Tracey Moffatt’s Early Films: Nice Coloured Girls, Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, and Bedevil
Livestream Conversation with Scholar Traci-Ann Wint, Smith College and Sabra Thorner, Mount Holyoke College
Wednesday, April 6 at 7:30pm EDT
(dir Tracey Moffatt, Australia: Nice Coloured Girls, 1987, 16 min | Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, 1990, 19 min | Bedevil 1993, 90 min)
Introduced by: Traci-Ann Wint, Smith College
Bedevil
Bedevil is the stunning debut feature from Tracey Moffatt (Night Cries, Nice Coloured Girls) and the first feature directed by an Indigenous Australian woman. Inspired by ghost stories she heard as a child from both her extended Aboriginal and Irish Australian families, Tracey Moffatt has constructed a sublime trilogy in which characters are haunted by the past and bewitched by memories. All three stories are set in Moffatt’s highly stylized, hyper-real, hyper-imaginary Australian landscape. In the first story Mister Chuck, a young boy is fascinated and terrified by a swamp that is haunted by the ghost of an American GI. Choo Choo Choo Choo finds a family living by railroad tracks haunted by strange happenings. The mother (played by Moffatt) is drawn to the tracks at night as she senses the horror of a past tragedy. The final story, Lovin’ the Spin I’m In, follows a woman who resists eviction attempts by her landlord so she can keep vigil for her dead son. Made with the participation of the Australian Film Finance Corporation. (Women Make Movies)
Nice Coloured Girls
This stylistically daring film audaciously explores the history of exploitation between white men and Aboriginal women, juxtaposing the “first encounter” between colonizers and native women with the attempts of modern urban Aboriginal women to reverse their fortunes. Through counterpoint of sound, image, and printed text, the film conveys the perspective of Aboriginal women while acknowledging that oppression and enforced silence still shape their consciousness. (Women Make Movies)
Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy
On an isolated, surreal Australian homestead, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman nurses her dying white mother. The adopted daughter’s attentive gestures mask an almost palpable hostility. Their story alludes to the assimilation policy that forced Aboriginal children to be raised in white families. The stark, sensual drama unfolds without dialogue against vivid painted sets as the smooth crooning of an Aboriginal Christian singer provides ironic counterpoint. Moffatt’s first 35mm film displays rare visual assurance and emotional power. (Women Make Movies)
Watch and Participate
Screen the Films
Available through the festival platform Sparq starting March 31
Live Conversation and Audience Q&A
with Traci-Ann Wint and Sabra Thorner
via Facebook or YouTube
(Wed, April 6 at 7:30pm EST)
All events are free and open to the public.
Access Sparq with your Gmail and Apple ID, or UMass Amherst email address.
About the Introducer/Moderator
Traci-Ann Wint
Traci-Ann Wint is an Assistant Professor in Africana Studies at Smith College. She earned a PhD in African and African Diaspora Studies (AADS) UT Austin. A Black feminist and critical race studies scholar, Dr. Wint is currently writing a book entitled After Paradise: Tourism and Making the Jamaican Nation that explores the ways a neocolonial tourism industry extends the raced and gendered hierarchies of the plantation in the modern anglophone Caribbean. She is also a published poet and experienced television producer.
About the Guest Speaker
Sabra Thorner
Sabra Thorner, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Mount Holyoke College, is a cultural anthropologist who has worked with Indigenous Australians for over 15 years, focusing on photography, digital media and archiving as forms of cultural production and social activism. She is broadly interested in visual/media anthropology, digital cultures, anthropology in/of museums, Indigenous Australia and Indigenous art/media worlds, intellectual property and cultural heritage regimes, ethnographic and documentary film, and art and society. She is currently working on her first monograph, on Indigenous photography in Australia, as well as a collaborative edited collection on the revitalization of Aboriginal arts in southeastern Australia.
Tracey Moffatt
“Tracey Moffatt is a contemporary Australian artist known for her photographs and films. With a variety of narrative techniques, including text, collage, and set design, Moffatt explores issues of childhood trauma, Aboriginal people, and popular Australian culture. In her series Up in the Sky (1997), the artist employs the aesthetic conventions of Italian Neorealist films to portray scenes of an outback town in which there is some lurking violence. “My work is full of emotion and drama, you can get to that drama by using a narrative, and my narratives are usually very simple, but I twist it,” she has explained. “There is a storyline, but there isn’t a traditional beginning, middle, and end.”
(Website: Women Make Movies)
Trailers
Bedevil
Nice Colored Girls
Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy
