Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

3
Expressionist filmmakers such as Fritz Lang and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and
mention the names of the Swiss director Alain Tanner, or the Swede Ingmar Bergman
as forerunners of his style”. 3 Including Bergman and Tanner along with Lang and
Murnau illustrates the broad definitions given to the term “Expressionism”. My first
task was therefore to refine my sense of the concept. At the same time, I was
necessarily committed to a broad understanding of such an aesthetic in terms of both
theory and practice.
I also came to realise that in many respects, Ward’s aesthetic was informed as much by
Romanticism as by Expressionism. Again there were precedents for this idea. Stan
Jones notes that some German critics interpreted Vigil as “a neoromantic film”, in view
of “its constant interaction between external landscape and inner fantasy. Such critiques
derive from that particularly German quality of ‘Innerlichkeit’ (‘visionary inwardness’)
first identified and refined by Romantic literature”. 4 Ian Conrich, a British academic,
sees Ward’s work as being influenced by Romanticism in its Gothic forms, and indeed,
as well as traditional Romantic concepts such as “nature” and “the sublime”, the
concept of “the grotesque” (associated with Gothic Romanticism), proved to be useful
in reaching an understanding of Ward’s aesthetic. While both Romanticism and
Expressionism provided me with useful starting points for a discussion of Ward’s
approach, it was necessary to locate the precise areas of these traditions that were
relevant and ultimately the thesis will go beyond these terms to a specific sense of
Ward’s unique combination of interests. As he himself said to me as advice (or friendly
warning) for my thesis:
There’s a perspective difference between what any critic or analyst is trying to
do and what a filmmaker or what an artist or novelist is trying to achieve, and
that’s essentially this, in that to analyse someone’s work or a particular work,
you [the interviewer] obviously want to categorise. The only thing that I want or
that almost any artist wants to do, is not be categorised, because that blocks
possibility. It also defines them in terms of who they are when in fact, most of
the process that they’re doing is always re-defining themselves and changing
[…]. So generally most of what one does is spend one’s life trying to get away
3 Stan Jones, Projecting a Nation: New Zealand Film and Its Reception in Germany, Studies in New
Zealand Culture, No 3 (Nottingham: Kakapo Books, 1999) 13.
4 Jones, Projecting a Nation: New Zealand Film and Its Reception in Germany 12.