Bedevil (1993)

directed by Tracey Moffatt

Australia

86 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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A lot of sources name this as the first feature film directed an Aboriginal Australian woman, but I'm wary of claims like that. Is it really the first, or is it just the first to get any kind of wide recognition? Even if it is the case that this is truly the first, the reasoning for that shouldn't be framed as a supposed lack of Aboriginal filmmakers, but with a society that has for so long prevented Aboriginal people from making films. Relevant to my specific interests, Bedevil also purported to be a horror film, or at least a creepy, supernatural film. That claim, at least, I can validate.

The film is split up into three segments, each dealing with a piece of local lore as told by the people who witnessed whatever event is at the center of the story. The first two segments are presented in almost a mockumentary style, a mix of present-day interviews with the people in question and flashbacks to the event they're describing as it actually unfolded. But there's something about the way these two stories are told - and I am deliberately focusing on the first two, because the third was a bit more inscrutable, and I'll get to it in time - that is entirely unlike the way you would typically think of a documentary or found-footage style film as being. These aren't formal, sit-down interviews, they're patchy recollections told almost as an aside while the interviewees are doing something else. Barely "interviews" at all, really; that term may be too formal for what in essence feels like a friend or at least an acquaintance telling us something that happened to them. It's almost like the focus is not on the story itself but on the people who lived the story - not the specific people, not in a biographical sense, but in the sense that at the heart of every legend shown to us in Bedevil is a real person who eventually grew up, moved on, and continued to live their life.

In "Mr. Chuck", two people relate parts of the same story. The story centers on a swamp that was rumored to have been haunted by the ghost of an American GI who drowned in it during WWII. The swamp as a physical location is a meeting place between three cultures: the Aboriginal people who have lived with it for tens of thousands of years; the white Australians, hungry for progress, building on the swamp like it's any tract of vacant land; and, only in ghostly form (or maybe as something worse) the specter of the American presence on the island. One of the storytellers is an Aboriginal man who, as a boy, fell into the swamp and experienced being physically touched by the spirit inhabiting it. The other is a white woman, the child of one of the developers who built a movie theater right on top of the swamp. While the woman manages to tell her story in a detached, impersonal way, describing with no facial expression how everyone knew that the boy who fell into the swamp had a bad home life and everybody could have helped him, but they didn't, the man seems physically haunted by his experience. He laughs about it, almost hysterically, but the way his face is downturned sometimes makes it look like he's crying. There's something incredibly, incredibly haunting about this segment - that feeling of what was once a human having been subsumed by the land that did not want him and turned, over decades, into something else. Something worse. I also find it really compelling that what was built on top of the swamp was a movie theater - a place where people go to live and relive stories, some of them, eventually, probably, being war stories.

"Choo Choo Choo Choo", the second segment, partially covers the Min Min Lights, an interesting phenomenon that I've known about for a while, but also involves a more personal story about a phantom train and the ghost of a little girl accidentally killed on its tracks. This is by far the most intimate telling: no formal, sit-down interviews; just the woman who witnessed the ghost train giving us tidbits of information when she's not rocking out in the bed of a truck with her netball group or busy cooking a wild pig underground. We feel familiar with this woman - at one point she comes up to the camera and wipes off the lens, like we the viewers are a messy child who's come to her with chocolate on our face. Everyone in the immediate vicinity seems to know about the story of the train, as we see that the people living around the tracks have actually developed a gesture to reference it - pumping one arm for the chugging of the wheels, then covering their eyes to represent the ghost girl who is inexorably paired with the train. Again, there's something deeply haunting about this, about hearing but not seeing disembodied noises in the night, knowing something is there, but not being able to touch it. But in the present, the woman is not haunted by it. She tells us how irritating it was to have the ghost girl come around, and then she has a little spat over the correct plating of seafood with her friend in their native language. What she experienced is a part of her life that she's conveying to us, and she's at ease with it.

The third segment, "Lovin' the Spin I'm In", has no interviews whatsoever and is entirely dramatized. It's also my least favorite segment, although it is as well-made and interesting as the previous two. It's the story of a landlord who owns a building inhabited by two Torres Strait Islander tenants who've been dead for many years, and the perspective is mostly through the eyes of a 14-year-old white boy in the building across the street. I think maybe the self-reflective nature of the first two stories was what made them engaging to me, because I had trouble getting into this one that was a more conventional narrative. It is eerie, unusual, and memorable, with the same gorgeous cinematography as the rest of the film, but it felt less interesting overall.

To talk of cinematography: this movie doesn't look like anything else I've ever seen. Moffat was heavily influenced by the aesthetic of Kwaidan, and it really shows, but at the same time Bedevil is its own thing. The film itself is unfortunately woefully obscure and your best chance of finding it is a garbage VHS rip that strips a lot of the visual intricacy from it, but you can still tell how innovative and unique the set design is. At first I thought the use of painted backdrops and what looks like just a bunch of Astroturf and fake shrubbery on a soundstage was something we were meant to not really see, but now I think it was very deliberate, and a brilliant choice. The parts of the film set in the present are filmed in a space that's clearly real, lucid, but the events of the past take place in a liminal zone that feels like a dream. The painted sunset looks more perfect than a real sunset could ever be, because it's not a real sunset, it's the way a sunset is captured as a static moment in our memory. The past segments feel like reenactments. The stories being told exist in an un-visitable eternal single moment that lives on not as an empirical truth but as a bodily, lived experience held within the tellers.

I was really taken in by this beautiful and strange film. People do know about it within certain circles, but it seems pretty obscure in the overall picture of Australian cinema. I'm not familiar with Tracey Moffat's other work as a video artist, but Bedevil has definitely left an impression on me, and I want to explore the other things she's created.