I watched Warwick Thornton's Samson And Delilah, which is currently being reviewed in the Australian blogosphere. The world is small isolated community in the Central Australian desert near Alice Springs and the Todd river bed at Alice Springs. Boredom, poverty flies and stillness defines the remote settlement. Alice Springs signifies indigenous people being marginalised, degraded, excluded and voiceless.

The film about the relationship between two teenagers in the context of brutal Third World conditions of Aboriginal life conditions of dispossession and inequality constituted through colonial processes. These conditions are framed in an intensely personal context:

It is a bare life --a life reduced to survival and no longer protected by any legal and civil rights. The hope in the film --salvation from the shattering harshness of life, rescue, retreat to country to overcome addiction, and love--- is mythic and sentimental. The old ways of subsisting on sparse ex-pastoral land are best.

In contrast to Thornton's minimalist dialogue and effective use of natural sounds----eg., the crackle of a fire and the sounds of crickets --- the photographic style is social realist, rather than creating a new visual image. This is in spite of the importance of indigenous painting in the film as a pathway to a fulfilling life and a life beyond a bare life. Some of the images however, break away from the social realist 'window on a world' to being powerful images in their own right.

What is haunting is the insight that a bare live, as merely existent life for indigenous people, is a mode of life that is actively and continuously excluded or shut out from the polity and is a mode of life produced by the sovereign authority. This is no historical or political aberration. It is a life exposed to death, which comes from the suspension of the rule of law in the town camps near Alice Springs, and so they become a non-citizen and a non-human being. Race is the marker in the formation of the non-human in the town camp.

The indigenous couple try to forget about the pain by sniffing petrol as they try to live an everyday life on the edge of Alice.They slowly become destroyed from the petrol and more non human. Their only hope for survival is to leave.