AustLit

'This All Hallows Eve, Senses of Cinema is publishing our first sustained inquiry into nonfiction cinema from the territories of former Yugoslavia. At a time when new nationalisms are again on the horizon, what tactics do documentary cineastes employ in an effort to fight back? Guest editor Nace Zavrl collates articles examining the importance and inexhaustible grit of recent nonfiction from the ex-Yugoslav region. In the context of ideological mystification, documentary images play a privileged role, tasked and entrusted with offering adequate, just depictions of our world. Precisely due to their experiences with virulent ethnonationalism and an assortment of obfuscatory political techniques, ex-socialist filmmakers and artists have offered viewers of contemporary nonfiction much to think through. Form, as these articles argue, is inextricable from politics; the aesthetic devices that filmmakers choose to employ (or to omit) have consequences in life outside cinema. ' (Editorial introduction)