Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

9
Eisner’s and Kracauer’s arguments in view of the current revival of interest in Weimar
cinema and rejects the hard-and-fast distinction made by many critics between
Expressionist cinema and the so-called “realist” Weimar cinema by pointing out the
similarities in their themes and subject matter.
Theoretical Approach and Methodology
My thesis inevitably falls within the category of auteur studies. Ward has been widely
regarded as one of New Zealand’s strongest candidates for auteur status, as a director
with a unique vision and a strong involvement in all aspects of production. Hans-
Günther Pflaum, writing about Vigil in the Süddeutsche Zeitung, already identified
Ward as “an auteur, a promising debutant director who knows how to exploit his
medium more radically and decisively, than any other first-timer”. 33 John Downie
defends the value of seeing Ward in these terms despite the tendency for film theory
over recent decades to have focused on issues of representation and reception to the
detriment of auteur theory, on the grounds that: “with a filmmaker such as Vincent
Ward, we have a punctilious, obsessive sensibility which labours to assert itself as
something more than just good craftsman or virtuoso technician. His presence is
palpably central to the entire fact of a film’s life”. 34
The notion of the director as being centrally responsible for a film’s form, style and
meanings is one of the most influential ideas in cinema history. As has often been
noted, the origins of auteur theory lie in nineteenth-century Romantic notions of
“artistic genius” that “resisted the forces of the market in the interests of artistic
autonomy in opposition to ‘commercial, socially conformist art’”. 35 The idea of the
artist as the autonomous genius will be discussed further in Chapter One, but this notion
could be seen as informing Ward’s auteurist approach to his films. One of the
problems, however, with “adopting a fairly consistent romantic position in relation to
creativity”, according to John Caughie, was that “it exposed film aesthetics to the
contradictions of those romantic principles of individual creativity which formed the
basis of nineteenth- and twentieth-century criticism, when applied to an expressive form
33
Pflaum quoted in Jones, Projecting a Nation: New Zealand Film and Its Reception in Germany 13.
34
Downie, The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey 2.
35
Pam Cook, ed., The Cinema Book: A Complete Guide to Understanding the Movies (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985) 115.