Landscape OF SILENCE Sound Design in the Films of Warwick Thornton

In the years since his internationally successful feature debut, Samson & Delilah (2009), Warwick Thornton has not been unproductive. He has made documentaries, written other films, and produced art and video installations, including the immersive Mother Courage; as Thornton has explained in an earlier issue of Metro, ‘Not all stories are feature films.’ Yet his fiction features – especially his more recent, Sweet Country (2017) – can be considered key pieces in his catalogue of art. While many things make his oeuvre significant, it is particularly noteworthy for its affective sound design, which is both specific in the context of Australian cinema and striking for the way it encourages the audience to participate. As academic Isabelle Delmotte has written, ‘To an audience, cinema sound designers are the mediators of a phenomenological world of sounds and silences that is in constant mutation.’ This ‘mediation’ is something that Thornton, along with his teams of sound personnel, manages to achieve in his work through a careful consideration of the sensorial impact of sound, silence, dialogue and music, in concert with the moving image.

Samson & Delilah, like many films, begins aurally, before its first images appear. As white text materialises on a black screen, sounds paint a vivid picture of the setting, including dog barks and bird calls, a telephone bell and wind moving through the landscape.