Tracey Moffatt makes films that challenge dominant myths regarding Aboriginal people, whose experiences are typically de-narrated or viewed through a colonialist perspective. This research paper will examine how Moffatt steals the cinematic and photographic languages of the oppressor and uses those languages to revision history and rearticulate the location of Aboriginal people on the cultural roadmap. One could easily focus attention on the racial discourse contained within Moffatt’s work, but in this research paper, I will also examine her interchangeable use of film and photographic mediums, her ability to deconstruct myths that permeate through White Australia, and more specifically throughout the history of Australian film, and finally her subversions of temporality, which are often startling and revelatory.
CONTEXT
In Ray Chow’s terms, Tracey Moffatt has taken part in a process of forming a “new ethnography” of indigenous Australian people, which tells the story from the point-of-view of those who are usually the subject of Western-oriented ethnographies[1]. Filmmakers and artists are able to produce such new ethnographies when they reflect upon the way they have been previously “looked at”, in order to give an account of their own culture, and to describe further their own culture’s encounters with other societies and cultures. This can be seen with an artist like Kara Walker and even the post-colonial thinker Franz Fanon. In many ways, Moffatt’s investigations have been obvious; as with Some Lads (1986), where she challenged the studied seriousness with which Aboriginal people have been photographed as scientific, exotic examples of strangeness or as victims of the white invaders of their country, which can be seen in the photographs of ethnographers such as John Lindt. In BeDevil, (1993) Moffatt’s investigation into how film can interrogate the ways people “look” at each other is compounded by the fact that she is focusing on the “looks” which occur between people who need to negotiate several binary, socially constructed distinctions if they are to communicate with each other at all. Some of her works, reflect her context more quietly. For instance, a distinctive feature of many of her film and photography sets has been her use of dramatic and clearly painted backdrops[3]. Interestingly, in the mid to late 1980s, a style developed among the new urban Aboriginal artist’s that saw them use three-dimensional naturalism for all figures, but a very flat, Manet-like configuration for all depictions of the landscape. Ultimately, it must be said, that Moffatt examines a contemporary situation – often a construction of ‘urban Aboriginal culture’; but it must be recognized that this situation is inextricably linked to the events that perspired in the past.
MYTHS
A great part of Moffatt’s work is aimed at deconstructing the myths that have pervaded and typified the relations between Aboriginals and White Australia. However, it is pertinent that she is not deconstructing these myths in order to uncover the ‘truth’ – “I am not concerned with verisimilitude…I am not concerned with creating reality. I’m concerned with creating it myself”[4]. Her knowledge and her own experience of social problems and inequalities are ultimately ubiquitous in her work. Yet these are usually in incorporated into images whose poetry, ironic inventiveness and aesthetic power create truly new and independent realities. One such example is her attempt to undermine the constructions of national identity formulated around the notion of the landscape as the implied domain of men – a harsh, infertile place. It is possible to place Moffatt’s work as continuing the work done by films such as Wake In Fright (Ted Kotcheff, 1971), which took a more ambivalent stance to the outback. Suddenly filmmakers were presenting a landscape of fear and fascination; a place where humans were challenged by boredom, a place of spiritual enlightenment.
Scenes from Up in the Sky (1998) evoke and by implication, criticize, images of outback life that seem familiar from beer and car commercials on television, as well as from documentaries “exposing” the abjectness to which both Aboriginal and poor white communities have been condemned. These images stand in stark contrast to the realities presented in Night Cries (1990). This is an audiovisual story that relies on vivid, glossy colours for its eerie representation of the outback. For instance, the highly polished red floors of the main set reflect the mauves and vivid blues of the painted Australian desert landscape. These shiny colours immediately locate the story within the glare and heat of inland Australia, and establish the film’s story as one of human endurance. This seems to adhere to the conventional idea of the Australian outback as harsh and unforgiving. The subversion comes when we consider the domesticity of the scene and the fact that the protagonists, indeed the only characters we see in this setting, are both women. Further, against the expected outcome where white Australians are left with the burden of the “helpless” Aboriginal people, this story depicts an Aboriginal woman caring for her very old white adoptive mother.
