Bedevil

In ‘Love’, the subtleties of first desires to climactic scenes of impassioned dialogue and action, to betrayal, disgust and violence that have played out over the history of film are ripped from original contexts and edited into a repetitive staccato rush, regurgitating, for our entertainment, horror and critique, the stereotypical, hyperbolic trajectory of (heterosexual) love. Through this process Moffatt unites the graphic punch and suggestiveness of the still image with the satisfaction of a complete movie narrative. In the end, its only a movie. ‘Love’ embodies Moffatt’s desire to create work that has an ‘international look’ and deal with ‘universal predicaments’. 'Love' is both parody and pastiche, critical comment, and wryly humorous.

Nice Coloured Girls is a short film classic by Tracey Moffatt, one of Australia's foremost visual artists. Three Aboriginal women cruise through Kings Cross and pick up a 'captain' (a drunken white man). They encourage him to spend his money on them and to drink until incapacitated while they steal his wallet and race off to catch a cab, self-satisfied. Nice Coloured Girls contrasts the relationship between Aboriginal women and white men in the past and present.

Mother compiles clips of mother figures from classic Hollywood cinema and television dramas. The figures range from the Virgin Mary and Mother Courage, to characters from Maude (1972–78), Aliens (1986), Imitation of Life (1959), and American Gangster (2007). The characters play out scenes of care, loss, emotional manipulation, abandonment, and grief. The intense relationships between mothers and daughters are especially prominent.

This playful video from famed director and photographer Tracey Moffatt turns the tables on traditional representations of desire to examine the power of the female gaze in the objectification of men’s bodies. HEAVEN begins with surreptitiously taped documentary footage of brawny surfers changing in and out of bathing and wet-suits. While the soundtrack switches between the ocean surf and male chanting, Moffatt moves closer to alternately flirt with and tease her subjects, who respond with a combination of preening and macho reticence.

A short film about the relationship between an Aboriginal daughter and her white mother. The daughter, now the sole carer of her dying mother, dreams of far away places, the haunted look in her eyes loaded with a sense of what could have been. Famous Aboriginal singer, Jimmy Little, sings 'Royal Telephone', evoking the presence of Christianity and its role in the assimilation of Aboriginal people. The final scene sees the daughter lying in a foetal position next to her mother, crying. Assimilation, then, can be understood as a pain experienced by both the Aboriginal daughter as well as the white mother.

A collection of scenes of destruction from disaster movies.

A study of the stereotypes associated with revolution in movies.

Tracey Moffatt’s fast paced montage videos compile scenes from film and television programs selected in response to a particular theme or coding. This is the final work in a suite of 7 videos made over the last decade; the previous works include ‘Lip’ 1999, ‘Artist’ 2000, ‘Love’ 2003, ‘Doomed’ 2007, ‘Revolution’ 2008 and ‘Mother’ 2009. 'Other' is one of the most mesmerising of the series as it edits together scenes of interracial encounters. It opens with first contact sequences, films in which the beach and the shallow waters are a zone of encounter between ships and canoes, between Europeans and non-Europeans. It then moves to images of looking, of two different peoples meeting for the first time and appraising each other visually. As imagined by Hollywood and TV directors, this is a moment of both curiosity and desire, where glances become lingering and erotically charged.

Through dance, voice and photographs, the confident, personal story of a talented young Aboriginal dancer is interwoven with the sombre history of Aboriginal women since European colonisation of Australia.

Short animation by Wendy Chandler.