Love

A film collaboration between Tracey Moffatt and Gary Hillberg

2003 | 21 minutes | Color/BW | DVD | Order No. 04836

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SYNOPSIS

“The clinch that signals the fade-out in so many movies is just the beginning of Love, as Moffatt and editor Hillberg turn their energetic montage technique (introduced in Artist and Lip) to the cinema’s most obvious and most multifarious subject. As it turns out, Bette Davis and the Bond girls have a lot in common. A wealth of clips, from chaste black-and-white Hollywood classics to more full-flooded fare from the ‘60s and ‘70s, show women’s love, lust, longing and revenge. Without commentary or condescension, the film remakes the age-old story of a boy and girl in love with exhilaration and irony.” -Patricia White, Associate Professor & Chair, Film and Media Studies Department of English Literature, Swarthmore College

PRESS

“Moffatt does Hollywood, casting a sharp, witty, insightful, political glance at some of our best memories of romantic films.”

Berenice Reynaud California Institute of the Arts

“Reviving the found footage film as a feminist genre, Tracey Moffatt’s Love uses humor and horror to show us the pathology of the couple form.”

Anna McCarthy Cinema Studies, NYU

SCREENING HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

  • Finger Lakes Envonmental Film Festival, Ithaca College

ABOUT FILMMAKER(S)

Tracey Moffatt

Australian photographer and filmmaker. After graduating from Queensland College of Art, Brisbane (1982), she moved to Sydney, later dividing her time between Sydney and New York. Moffat began her career as an experimental filmmaker and as a producer of music videos, and she continued making films after establishing herself as a photographer. Her concern with power relations is demonstrated in the series Scarred for Life (nine offset lithographs, 1994), which juxtapose photographs of children with text, mimicking the layout of Life magazine during the 1960s. Useless, 1974 (1994; priv. col., see B. Reinhardt, ed., p. 21), shows a young girl cleaning a car in a suburban setting; the text beneath reads ‘Her father's nickname for her was “useless.”’ In the late 1990s she focused on the relationship between Australian Aborigines and white colonial settlers. The highly atmospheric series Laudanum (19 photo-engravings, 1998; Frankfurt, L. A. Gal.) shows the relationship between a woman and her aboriginal servant. Based on Pauline Reage's erotic novel Story of O (1954), it presents two actors posing in a variety of locations around a large house, suggesting sexual and power relations laced with narcotic hysteria. The use of photogravure and deliberately flawed prints heightens the ambience, informed by late 19th century photography as well as by Expressionist Cinematic techniques of shadow and distortion. The typically dreamlike quality of these works creates a space in which actors can embody wider sexual and social conflicts.

In 2017 she represented Australia at the 57th Venice Biennale with her solo exhibition, "My Horizon". Her works are held in the collections of the Tate,Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, National Gallery of Australia, Art Gallery of South Australia and Art Gallery of New South Wales. She currently lives in Sydney and New York. (03/19)

Gary Hillberg

Gary Hillberg was born in Perth, Australia and has been working as an experimental filmmaker and music video producer since the late 1980s. Most recently, he co-directed a series of filmic montages in collaboration with Tracey Moffatt. In 2008, Hillberg and Moffatt presented REVOLUTION, a study of the stereotypes associated with revolution in movies. Hillberg currently lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. (07/09)

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