Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

154
would not affect the way she behaved. 510 Bollinger agrees that “there were times”
when they set up the camera and hoped she would walk into the frame, “especially if
there was a particular composition or part of the property and we knew that she would
do certain things at certain times of the day”, but “there’s quite a lot of subtly moving
camera within the house, like to do the tea-making sequence”. This kind of shot could
not be achieved within one day, and according to Bollinger, one of the difficulties of the
film was “to get the sort of detail that Vincent wanted […]. She just went about her
business and it was up to us to capture what we wanted. So just the tea pouring
sequence might have taken two or three separate shoots”. 511
Almost all of the film was shot with a hand-held camera, using prime lenses and
Bollinger recalls that it was “a pretty uncomfortable shoot” because the whole film was
shot from a very low angle. 512 According to Ward, this was “an intuitive choice”,
because he “didn’t wish to look down on [Puhi] at all”. 513 He explains further that:
“The film was literally shot on our knees. I wanted the camera viewpoint to be below
the subject’s eye level. Both the use of the zoom lens and unmotivated camera
movement seem out of character with the film’s centre. I wanted a static camera which
isolated particular pieces of action and allowed the subjects to move in and out of
frame”. He was surprised at how successful the latter technique proved to be in closeup,
using the example of where a sequence begins with an empty frame, into which a
hand appears, gestures, then leaves the frame, only to reappear, gesture and leave the
frame once again: “In documentary, when you have no control over the subject’s
actions, it is all the more remarkable when that hand reappears within the small
somewhat arbitrary window space of the camera frame. The idea behind this use of the
camera comes largely from Japanese painting tradition”. Here, Ward is again using his
art-school training and applying it to the negative use of space, so that “what is shown is
of equal importance to what is not shown”. 514 The emphasis on continuous movement
within the frame is, of course, similar to Bazin’s aesthetics (formulated in relation to
films such as Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, 1922, with its similarly isolated
characters). Bazin’s comments in relation to cinematic realism are also applicable to In
Spring: “Realism in art can only be achieved in one way –through artifice. Every form
510 Ward, Edge of the Earth: Stories and Images from the Antipodes 17.
511 Lynette Read, interview with Alun Bollinger, 3 December 1998.
512 Lynette Read, interview with Alun Bollinger, 3 December 1998.
513 Ward, "That Personal Quality," 45.
514 Ward, “A Documented Account of the Making of In Spring One Plants Alone,” Section on Approach.