Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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tradition and because of this you find you are more interested in their beautiful
surfaces. The characters don’t live, and swear and sweat. American film has
more immediacy, less poetry. It draws more from a tradition of newsreel and
photojournalism. In New Zealand, we’re neither in one tradition or the other.
You have to try and forge a different tradition which inevitably has elements of
the two. It’s a blank canvas. The rawness of the country, its lack of tradition or
conversely its mish-mash of inherited, diluted traditions are your material. 678
Given the comparisons often made between Ward’s work and European art films, this
would seem to contradict his own emphasis on the “primacy of the image”. The
comments seem to represent Ward’s own advice to himself to focus more strongly on
storytelling, now that he has embarked upon larger-scale feature films. The irony is that
he articulates the idea here through another visual image – “smash your fist through the
pane of glass” – which is taken directly from the end of A State of Siege. He is making
his way towards a greater emphasis on narrative but still sees it in terms of “a blank
canvas”. He commented, in the Pressbook prepared for the release of Vigil: “I’m
basically interested in human qualities rather than specific social or political situations.
The important things for me are stories and characters. What happens between people
and how the film progresses is important; the country in which the film happens is
almost irrelevant”. 679 In the interview for Art New Zealand, he goes on to say: “My
interest is in people’s individuality and the way they perceive things […]. And what
separates them out from other people, rather than the wider social fabric that holds
people together”. 680 Story-telling is here being defined in terms that do not lose touch
with his earlier interests. Individuality, subjective perception, and separateness are
qualities that one might associate with the kinds of narrative in Expressionist films.
Ward was explicitly distancing himself from the growing tradition of New Zealand
feature films in the wake of Sleeping Dogs (films with a strong emphasis on the “social”
and the “political”, the American sense of journalistic “immediacy”, and New Zealand
nationalism).
Despite this emphasis on narrative there are still many arresting images in Vigil. Tetley
asserts that for Ward the “painting image is very strong. He works from images” - for
678 Mitchell, "Vincent Ward: The Eloquence of Isolation," 38-39.
679 Vigil Pressbook (New Zealand Film Commission, 1984).
680 Mitchell, "Vincent Ward: The Eloquence of Isolation," 38.