Nice Coloured Girls (1987) sees Moffatt overturn stereotypical images from Australian history in order to expose the history of exploitation of Aboriginal women by white men. The short film is not an a-historical reconstruction of Aboriginal women, as Moffatt acknowledges the role of oppression and enforced silence in the construction of colonized Aboriginal women. This identification of the subaltern is juxtaposed against recognition of the acculturated, modern, urban Aboriginal woman in an unusual counter-narrative[5]. Thus, Moffatt escapes the tendency to represent the Aboriginal woman as a monolithic subject.
CULTURAL REFERENCES
Cultural references are littered through Moffatt’s work identifying it as post-modern through the use of pastiche and unstable identity. Her work incessantly explores both ‘high’ and ‘low’ sources, referencing and subverting the tradition of History Painting - so beloved of Western art, yet also mimicking the exaggerated visual stereotypes of advertising in the 1990s. Night Cries is itself, in a sense, a response to Charles Chauvel’s film Jedda (Charles Chauvel, 1955)[6]; only now the characters are 30 years older. Significantly, Moffatt has revised the gender representations that abound in that film, and her Jedda is empowered with male-identified skills. Jimmy Little’s presence in the film is particularly furtive ground. In regards to a post-colonial positioning, which I will explicate further later, Moffatt’s use of Little can be seen as a rethinking of the tenets of assimilation. He is shown miming himself, lip-syncing his own hit song. Colonial mimicry is based in the desire for a reformed, recognizable Other; a subject marked by a difference that is “almost the same, but not quite”[7]. Mimicry is thus the sign of double articulation, “a complex strategy of reform, regulation, and discipline, which appropriates the Other as it visualizes power”[8]. Little’s performance of ‘Telephone to Glory’, against clearly artificial images of the desert, a corrugated iron “dunny”, prosthetic eating devices, and a wheelchair, is odd to say the least. He sings of easy comfort, of a Christianity that welcomes everyone into its fold. But of course, Christianity is one of the double-edged gifts that European culture has given to indigenous Australia[9]. Little problematises the emotional register of the parental relationship. Abruptly interrupting the narrative’s linearity, the saccharine lyrics, plangent strains, and manufactured sensations, offer hollow comfort at the same time as they preclude the possibility of any direct emotional identification with either of the principals[10].
POST-COLONIALISM
It is important to note that there are no accusations in Moffatt’s oeuvre. Her aim is not political agitation. Her questioning of aboriginality and her view of it and whiteness as interrelated, undermines the binaristic positioning of Europeans and Otherness so prevalent in race relations. Moodeitj-Yorgas (1988) began a process of healing the ontological and narcissistic wounds of non-white subjects. While her inventory of hybrid representations, as seen in Movie Star: David Gulpillil (1985) moved towards the possibility of a metisse or creole society, it also acknowledged the value and ethics of Aboriginal cultures. Something More (1989) is a kind of allegory for the dislocation, loss, desire and oppression felt by all colonised peoples everywhere, and provides for social comment on those people who victimise outsiders. There is an unhappy ending to this intense and violent story as we witness the heroine’s unsuccessful struggle for ‘something more’. Night Cries (1990) allegorises post-colonial identity as the hybrid outcome of a forced affiliation, remaking maternal melodrama as “King Lear for women…the tragedy of national history”[11].
In much of her work, Moffatt’s attention is not focused recapitulating a childhood event or trauma in search of a scapegoat, but instead on the struggle for power. So, Moffatt not simply examines the struggles for power, but the very complex and shifting ground upon which these struggles, particularly as they revolve around the desire for acceptance, take place. The ghost stories of BeDevil (1993) are concerned with a particular set of socially constructed “secrets” which have existed for over 200 years – secrets that are involved with the many and varied experiences of being an indigenous person in Australian settler society. They are stories of ghosts and memories, of secrets, which, in Foucault’s sense, are not so much repressed as they are nurtured in the form of carefully controlled discourses where “silence and secrecy are a shelter for power”, anchoring its prohibitions[12]; but they also loosen its holds and provide for relatively obscure areas of tolerance. Through her telling of these ‘secrets’, Moffatt continues to break through the official discourse about indigenous people in Australia that has been carefully controlled by the institutions of academia, religion, the state and the art industry.
