- by A Carruthers
- The Guardian
- Issue #2153
"Sweet Country"
That Warwick Thornton, Kaytetye man from Alice Springs, has only directed two films, and that those two films are both masterpieces is astonishing.
When I first saw Samson and Delilah (2009), immediately I was hooked. There is a gritty realism to Samson and Delilah and an epic ability to paint broad brushstrokes and bring the cinematic world upwards to the highest level of allegory, in this case biblical.
Underneath it is a scathing exposé of the exploitation of capitalist white Australia and the degradation of the lives of the two characters, Samson and Delilah, who struggle to make a life together. Yet it’s a story of survival and extreme tenderness – Delilah’s relationship with her grandmother, with art, and with Samson, is extraordinarily portrayed.
The cinematic effects are arresting, impossible to forget – Thornton can bring us so close to the earth and to the humanity of the characters as to almost smother us, and yet also step back and take us to middle distance or even farther out (the camerawork is so fluid, so purposive yet so spontaneous) – there is a heaviness on the one hand and a lightness of touch on the other that is rare for filmmakers in our time, or any time really. Surely he is a genius.
Thornton followed this up with the 2017 film Sweet Country – he may have gotten even better with this one. Again there’s a lightness to it. It can be funny, but who has created images like this?
Sergeant Fletcher is held up, almost dangled before us on the screen, as this colonial absurdity – the frames of him struggling to survive in the desert clearly have a Sidney Nolan quality. But none of this detracts from the sheer bitterness and horror of it either. The dialectic of lightness and darkness carries the extremity of effects.
I think this is something that needs to be better understood in liberal accounts of Aboriginal art. I saw Vincent Namatjira’s exhibition at the National Gallery not too long ago and I felt that the way liberal media reflected on it, both right-wing and left-liberal, completely misunderstood it.
Do they not realise how funny it is to see a caricatured Prince Charles stuck in the red desert? Looking at some of the reviews and the reception, it would seem that white-liberal viewers really don’t yet know how to process the levels of humour, irony and complexity in Aboriginal art, and in some cases, treat it too seriously and forget that lightness of touch and thematic darkness are both part of the experience.
That exhibition was not just about the infamous Gina Rinehart portrait – it was probably one of the greatest exhibitions in Australian art history. The best way to view it was from the standpoint of sovereignty and the horizon of Aboriginal national liberation.
Aboriginal film, art and literature is undergoing a world-historical renaissance. Aboriginal achievement is unstoppable. We have seen this in the epic novels of Alexis Wright. We have seen it in the poetry of Ellen Van Neerven and Lionel Fogarty. The dialectic of deep tradition, deep civilisational expression and the reality and brutality of capitalist modernity is producing clashing polarities and penetrating the deepest wellsprings of human expression.
I for one cannot wait to see what Warwick Thornton does next. If he isn’t captured by Hollywood, it is sure to be great (again!).
