Warwick Thornton’s Emotional Landscapes: Indigenous Cinema and Cultural Autonomy in Australia

This article explores director Warwick Thornton’s activistic use of filmic emotions in the features Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017). Thornton’s films portray coloniser-colonised relations at two moments in Australian history, and that affective history-telling is motivated toward a more deliberative case for a future of self-determined cultural autonomy. I analyse emotive resources that cross between both films, including periods of silence and landscape aesthetics that depict subjective experience of country. I also address the place of empathy in Thornton’s character studies as foundational to later political reasoning. Thornton’s films call attention to the positionality of different audience members, challenging the spectator to interrogate foundational emotional responses, conflicts between their emotional responses, and subsequent prompts to think through the politics of those experiences. These provocations are united into an explicitly argumentative appeal for Indigenous cultural autonomy.