bazin subjectivity as a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image is unavoidable.

The Bazinian total cinema has evolved in this regard, enhancing the spatiotemporal unity in long-take/deep-focus and even eliminating the boundary between screen and theater spaces through the digital/3D technology. First, aesthetically, iconic index as full representation: it is more accurate that his ontology of the image is less about indexicality per se than about the indexical effect which can also be created in hyperreal or surreal iconicity.

This chapter proposes a new theorization of André Bazin’s realism in two directions in which the medium-specific notion of photographic indexicality can be deconstructed and reframed in view of Bazin’s own work and post-Bazinian film history. The space in the film becomes a place where character and spectator are forced to assume a moral position.

A phenomenological analysis of three short films by Thornton in relation to his latest major work: Samson and Delilah, will demonstrate that the focus of representation in his work is not limited to the characters’ reality, it goes beyond by offering an uncanny ethical space to be shared between the characters and the spectators.

The thesis will draw on André Bazin and Amédée Ayfre's reading of Rossellini to set Thornton’ s work within a phenomenological concept of ethical space connected with a sacred perspective. Thornton’s cinema departs from the social realist tradition of Australian cinema creating a new visual perspective, while operating within the recent development of indigenous Australian filmmaking. It shows how this combination allows the Australian director to communicate an indigenous social content to a wider audience relying on the shared experience of spatial and aural codes. This thesis analyses Warwick Thornton’s aesthetic as produced by the combination of an experience of cinematic style and practice.

Bazin subjectivity as a human hand intervened cast a shadow of doubt over the image is unavoidable.