Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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While I was living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, I had access to the College of Santa Fe
library, which had a wide collection of resources on German Expressionism. One of the
most useful of these was German Expressionist Painting by Peter Selz, which gave not
only a comprehensive history of the Expressionist movement, but discussed in detail the
links between Romanticism and Expressionism, and the Expressionist movement in art,
music and literature. 15 From Wagner to Murnau, written by Jo Collier, who teaches at
the College of Santa Fe, included some useful discussion of the differences between
Romanticism and Expressionism, and the work of Murnau, whose films seemed to me
to have a particular resonance with Ward’s films. 16 John Barlow’s German
Expressionist Film is one of the few books amongst a plethora of material on the topic
of Expressionism that deals exclusively with Expressionist film. 17 It attempts to define
German Expressionism as opposed to the expressionistic (a more general term), and the
last chapter is dedicated to the influence of German Expressionism on American
cinema, which I found relevant to my research on this aspect of Ward’s work. Another
more recent book that discusses Expressionism in America is Paul Coates’s The
Gorgon’s Gaze. 18 This book takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of
expressionism and its persistence in the styles of such diverse filmmakers as Orson
Welles and Ingmar Bergman. I found Coates’s theories of the nature of the uncanny to
be useful in reaching an understanding of Ward’s films, particularly A State of Siege.
No discussion of texts on the topic of Expressionist film would be complete without a
mention of two seminal studies, Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler: a Psychological
History of the German Film, originally published in 1947, 19 and Lotte Eisner’s The
Haunted Screen, originally published in 1952 and translated and republished in 1969. 20
While Kracauer’s thesis that the German films of the 1920s were filled with
premonitions of the German totalitarianism of the 30s has largely been discredited on
the basis that he chose only a limited number of films of the period to illustrate his
15
Peter Selz, German Expressionist Painting (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1957).
16
Jo Leslie Collier, From Wagner to Murnau: The Transposition of Romanticism from Stage to Screen
(Ann Arbour, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1988).
17
J.D. Barlow, German Expressionist Film (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982).
18
Paul Coates, The Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
19
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton,
New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1947).
20
Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen, trans. Roger Greaves (U.S.A: University of California Press,
1969).