Doomed

Tracey Moffatt’s Doomed (2007) and Other (2010), from the Hollywood Montage series made together with Gary Hillberg, are videos collaged from clips of popular films and television programs, using the recognizable appeal of these quotations from the history of cinema and popular culture to create comically rousing celebrations of our fascination with global disaster and the perilous attractions of otherness. 

By means of its fast-paced montage of film clips, Doomed takes Hollywood’s fixation with death and disaster to its ultimate cinematic end. Using fictional and reconstructed disastrous events, Moffatt creates a highly entertaining and darkly humorous take on the bleak side of our psychological landscape. Each clip carries a particular cargo of references. They occupy their own unique symbolism and filmic territory – the poignant, sublime, epic, tragic, the B-grade and the downright trashy. Playing with the disaster genre, and looking at the forms of filmic entertainment, as well as ‘art as entertainment’, Moffatt addresses what it is about death and destruction that we invariably find so entertaining. The rousing music manipulates our emotions, as the soundtrack builds and peaks to climactic effect. Yet for all the destruction that we see and enjoy on screen, the title ‘Doomed’ has the quality of the not yet destroyed. It is a description that is applied to individuals, families, lovers, politics, and nations – an observation made from the outside and yet containing the possibility and hope that the situation can be salvaged.