Administering sonic shock in Samson and Delilah

Abstract

Through its soundtrack, Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009) brings to the fore questions about representation, history, memory and diaspora. This chapter investigates ways in which the film challenges how Australia has been recorded on film. It examines how Samson and Delilah re-sounds landscape films from the New Australian Cinema; provides shocks to audiences through its audiovisual track; and hybridises genre using the syntax and semantics of the road movie, melodrama and Gothic genres to reinterpret the way Indigenous Australians are represented on screen. By using these techniques, amongst others, Samson and Delilah sound back to films of the New Australian Cinema, and provides a site for questioning Australia’s past.