, Mario Bava and Piero Schivazappa. Bekim Fehmiu, with that piercing gaze worn by waves, became our icon of Ulysses. Opposite him stood a magnificent Penelope, the great Greek actress Irene Papas, whose noble, dignified features became a symbol of faithful waiting. It was a legendary production for RAI, and behind the cameras the two actors, bound by a shared cultural origin, were even said to speak Albanian to one another — a secret code exchanged across the sets of Italy and the former Yugoslavia.

Today, far from those early childhood memories, comes a new cinematic realization that invites us to look at the myth through an entirely different lens. Christopher Nolan is not interested in the bright colours or the straightforward adventure logic of earlier versions. He draws us into a genuine labyrinth of time and memory.

In this film, Ulysses’ journey is not merely physical navigation but a psychological struggle to confront the trauma of war and the loss of identity. Through a fractured, fragmentary narrative — unmistakably Nolan — we watch a man reconstruct himself through memory while suffering from the impossibility of ever truly returning home.

This Odysseus, played by Matt Damon, carries heavy guilt and an inner abyss. He is as much raider as hero: a complex figure struggling against fate in a world blackened and reduced to ash by war. Nolan chooses to strip the story of classical supernaturalism. There are no gods descending as deus ex machina [1]; instead, divine figures — Athena, for example, played by Zendaya — are read as projections of the hero’s own conscience and guilt.

Part of the film’s force lies in Nolan’s bold decision to shoot in an entirely analogue 70mm production, turning away from the sterile digital simulacra of CGI [2]. The result is a physical cinema: analogue, weighty, tactile. Bodies, rocks and the sea have mass, texture and presence.

And precisely in this stripped, material world, at around the fifth minute — when Telemachus, played by Tom Holland, trains among idyllic rocks with the sea behind him — my emotional encounter with the film truly begins.

The theme of Telemachus — the pastoral — is not merely background music. This bucolic melody becomes the leitmotif of the young man growing up without his father, tied to the earth, the sea and the innocence of Ithaca. Everything begins to feel tangible: wind striking dry grass, the roughness of stone.

Then comes that pastoral melody, simple and entirely bare.

It carries a strange chiaroscuro of its own. To an ear accustomed to bombastic overtures, it sounds unfamiliar; and yet to me it is shockingly familiar, intimate, almost domestic. To an Albanian ear, the sound awakens something like a genetic testimony.

“These are the flutes of Gramsh,” I say to myself, moved by an intuition that goes beyond mere musical recognition.

This is what we might call the emotional archaeology of memory — the brain’s ability to connect a universal image with a deeply local code.

And when research leads you to footage from the Gjirokastra folklore festivals, or to Albanian television reports on the “Magic Flutes of Gramsh” — where, at around the eighth minute [3], one encounters a passage strikingly close to the one heard in the film — the question is no longer merely technical. It becomes anthropological, cultural and philosophical.

How did the breath of a shepherd from the slopes of Gramsh find its way into the soundtrack of a Hollywood mega-production?

Why does cinema need the flute?

If great composers have taught us anything, it is that the more fantastic, mythological or unbelievable an event becomes, the more music needs to anchor it in something that feels true. Howard Shore, for example, used the tin whistle in The Lord of the Rings to create the comfort and peace of the Shire. James Horner used the low whistle [4] in Braveheart to evoke the melancholy of the Scottish Highlands.

This is no accident.

Musical anthropology reminds us that wooden wind instruments — the flute, the kaval, primitive pipes — are among the instruments closest to the human voice and, at the same time, to the voice of nature: wind through trees, breath over woodland and meadow.

When Hollywood wants to construct a “Greek pastoral” for the age of Homer, it cannot rely on the classical violin or piano — instruments shaped by European royal courts of later centuries, carrying with them, so to speak, the cultivated self-assurance of later European elites.

Mythology asks for a wild, unpolished past.

And here, to my ears, enters the magic of the Gramsh flutes: three, four, perhaps more flutes sounding together — one sustaining the drone, another embroidering the melody, the others creating a bifonic or polyphonic acoustic field that, to a Western ear, can sound like an ancient, mystical summons from the dawn of humankind.

This timbre converges with Ludwig Göransson’s compositional choices. Once the principal themes have been presented, the music enters a developmental phase through what the film industry calls “cues” [5]. He avoids continuous classical orchestration and the heavy mass of brass because a score cannot consist only of emphatic melodies. Its form needs empty spaces, transitional bridges, atmospheric music.

Our flutes, then, offer a last remaining oasis of nature and human presence.

The flute as an urban and cosmopolitan instrument: a modern paradox.

