First Nations Australian Cinema and the Unrepresentable: The Sublime in Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country

That which exceeds the frame is a persistent focus of First Nations Australian filmmaking. The Kaytetye director Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country (2017) exemplifies this formal and theoretical interrogation of the representation of Indigenous peoples within settler Australian visual culture. To make sense of the already existing yet overlooked philosophical importance of this work in its material specificity, to read Sweet Country as theory requires new theoretical approaches. As such, this article centres the unrepresentable, as it is often invoked in the sublime. It critically interrogates how the anthropologically interlinked sublimes of Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, conceptions that influenced settler Australian visual culture, help to illuminate Sweet Country’s interrogation of settler genres, including the Western and European philosophies of representation. However, in a distinctive manner, Sweet Country brings these European philosophies into contact with Indigenous theoretical knowledge. In doing so, the film draws out manifold theoretical possibilities from the unrepresentable, establishing it as not exactly void but full of possibility.