AustLit

'Warwick Thornton’s 2009 film Samson & Delilah was surprisingly untimely on a number of levels. In terms of its cinematic approach, it is a film that provokes a sense of untimeliness, as it seems out of step with other contemporary Australian films. This applies firstly in terms of the way in which the film consciously uses time in its structure—for example in the way it uses a cyclical motif to reinforce the specific way in which time impacts on the main characters’ everyday lives, while at the same time using this cyclical motif to provide humour and light relief. Secondly, the film can be untimely in the sense that it is firmly grounded in the present, which is unusual for a film set in outback Australia and one that focuses on an Indigenous story. Samson & Delilah is a contemporary story that does not displace its Indigenous characters by assigning them, and their connection to country, to history. Rather, the film situates its characters (and their struggles) very firmly in the context of country and of contemporary struggles, thereby ironically creating a sense of untimeliness. At the same time however, this means that in subtle ways, the film creates a sense of place, and by extension a sense of belonging (for both Indigenous and non-­‐Indigenous experiences) that works on two different levels: inside the film for its characters, and outside the film for its audience. None of this means that the film is out of step with history, but rather that it is out of step with Australian film history, in which there has been a tendency to position Indigenous Australians in one of two main paradigms: either as ‘noble savages’ living in harmony with and on the land, or as lost and hopeless city dwellers, divorced from their culture. Neither of these paradigms allows for the many different experiences of belonging which Indigenous Australian peoples inhabit.' (Author's introdiction)