MEDIUM
Tracey Moffatt went against the grain in her trajectory from film and video to fine art. While artists like Cindy Sherman left the art world to make films. Some avant-garde and experimental filmmaking instead moved closer to the art world since the late 1980s thus separating itself from more mainstream narrative cinema, which may have incorporated some of its innovations but has rejected its radical vision. In her photographic works, she has adopted the procedures and effects of the studio photographer, exploiting the manipulation and image tampering that characterise contemporary commercial style. However, Moffatt has the ability to “criss-cross” the two mediums[13]. In Something More (1989), by blurring some photographs and by tightly cropping others, Moffatt refuses to satisfy the viewer’s desire for a complete and self-sufficient narrative. The viewer becomes the author, and becomes implicated in the story. Something More (1989), which was accompanied by a soundtrack at its first showing, appears as a collection of scenes from a film that was never made. In a film like BeDevil (1993), she created a filmic gestural practice concerned with an “experience of secrets”, and she imparts information that is usually hidden or otherwise obscured. In Up in the Sky, Moffatt takes inspiration from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone (1961), producing enigmatic pictures, which, like his film, achieve their effects through an aesthetic of contamination, a linguistic concept used by Pasolini to describe the action of different textual elements on one another, in which neither element loses its identity, but their encounter generates something new.
In Night Cries (1990), the use of film allows Moffatt to focus our attention and secondly our empathy with the daughter, played by Marcia Langton. We see the mother through her eyes. We are made complicit in her anger, frustration and bitterness and the manifestations of these against her aged, decrepit, wheel-chair bound white adoptive mother. This anger can of course stand for wider Aboriginal anger towards the white society that usurped their land and marginalized them into servitude. As Alison Butler points out, the mixed race relationships that resulted from the governments policies between the 1930s and the 1970s, domesticated all the internal tensions of colonialism, recasting them in terms of familial interdependence[14].
TIME
Many of Moffatt’s works involve a condensation between the various temporal strata brought into play by memories, dreams and fantasies. This can be seen in the photographic series Laudanum (1998), in which the photographs are produced with distinctly different tonal qualities. At times, for instance, in Something More (1989) we find the realm of a structure devoid of location and time; beyond the boundaries of all reality and fiction. As such, this photographic series can be read equally as a post-modern pastiche or a post-colonial narrative; there is no straightforward narrative and the viewer, seeking to find a satisfactory conclusion, instead is lead down the blind alleys one encounters in a dream. This play on narrative also occurs in Night Cries (1990) where the absence of a dialogue track contributes to the narrative theme of frustration, a feeling of being trapped, bored, and yet haunted by troubling memories. To reiterate the idea that Moffatt’s films are concerned with examining the contemporary situations facing Aboriginal, and by extension all marginalized peoples, it is intriguing that it is difficult to locate many of the stories in historical time. For instance, in Something More (1989), although the clothing suggests the 1950s, the story could in fact be set in any remote society with mixed races and outcasts at the peripheries of power.
