'When I grow up I want to be just like Jesus.' (Warwick Thornton, aged 6, quoted on the website for Stills Gallery at the time of his exhibition titled "Stranded"
Warwick Thornton's Bible studies seem to have left deep impressions. The title of his first film Samson and Delilah evokes the biblical story even if the film doesn't seem to grapple with it. Not long after the film was made Thornton produced a video and an accompanying photographic exhibition called "Stranded". This premiered at the 2011 Adelaide Film Festival as part of Stop(the)Gap, described as a major international Indigenous moving image project curated by Brenda L Croft for the Samstag Museum of Art. In Sydney Stills Gallery in Paddington presented the 3D screening of Stranded and the series of photographic works inspired by the video.
According to Brenda L Croft 2011 writing the Stop (the) Gap catalogue essay the video features Thornton “as the central Christ-like figure – dead centre, if you like – with the unexpected addition of a skull and crossbones. Thornton’s figure revolves in space above a mirrored waterhole in the brilliant harshness of the broken heartland, heightened by the unnerving sounds of wide open spaces – the chirruping of native birds, the ubiquitous blowfly buzz, the whoomp-ing sensation of windmill...or wind turbine? Dream(ing) or nightmare, or both?”
The Stills Gallery website notes that the depiction of Thornton as Christ "is at once melodramatic and subversive. He draws on certain cinematic conventions — the epic desert landscape as setting, the use of sound to heighten an emotional response, the high-tech 3D technology usually prevalent in blockbuster films — but provides no narrative resolution. In the similarly cinematic still images that accompany the video his crucified figure appears over desert, lake and city-scapes suggesting a Christ-like ubiquity, however in both video and photographic works, his deliberate open-endedness asks viewers to form their own assumptions. At one point in Stranded, for example, Thornton yawns on his cross. What are we to make of his boredom?"
“We are (also) possibly witnessing a representation of a ‘lost’ Aboriginal generation, Thornton’s own, no longer under missionary control, yet still nailed to the cross, detached and hovering above the Land (see still at the top). Perhaps in Stranded we encounter another ‘muddying of the waters:’ art that worries at the line between Indigenous and non-indigenous, elusively pushing beyond established concepts.”
Tom Redwood – RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg.23
The Stills Gallery website notes that the depiction of Thornton as Christ "is at once melodramatic and subversive. He draws on certain cinematic conventions — the epic desert landscape as setting, the use of sound to heighten an emotional response, the high-tech 3D technology usually prevalent in blockbuster films — but provides no narrative resolution. In the similarly cinematic still images that accompany the video his crucified figure appears over desert, lake and city-scapes suggesting a Christ-like ubiquity, however in both video and photographic works, his deliberate open-endedness asks viewers to form their own assumptions. At one point in Stranded, for example, Thornton yawns on his cross. What are we to make of his boredom?"
“We are (also) possibly witnessing a representation of a ‘lost’ Aboriginal generation, Thornton’s own, no longer under missionary control, yet still nailed to the cross, detached and hovering above the Land (see still at the top). Perhaps in Stranded we encounter another ‘muddying of the waters:’ art that worries at the line between Indigenous and non-indigenous, elusively pushing beyond established concepts.”
Tom Redwood – RealTime issue #102 April-May 2011 pg.23
All of this trickled back as I watched The New Boy, Thornton's new film in which a feral child, some descendant of Kipling's Mowgli and Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage, is dumped in some outback foster home for blackfella kids presided over by an alcoholic white nun (Cate Blanchett) and a friendly black nun (Deborah Mailman). The new kid cant speak but has magical powers which later include an ability to handle snakes in a way which sends terror through the rest of the handful of people living in the mission. Absent from the mission is the dead head brother, whose demise has been kept secret from the authorities, likely for fear that the place will be closed down.
For a decade or so now we've had our heads filled with grim tales of institutional abuse, violence, sexual assault even murder and suicide. Apart from Thornton making sure we appreciate how kids designated as leaders quickly assume the violent and authoritarian traits of their elders, the place is remarkably benign. John McDonald writing in the Australian Financial Review and reprinted on his personal website if you dont want to buy the paper got some words together that expressed things better than I : "We’re left wondering if our young hero is being irredeemably warped by Catholicism, or whether he is exposing its flaws and hypocrisies. The nuns are equally ambiguous, being kind-hearted and all-too-human in their failings. Are they supposed to be agents of an oppressive ideology?"
Like John I'm not sure if Thornton is trying to shake the Catholicism out of himself or tell you how much he loves it and how fondly he remembers it.
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