Swedish artist John Skoog’s latest short film saw him trek California’s sweeping landscapes in search of the ghosts of Hollywood past. And no, we’re not talking silent film stars. Instead Skoog, fascinated by topography and its cultural symbolism, turned his lens to the West Coast landscapes that have in Hollywood’s golden filmic history stood in for their more exotic international (or fictional) counterparts.

Afghanistan, Tibet, the Sahara Desert, Sherwood Forest, French Alps and Alaskan Rivers and fictional places like Aladdin’s Cave and the Garden of Eden… From Death Valley and Palm Springs, and from the Batcave (played by Bronson Caves, CA) in the 1966-68 Batman television show to Robinson Crusoe’s Island in the 1922 silent film series (played by Thousand Steps Beach Cave) the list goes on.

That devastatingly vast and varied landscape is what lies at ground zero of Hollywood’s foundations, the same beauty that Skoog says drew him to travel and capture this ‘non-place’ – a Shadowland, in its own right. Here, Skoog reflects on the experience and shares exclusive images shot in the making of the film.

John Skoog on Shadowland

“Just before  I was twenty, I got the chance to travel the US through being included in a touring exhibition of Scandinavian photography,” says Skoog. “I had a friend living with her father in a very generic suburb of San Francisco, she worked as a pizza delivery person and I accompanied her in the car sometimes. After her shift we would go on short excursions to random destinations by just choosing (funny-western-frontier-I-can-name-my-land-what-ever-I-want) street or city names. On her days off the destinations were further away. The quick changes of the Californian topography really made a huge impression on me. Coming from northern Europe where one can travel a day and still being in more or less the same type of landscape, it was hard to take in a place that in a few hours could go from desert to snowy mountains to big, beautiful beaches.

“When I later went to art school a friend and I collaborated for several years doing film screenings and works that were more on the border of some kind of experimental film history, expanded projection and making art-works. I then stumbled upon the history of Hoboken and Hollywood and all of the reasons that the film industry moved to the West. Light, weather, distance to patent holders and financiers, cheap land, and many other reasons… But the access to locations that could easily stand in for far away places – a Swiss lake, the Wild West, a Canadian mountain, even the moon and all this within a day’s travel from Hollywood – which Hoboken could not provide, stuck with me and merged with the memory of the car rides through California nine years earlier.”

“All the places in the film are places in California that have played other parts of the world in early days of Hollywood. So there is hopefully a ‘Where have I seen this image before?’ feeling inscribed in all the shoots. But then again, with the being the provider of the dominant image culture for the last 100 years the south Californian landscape is something we all know, understand and have seen over and over again, the film is placing itself somewhere on the border of this fictional landscape. When we were going around documenting places we always tried to make a shot with a framing similar to the original film. Most of the time I ended up using another shot but some of them are in the film and I think they provide a symmetry.”

For more information on John Skoog and the film visit Pilar Corrias here.