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Who in Heaven?:Tracey Moffatt: Menin Wet-Suits and theFemale Gaze Catherine Summerhayes2003 год

Who in <i>Heaven</i>?: Tracey Moffatt: Men in Wet-Suits and the Female Gaze
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Аннотация: Who in Heaven? Tracey Moffatt: Men in Wet-Suits and the Female Gaze Catherine Summerhayes Heaven is Tracey Moffatt's 28 minute long video which she produced, or "lovingly compiled" as she says in the credits, in 1997 for her visual art exhibition at the Dia Center in New York. This exhibition also featured two photo-series and her much acclaimed short film: Night Cries—A Rural Tragedy (1989). Heaven was shot on hand held 8mm video tape and features staged and unstaged footage of "good looking" male surfers removing wet suits and otherwise "changing" their clothes. This short film slips between the generic boundaries of video art and film. The distribution company Ronin Films has released it with a cover that proclaims: "Heaven, a film by Tracey Moffatt" and yet Jane Cole, who worked on Heaven as editor and cinematographer, was very clear in her understanding that she was working on a piece of visual art. In Cole's words, Moffatt 's artistic frame of reference is "completely slippery."1 This essay explores such "slipperiness" in Heaven not simply with regard to artistic conventions but also to the difficult, teasing intersections of "looking" with gender and race. Although it was produced as a videotape, I refer to Heaven as film not only because Ronin Films released it as a film but also because its length, content and form provide a nanative cohesion that recalls Moffatt's other films: the three ghost stories in Bedevil (1993), the short film Nice Coloured Girls (1987), and Night Cries—A Rural Tragedy. As in Heaven, JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 33.1 (Winter 2003): 63-80. Copyright © 2003 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 64 JNT the soundtracks of the two latter films were mostly constructed from nonsynchronized sound. I also want to discuss it as a text that can be understood within parameters of film, literary and nanative theory. Within these parameters, Heaven can be understood as playing both with Laura MuIvey 's original concept of a gendered, male cinematic gaze and with those experiences of looking at other people that Jane Gaines calls "looking relations "—social relationships that exist within the cinematic gaze (326). My discussion explores several kinds of looking that are part of the experience of this film and also the idea that vision is a social act that takes place in specific conjunctions of space and time. I consider these acts of looking in the context of Walter Benjamin's concept of aura and with regard to his comments on the mimetic faculty. I draw on Bakhtin's device of chronotope as a way in which to describe how this film's nanative of looking is inscribed through space and time: ways that suggest a meta-narrative of subverted gender and race relations. In short, I will argue that Heaven challenges socially dominant modes of looking. Moffatt the Performance Artist Cole produced a 25 minute documentary, Up in the Sky: Tracey Moffatt in New York (1999), focusing on Moffatt as she prepared for the Dia exhibition. In this film, Moffatt describes how she first conceived of Heaven whilst living in a beachside suburb as she drafted the script for another of her films. She was left alone during the day while her companion went to work and in her words, I was, just like, bored? So I started to film these guys taking their clothes off just out the window ... I shot it on video 8, home video, very shaky camera, I wanted it to look like a bored housewife shot it. Moffatt goes on to describe how she asked various women she knew to film similar subject matter: male surfboard riders changing their clothes in the semi-private space of their cars. Cole herself was one of six cinematographers ; sites included Sydney's Bondi Beach and Avalon Beach.2 In the sense that her art performs images of her own body and draws on nanatives based on her own personal history, I suggest that Moffatt's artis- Who in Heaven? 65 tic practice can well be described through Rebecca Schneider's concept of the performance artist.3 Such an artist works with her own body in order...
Год издания: 2003
Авторы: Catherine Summerhayes
Издательство: Eastern Michigan University
Источник: Journal of Narrative Theory
Ключевые слова: Cinema and Media Studies, Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism, Narrative Theory and Analysis
Другие ссылки: Journal of Narrative Theory (HTML)
ANU Open Research (Australian National University) (PDF)
ANU Open Research (Australian National University) (HTML)