Here it is worth stopping, not from a patriotic impulse or an instinct to monopolize everything that sounds Albanian, but in order to consider how “cultural appropriation” — or perhaps simply a chance encounter — actually functions.

We are accustomed to seeing the flutes of Gramsh as something strictly ours, locked inside the drawers of local folklore, isolated in ethnographic exhibitions or television reports that speak of “preserving heritage.”

Yet today’s world is global and interconnected in almost ironic ways.

Hollywood composers no longer need to travel through the villages of Gramsh, Myzeqe or anywhere else with a tape recorder in hand, as composers such as Miklós Rózsa [6] and early folklore researchers once did. They work with sound libraries — digital archives containing recorded performances by instrumentalists from across the world, catalogued under broad labels such as “Balkan double flute,” “archaic shepherd flute,” “Epirus polyphonic wind,” or, more simply still: one click on YouTube.

Thus the breath of a shepherd from Gramsh — perhaps recorded at a Gjirokastra festival or in a modest studio — can become a loop in digital code, a sound sample, and fly into the expensive studios of Los Angeles.

What for us is national identity may, for the film industry, become simply “acoustic texture.”

That is the great modern paradox.

Globalization strips a sound of its geographic context in order to give it a second life — universal and mythological.

Essential questions for a musicological and anthropological debate

To raise this observation to the level of serious inquiry, several questions need to be asked, bringing philosophical reflection together with deep cultural analysis.

When we hear the flutes of Gramsh in a film about ancient Troy, are we experiencing a deliberate form of estrangement?

Why does the global industry use sounds from the Balkans or the East to represent European antiquity?

Does this suggest that the West still imagines the Balkans as an acoustic reserve of its own forgotten history?

Dmitri Shostakovich wrote vast amounts of film music — often for survival or under political commission — while breaking down the borders between “high” academic music and popular music. Is cinema now becoming a new agent in the preservation of folklore?

Is today’s Hollywood the “new opera house” in which folk music finally receives the dignity that academic elites historically denied it?

When an instrument as specific as the flutes of Gramsh is used anonymously in an international production, does that enrich our cultural heritage — or dissolve it into the global amalgam called “World Music”?

Can a sound truly carry the identity of a community when the global audience has no idea where it physically comes from?

The flute that never dies

Telemachus swings his sword among the rocks. Matt Damon’s Odysseus watches him with pride and longing. In the background, the flutes of Gramsh seem to lament and sing at once.

That pastoral melody, born in our mountains as a means of communication between human beings and nature — calling to mind the famous “Kënga e Tanës” — once expressed the shepherd’s solitude or the joy of return. Now it has made the great leap onto the global screen.

Perhaps this is the true beauty of music.

It does not need a passport.

Whether Hollywood knows where that breath belongs or not, for those of us who hear it and are carried back to the old hall of Kinema Republika, to Bekim Fehmiu’s deep gaze and to those beautiful days with my father and brother, the sound remains a secret bridge.

A bridge joining Gramsh to Ithaca, our past to the future of the big screen, and our collective memory to the universal magic of cinema.

17.07.2026, Eda Zari © All rights reserved.

[1] From Ancient Greek apò mēchanês theós. The term comes from ancient Greek theatre. When dramatists such as Euripides drove a story into an impasse and no longer knew how to resolve it, they used a device: an actor playing a god was lowered onto the stage by ropes or mechanical platforms. This “god” intervened suddenly, resolved every conflict with a single gesture and brought the drama to a close.

[2] Computer Generated Imagery — visual effects, figures or backgrounds created digitally on a computer rather than photographed in physical reality. Anyone familiar with Nolan’s working method knows his loyalty to large-format analogue cameras, especially IMAX 65mm 15-perforation cameras for monumental landscapes, sea scenes and wide spaces. The format provides extraordinary resolution and clarity, giving every grain of sand and reflection on water a physical presence.

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtG3RyEnpGw

[4] The larger, deeper sister of the tin whistle, producing a warm sound. Commonly tuned to low D, it sounds a full octave lower and, because of its larger body, has a rich, warm and almost melancholic timbre.

[5] Musical passages tied to specific scenes.

[6] Film music has deep roots in the methodology of composers from Hollywood’s “Golden Age,” above all the Hungarian-American Miklós Rózsa. For monumental works such as Ben-Hur (1959) and Quo Vadis, Rózsa worked almost as an ethnomusicologist. Before writing a single note, he rejected modern clichés and spent months in museums in Rome and Naples studying ancient reliefs, remnants of wooden and brass instruments, and the modal structures of early church and synagogue hymns. As in the case of the Gramsh flutes in Nolan’s film, Rózsa showed that one way to reconstruct acoustically an antiquity that was never recorded is to excavate the roots of living folklore.