Synchronic Cinema I Shadow Zones, Experimental Cinema History in Yugoslavia; Or a Cinema and a History Made Unmade by Maps
(2023)

Experimental and structuralist films are often intended to be anti-narrative, until a look in the archives reveals a complex of “characters” and “scenes”, each with their own lay of the land. Shadow Zones maps the weave of this social fabric in the Yugoslav context, a drama of mutual care, power, desire, and influence, on the Live road map generated film, a technique we define as Synchronic Cinema. With anticipatory suspense, structural conditions come to be inhabited as characters are embroiled in systems of the film’s circulation. Geopolitics, romance, style and suitcases of celluloid wind into a tangled transnational fabric. Travelling between moments in the production of “Croatian scenes,” the installation also circuitously tracks the border statuses of the Balkans within conceptions of “Europe” and “European” avant-garde film history: a snake in one direction can be a ladder in the other.