Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

172
The world-view of In Spring is also reminiscent of Werner Herzog, and indeed,
according to Timothy White, Ward had seen and expressed considerable interest in
Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) while they were still film students at
Ilam. 578 In “Where the Green Ants Really Dream”, Parekowhai had linked the two
film-makers in a negative sense, for attempting to deal with indigenous subject-matter
by projecting their own personal mythology “thinly disguised as something else” onto
an indigenous world-view”. 579 By contrast, later critics would compare Ward’s work in
a more favourable sense with that of both Herzog and Wim Wenders for achieving “that
particularly German quality of ‘innerlichkeit’ (visionary ‘inwardness’), first identified
and refined by Romantic literature”. 580 Don Watson, of the New Musical Express
commented that Vigil “has a density that is characteristically European. The power it
calls from the damp landscape is reminiscent in the best possible sense of vintage
Herzog. In fact, it has precisely the sense of quirky semi-surrealism that is so sadly
lacking in that director’s Where the Green Ants Dream”. 581 Ward himself sees his work
as “hooking into a similar vein” to that of Herzog and Wenders. 582
Herzog is the more obvious comparison as a director who, like Ward, has a “penchant
for shots describable in terms of the sublime. In this regard not only does he present
vistas that suggest infinite expanse, eternity, and the giganticism of nature […] but he
also returns again and again to icons of the sublime such as mists and clouds”. 583 While
this comment seems to have more resonance with the images in What Dreams May
Come, there are some echoes of the sublime in the dreamlike, ethereal images of the
heron or the white horse appearing from nowhere in In Spring. Like Ward, Herzog is
perceived as a director, who
will go to any lengths, overcome the most impossible obstacles and hazard
unthinkable forms of physical danger in order to create those visions and dreams
which are the lifeblood of his artistic soul. Like an artist in the age of
romanticism, an image to which Herzog most consciously aspires, despite
disclaimers, Herzog seems to believe in the rarity of the true aesthetic vision, in
578 Lynette Read, interview with Timothy White, 29 September 1999.
579 Parekowhai, "Where the Green Ants Really Dream," 6.
580 Jones, Projecting a Nation: New Zealand Film and Its Reception in Germany 12.
581 Don Watson quoted in "Vigil Wins Praise," Auckland Star 16 February 1985: B4.
582 Lynette Read, interview with Vincent Ward, 11 December 1997.
583 Carroll, Interpreting the Moving Image 295.