Spall’s towering presence in the central role is unquestionably a masterpiece of Dickensian proportions – by turns passionate, mischevious, cerebral and melancholy. This ripe, gamey dialogue is one of the most obviously impressive aspects of Mr Turner and it’s backed up with a whole gallery of tremendous performances.

Any apprehension that Mike Leigh’s biopic of Turner will descend into bloodless, well-mannered heritage cinema are well and truly buried with this exchange “Gawd, strewth, that brigand’s still robbing us!” responds his son in Covent Garden cockney, who happens to be the famous painter JMW Turner.

The space in the film becomes a place where character and spectator are forced to assume a moral position.“Ultramarine’s gone up to a guinea a bladder!” cries William “Daddy” Turner. 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.

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