- Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), 56–80.
- Ibid., 42–9.
- Ibid., 67.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 56.
- Ibid., 48.
- However, this does not mean that frozen gestures offer unequivocal meanings. They point towards meanings implicitly, meanings not easily ‘put into words’.
- Ibid., 65. While Brooks speaks of ‘mute gestures’ or ‘silent gestures’, gestures are commonly understood to be silent or at least ‘without words’. Through this tautology, Brooks might wish to emphasise the importance of ‘wordlessness’ for theatrical tableaux, in which gestures form a self-contained language, independent from verbal means of expression.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 72.
- Tom Gunning, ‘The Horror of Opacity: The Melodrama of Sensation in the Plays of André de Lorde’, in Melodrama: Stage, Picture, Screen, ed. Jacky Bratton, Jim Cook, and Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 50.
- Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1987), 50.
- Susan Hayward, Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts, 3rd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 128.
- Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, 51.
- Ibid., 52.
- Hollywood's censorship was effective until the 1960s.
- Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, 55. This means that the mise-en-scène tells more about the characters than the plot.
- Ibid., 52.
- Christine Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field: An Investigation’, in Home Is Where the Heart Is, 18–9.
- Ibid., 18.
- Ibid.
- Ibid., 21.
- Ibid., 22. Significantly, Moffatt has emphasised her obsession with all components of the mise-en-scène in her visual narratives. Tracey Moffatt, ‘Fever Pitch’, in Tracey Moffatt: Fever Pitch, ed. Tracey Moffatt and Gael Newton (Annandale: Piper Press, 1995), 5.
- Christine Gledhill, ‘The Melodramatic Field’, 22.
- Rex Butler and Morgan Thomas, ‘Tracey Moffatt: From Something Singular… to Something More’, Eyeline 45, 2001, 24.
- Gerald Matt, ‘An Interview with Tracey Moffatt’, in Tracey Moffatt, ed. Martin Hentschel and Gerald Matt (Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 1998), 25.
- Several critics have analysed aspects of Moffatt's cross-media and intertextual practice. For example, see Regis Durand, ‘Specific Climates’, in Tracey Moffatt (Barcelona: Centre Cultural de la Fundación ‘la Caixa’; Paris: Centre national de la photographie, 1999), 103–5.
- As Lea Jacobs observes, there are a few variations on the conventional story. The fallen woman was a frequent theme of nineteenth-century Victorian novels and later particularly popular in late-1920s and early1930s Hollywood cinema (Lea Jacobs, ‘Censorship and the Fallen Woman Cycle’, in Home Is Where the Heart Is, 100–2). In 1934, the Hays Code restricted the representation of women that were considered to be too transgressive.
- According to Adrian Martin, this cross-media approach is the defining feature of a tableau actualised in any media (Adrian Martin, ‘Immortal Stories’, Photofile 4, no. 3, Summer 1986, 11–5). Additionally, in the particular context of melodrama, as seen in Brooks's definition, the tableau is defined as a form that freezes the gestures of characters to summarise their emotional condition. Both defining features of the tableau are realised in Something More.
- Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, 62.
- As Linda Williams observes in her book Playing the Race Card: ‘All the afflictions and injustices of the modern post-enlightenment have been dramatized in melodramatic form… [Melodrama] explores controversies not yet placed on the agenda of liberal humanism.’ Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O. J. Simpson (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), 18. Williams explicitly names the injustices and social problems that melodrama addresses: ‘illegitimacy, slavery, racism, labor struggles, class division, disease, nuclear annihilation, genocide’ (Ibid.).
- This image relates to what Adrian Martin has identified as a key theme of the series, ‘desire taken as a drama of social mobility’: the desire for a different environment, for social stability and, maybe, a change of identity (Adrian Martin, ‘Tracey Moffatt: The Go-Between’, World Art 1, no. 2, 1995, 27).
- Sadomasochism is understood here as a combination of masochistic and sadistic tendencies within a person or as an alternation of these tendencies between persons who act both sadistically and masochistically towards each other at different times. In Freud's understanding, sadistic and masochistic tendencies are interchangeable, the masochist being at the same time a sadist and vice versa. Lynn S. Chancer, Sadomasochism in Everyday Life: The Dynamics of Power and Powerlessness (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1992), 83–4.
- Tracey Moffatt, ‘Letter Exchange with Clare Williamson’, Eyeline 18, 1992, 8.
- Gerald Matt, ‘An Interview with Tracey Moffatf, 18.
- This interpretation is suggested in light of the fact that the series was made a year after the Bicentenary of Australia, a time when Moffatt was involved in political activism.
- The formal fragmentation of Moffatt's series has also led critics to compare them structurally with music videos. For instance, Justin Spring notes the formal similarities of Moffatt's Up in the Sky (1997) series to David Bowie's video Let's Dance (1983). Justin Spring, ‘Tracey Moffatt: Hunters and Collectors’, Art and Text 60, February-April 1998, 60–5.
- Gael Newton, ‘See the Woman with the Red Dress On… And On… And On…’, Art and Asia Pacific 7, no. 2, 1994, 100.
