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Walls, Coats, Shadows

Walls, Coats, Shadows
/10
    • Walls, Coats, Shadows
    • Zidovi, kaputi, sjene
  • 1975
  • 8mm film transferreed to digital, color, no sound
  • 7min, 25sec
The color film “Walls, Coats, Shadows” consists of three parts: the artist first shows gray walls of different textures, then the coats of people passing through that part of the street. Their jackets are either gray, dark blue, or black. The third part captures the shadows of passers-by, which are colorless to begin with. This film, structuralist in its principle, exhibits essential features of Mladen Stilinović’s oeuvre: irony and wit as well as absence and negation. The part devoted to walls shows whitish-to-grayish facades characterized by specific surface textures that range from clean to somewhat darkened as well as by various grids and related geometric patterns. The part devoted to coats focuses on the various coats and jackets worn by pedestrians who walk past the camera, showing either the front- or back-sides of their attire up to their necks. While this filmic sequence suggests a certain uniformity in life, the silhouettes and shapes denote the individuality of the coats’ owners, whose faces the artist deliberately keeps out of sight. The part featuring shadows combines the two previous parts, with the people only being traceable in the form of their gray shadows against the white or grayish walls. Although this film was shot in color, the hues appear as faded or as black and white—which would correspond to notions of “gray socialism.” Is thus that Stilinović traces the ephemeral moments of life in their omnipresence and fleeting capacity for representation. W.S.