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Although Tracey Moffatt's name is not likely be found on the marquee of your local multiplex, the Australian Aboriginal photographer, video artist, and filmmaker is, in the contemporary art world, "one of the most popular artists of the moment" (Versloot 1). Seen today as "Australia's hottest artist internationally," Tracey Moffatt first received wide recognition in 1989. During that year, the Australian Centre for Photography exhibited her photographic series Something More in a one-person show that toured galleries across Australia. That same year, her experimental narrative film Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy was selected for official competition at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. The film received a Golden Palm nomination for Best Short Film. Since 1989, art galleries throughout the world have been a primary exhibition venue for Moffatt's films and videos. Representative of recent exhibitions of her work, the New Works by Tracey Moffatt exhibition at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center from 5 August to 22 October 2000 featured two of her films and two videos that she co-directed along with her 1998 series of hand-tinted photogravures titled Laudanum, the Invocations series of silkscreens she created in 2000, and a documentary that provides an overview of Moffatt's career.1
Moffatt's imaginative work as a director of photonarratives in a range of art forms has prompted film scholars and art historians to discuss the boundary-crossing power of Moffatt's authorial vision. Feminist film scholar Patricia Mellencamp has argued that filmmakers such as Tracey Moffatt "use the affective quality of photographyof composition and the close-up-to make intellectual arguments" ("Empirical Avant-Garde" 179). Writing about an exhibition of Moffatt's work last year at the Roslyn Oxley Gallery in Sydney, an Artspace critic explained that the strength of her work results from the fact that "with Moffatt, there's always a conversation between photography and cinematography" ("2000 Shows" 1). That interaction means, in part, that Moffatt is a directorial photographer who sets "up her shots like a filmmaker: storyboarding them, constructing sets, casting and directing characters" (1).
The interaction also means that in Moffatt's films, the mise-en-scene elements, sound-image combinations, and sequence-to-sequence relationships are so dense with meaning that they invite, require, and reward the kind of contemplation often reserved for one's leisurely or studied encounters with art gallery exhibitions. In the discussion...