Night cries: a rural tragedy

In Tracey Moffatt’s re-imaging of the pivotal Australian film “Jedda”, a middle-aged Aboriginal woman returns to her outback home to nurse her dying white mother. Filmed against lushly coloured sets that recall the technicolour glories of the past, and utilising a harsh discordant soundscape, “Night Cries” occupies the landscape of dreams and the classic mythic terrain of familial violence and betrayal. This short film does more than simply reconfigure and re-imagine past narratives. It inaugurated a clear and permament break with previous moving image representations of the “outback”: no longer the pretence that it is a place outside language and history.