CONCLUSION
While Moffatt’s works deal with Australian Aboriginal history, and identity politics, ultimately they reveal broader truths in regards to our understanding of the landscape, the mythologies that persist in our culture, and concepts of time and place. Coming from a fine arts background, Moffatt’s films and photographic series are carefully constructed, and permeate with meaning. Her work can be compared to African-American artist Kara Walker who also examines the wrong doings of a colonial power in the past from a contemporary standpoint. Both artist’s have experienced racism firsthand and refuse to have labels thrust upon them. Instead, Moffatt defines her own identity, and defines her own subjective relationship to her past, this land, and its people.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Butler, Alison. Women’s Cinema: the contested screen, Wallflower Press/Columbia University Press, 2002
Butler, Rex and Thomas, Morgan. Tracey Moffatt’s Beauty in Paula Savage and Lara Strongman (eds.) Tracey Moffat, City Gallery of Wellington, Wellington, 2002
Chapman, Chris. Hallucination: Notes on the Aesthetics of Tracey Moffatt’s Film and Video Work in Paula Savage and Lara Strongman (eds.) Tracey Moffat, City Gallery of Wellington, Wellington, 2002
Durand, Regis. Specific Climates in Michael Snelling (ed.) Tracey Moffatt, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, 1999
Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Women Film Directors: an international bio-cultural dictionary, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1995
Genet, Jean. Un captif amoureux (1986); quoted in Catherine David, “Recent Ruins” in Robert Gober, Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1991
Julien, Isaac and Nash, Mark. Only Angels Have Wings in Julien Cooke (ed.) Tracey Moffatt: Free-Falling, DIA Centre for the Arts, New York City, 1998
Kaplan, E. A. Trauma Culture: the politics of terror and loss in media and literature, Rutgers University Press, 2005
Mellencamp, Patricia. A Fine Romance: five ages of film feminism, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, 1995
Mellencamp, Patricia. Haunted History: Tracey Moffatt and Julie Dash, in Discourse 16, No.2, Winter 1993/4
Morris, M. Beyond Assimilation: aboriginality, media history, and public memory in aedon, vol.4 iss. 1, November 1996
Newton, Gael. Invocations, Australian National University Drill Hall, Canberra, 2001
O’Reagan, Tom. Australian National Cinema, Routledge, London, 1996
Reinhardt, Brigitte. Creating One’s Own Reality, in Brigitte Reinhardt (ed.) Tracey Moffatt: Laudanum, Hante Cantz, New York City, 1999
Summerhayes, Catherine. The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt, Charta, Milan, 2007
Summerhayes, Catherine. Haunting Series: Tracey Moffatt’s bedevil, in Film Quarterly, Vol.58, Fall 2004, p.14-24
Traussig, M. Mimesis and Alterity: a particular history of the senses, Routledge, New York City, 1993
FILMOGRAPHY
Something More Dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1989. Screening Time: 19 minutes
Night Cries Dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1990. Screening Time: 17 minutes
Nice Coloured Girls Dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1983. Screening Time: 16 minutes
Bedevil Dir. Tracey Moffatt, 1993. Screening Time: 90 minutes
Jedda Dir. Charles Chauvel, 1955. Screening Time: 85 minutes
Wake in Fright Dir. Ted Kotcheff, 1971. Screening Time: 109 minutes
Accattone Dir. Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1961. Screening Time: 120 minutes
[1] Ray Chow quoted in Catherine Summerhayes, The Moving Images of Tracey Moffatt, Charta, Milan, 2007, p.119
[3] The backdrop in Night Cries is particularly reminiscent of the paintings of Albert Namatjira; a popular water-colourist spurned by the critical establishment for his lack of ‘primitive authenticity’.
[4] Tracey Moffatt, quoted in ‘Tracey Moffatt: Free Falling, DIA Centre for the Arts, New York, 1983, p.23
[5] Gwendolyn Audrey Foster, Women Film Directors: an international bio-critical dictionary, Greenwood Press, Westport, 1995
[6] It is interesting to note that Chauvel’s film was considered liberal for its day, but is considered racist by today’s standards.
[7] Julien Cooke, Tracey Moffatt: Free-Falling, DIA Centre for the Arts, New York, 1998, p.26
[8] Ibid, p.27
[9] Though I have tried to avoid Moffatt’s own life, this is of course relevant in the auspices of her removal from her aboriginal birth mother, and upbringing in a white family, all in the name of the Church.
[11] P. Mellencamp, 1999, p.266
[12] Catherine Summerhayes, Haunting Series: Tracey Moffatt’s bedevil, in Film Quarterly, Fall 2004, Vol. 58 p. 16
[13] Specific Cinemas by Regis Durand, p.10
[14] Alison Butler, Women’s Cinema: the contested screen, p.110
