Dis­cov­er the haunt­ing ghost sto­ries of Tracey Moffatt’s beDevil

In 1993 Tracey Moffatt’s inno­v­a­tive super­nat­ur­al hor­ror beDev­il became the first fea­ture film direct­ed by an Aus­tralian Abo­rig­i­nal woman. Like the artist and filmmaker’s pri­or short, Night Cries: A Rur­al Tragedy, it was select­ed for the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val, appear­ing in that year’s Un Cer­tain Regard section.

Despite Moffatt’s inter­na­tion­al renown as an artist and the fact that it remains her sole fea­ture, beDev­il has sub­se­quent­ly been rather sur­pris­ing­ly over­looked. For­tu­nate­ly, it screens as part of the Barbican’s forth­com­ing sea­son, Home­land: Films by Aus­tralian First Nations direc­tors along­side work by Leah Pur­cell, War­wick Thorn­ton, Rachel Perkins and others.

Indebt­ed to Masa­ki Kobayashi’s Kwaidan, beDev­il is an anthol­o­gy hor­ror con­sist­ing of three uncon­nect­ed ghost sto­ries which Mof­fatt heard as a child from her fam­i­ly. The first, ​‘Mr Chuck,’ con­cerns a young boy who encoun­ters the spir­it of an Amer­i­can GI that drowned in a swamp on Bri­bie Island dur­ing World War Two and con­tin­ues to haunt the locale.

The sec­ond, ​‘Choo choo choo choo,’ cen­tres on a fam­i­ly liv­ing in a house beside a rail­way track some­where in the Out­back who are beset by the clam­our of invis­i­ble loco­mo­tives and the spir­it of a young girl killed on the tracks. Final­ly, ​‘Lovin’ The Spin I’m In’ tells the trag­ic tale of a cou­ple from the Tor­res Strait Islands who mys­te­ri­ous­ly died far too young and are for­ev­er com­pelled to reside in a con­demned warehouse.

While it might be under­stand­able that beDev­il is reg­u­lar­ly char­ac­terised as ​‘Indige­nous Goth­ic,’ Mof­fatt her­self bris­tled at those who were only able to engage with her work through the lens of her iden­ti­ty. Across her var­i­ous modes of art prac­tice, she has addressed Indige­nous sto­ries and peo­ple, but the sto­ries in beDev­il recount haunt­ings by ghosts of var­i­ous eth­nic­i­ties and nation­al­i­ties and they are plagu­ing peo­ple of sim­i­lar­ly diverse backgrounds.

The inter­play of cul­tures is unde­ni­ably both promi­nent and per­ti­nent, but the frame of ref­er­ence is broad and inter­sec­tion­al. Per­haps as strik­ing as the fore­ground­ing of Indige­nous char­ac­ters is the agency giv­en to women – who act as the pri­ma­ry fram­ing voic­es for all three sto­ries – as well as char­ac­ters from immi­grant back­grounds or who oth­er­wise don’t con­form to soci­etal expectations.

How­ev­er, the rad­i­cal­ism of the film doesn’t end with issues of rep­re­sen­ta­tion, and it could be argued that its aes­thet­ic and for­mal cre­ativ­i­ty is why beDev­il still feels quite so invig­o­rat­ing to a con­tem­po­rary audi­ence. Visu­al­ly, the film resem­bles some of Moffatt’s most famous pho­to­graph­ic work, in its use of impres­sion­is­tic stu­dio sets paint­ed in bright sat­u­rat­ed colours – par­tic­u­lar­ly her 1989 series, Some­thing More.

The sets are one area for which Mof­fatt cit­ed Kwaidan’s influ­ence as well as Aus­tralian land­scape artists like Rus­sell Drys­dale. The design and light­ing of the sets, inten­tion­al­ly high­light­ing their arti­fi­cial­i­ty, is both incred­i­bly evoca­tive and uncan­ni­ly atmos­pher­ic. It also empha­sis­es the lay­ers of sto­ry and mem­o­ry that instruct the film’s form and its think­ing about haunting.

Even with­in the three sep­a­rate sec­tions of beDev­il, there are mul­ti­ple lev­els of rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Two of the three chap­ters include faux-doc­u­men­tary fram­ing devices along­side the hyper-real pre­sen­ta­tion of the actu­al events, while in the third sec­tion peo­ple recount ele­ments of the nar­ra­tive with­in the nar­ra­tive itself. The lay­er­ing of sto­ry and tem­po­ral shifts unmoor us and col­lapse time, allow­ing Mof­fatt to explore the pro­longed impact of mem­o­ries and the way that fables become enmeshed in com­mu­ni­ties through the years. It feeds into the sense that as much as tales of phan­toms, beDev­il is about the haunt­ing of a place by its past.

In this sense of land­scapes hold­ing on to painful mem­o­ries, it clear­ly engages with the spe­cif­ic his­to­ries of Australia’s Indige­nous pop­u­la­tions, but it also speaks more broad­ly about the nature and impact of remem­brance and sto­ry­telling. beDevil’s most unnerv­ing aspect might be the poten­tial it posits for the hor­rors of the past to come crash­ing, ter­ri­fy­ing­ly into the present.

beDev­il screens as part of Barbican’s Home­land: Films by Aus­tralian First Nations direc­tors sea­son, which runs 2 – 23 February.