- Ibid.
- This motherly sacrifice is also often put into question in the more sophisticated family melodramas, one example being Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955).
- Isaac Julien and Mark Nash relate Night Cries's theme of a ‘black’ daughter serving her ‘white’ mother to Australia's government policy of assimilation and forced removal of Indigenous children from their families. This policy aimed to provide cheap slave labour for domestic and industrial purposes. However, Julien and Nash also see Night Cries more generally as an exploration of a mother-daughter relationship in a case of adoption, demonstrating love and dependency between the women. Isaac Julien and Mark Nash, ‘Only Angels Have Wings’, in Tracey Moffatt: Free-Falling, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (New York: Dia Center for the Arts), 9–20. On one level, the story of Something More circles around a crime, offering a ‘whodunnit’ puzzle that is unsolvable because the identity of the perpetrator is withheld.
- Adrian Martin, ‘Tracey Moffatt: The Go-Between’, 27.
- Tracey Moffatt, cited in Scott Murray, ‘Tracey Moffatt: Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy’, Cinema Papers 79, 1990, 22.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- For the production of the film, Moffatt collaborated with various people, including set designer Stephen Curtis and sound and video artist Deborah Petrovitch, who created the soundscape.
- Douglas Sirk often used coloured light to indicate characters’ emotional states.
- Ingrid Periz, ‘Night Cries’, 16.
- Ibid. Like Periz, Jayamanne describes the setting in Night Cries as a ‘sign of a sign… a specific cultural reference’. Laleen Jayamanne, ‘“Love Me Tender, Love Me True, Never Let Me Go”: A Sri Lankan Reading of Tracey Moffatfs Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy’, in Feminism and the Politics of Difference, ed. Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1993), 75.
- Laleen Jayamanne, ‘Love Me Tender’, 75–6.
- Ibid., 78.
- Ibid.
- Ingrid Periz, ‘Night Cries: Cries from the Heart’, Filmnews, August 1990, 16.
- The epigraph is: ‘“Look at that sunset Howard!… It's like the daytime didn't want to end… like it was gonna put up a big scrap and maybe set the world on fire to keep the night time from creepin’ on.” Rosalind Russell—Picnic’. Rosemary is watching the sunset at the town's communal Labour Day picnic. Her words contrast the sunset's red fire (her passionate desires) and the approaching night (her anxiety about getting older in desperate loneliness).
- For the storyboard, see Tracey Moffatt, ‘Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, 1989, Storyboard’, in Tracey Moffatt, 40–4.
- Ingrid Periz, ‘Night Cries: Cries from the Hearf, 16.
- Moffatt admitted that the play inspired Night Cries. ‘The House of Bernarda Alba… is now seared into my brain. I read it over and over again after a play in London in 1987… My short film Night Cries was greatly influenced by this play—the idea of women living cooped up together in a hot environment and going insane.’ Marta Gili, ‘An Interview with Tracey Moffatt’, in Tracey Moffatt, ed. Régis Durand (Barcelona: Fundacion La Caixa de Pensiones, 1999), 106.
- In Jedda, the mother wants her adopted daughter to assimilate into ‘white’ culture and to deny her racial origins. In Picnic, the mother opposes Madge's relationship with the drifter Hal. In The House of Bernarda Alba, the mother restricts her daughters in their sexual desires and actions.
- Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, 67.
- Tracey Moffatt, ‘Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, 1989, Storyboard’, 43.
- Laleen Jayamanne, ‘Love Me Tender’, 77.
- Jayamanne sees Little as culturally ambivalent. It is not possible to decide which side he stands on. Through mimicking his own performance, Little indicates the strategy of cultural assimilation, which enables the colonised to live and act in a (post)colonial world. This mimicry, according to Jayamanne, can be described as a ‘hybridizing gesture’ which makes it difficult for others to decide if one is ‘there or not’. Ibid., 78.
- Roland Barthes, ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Image-Music-Text (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 69–78. Barthes refers here to the mise-en-scène of ‘post-Eisensteinian cinema’.
- Adrian Martin, ‘Tracey Moffatt's Australia (A Reconnaissance)’, Parkett 53, 1998, 26.
- Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury’, 50.
- Moffatt explains: ‘Love is a rollercoaster montage of some of my favorite Hollywood melodramas depicting love scenes, which in the end turn out to be not so romantic.’ ‘Tracey Moffatt: Love and Adventures: To Be Exhibited at Steven Kasher Gallery’ (www.newyorkartistseries.com/mambo/content/view/466/60).
- Jean Beaudrillard, ‘The Melodrama of Difference (or, The Revenge of the Colonized)’, trans. James Bendict, International Journal of Baudrillard Studies 3, no. 1, January 2006 (also www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol3_1/baudrillard2.htm).
- Ibid.
- Meaghan Morris, ‘Beyond Assimilation: Aboriginality, Media History and Public Memory’, Identity Anecdotes: Translation and Media Culture (London: Sage Publications, 2006), 105. Here Morris refers to Night Cries.
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art
Volume 10, 2009 - Issue 1: The Conference Issue