Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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described Ward as “a rare visionary. The hills and bogs and mists of the remote sheep
country (from which Ward himself comes) take on a primeval majesty and terror which
touches the passions and the subconscious of the people who inhabit them”. Leading
French critic, Louis Marcorelles of Le Monde, commented on Vigil’s affinity with silent
film: “Vigil takes us back to the genius of silent cinema, to the mute faces where
existential anxiety seems to drown itself, to the fantastic landscapes where anything can
happen and where nothing is certain”. In contrast to these comparisons with
international cinema, Francois Cognard of Starfix, a French monthly magazine focused
on the uniquely New Zealand nature of the film, placing it in context with other recent
films from the same country: “With Vigil, one gets to know the real character of a
young cinema industry, one which is not happy to reproduce American stories, but
prefers to look into its own country and to find stories which are both realistic and
poetic”. 700
German reviewers tended to see the film as an example of neuromantischer (neoromantic)
film. Stan Jones commented that although German critics did not appreciate
“the particularly Pakeha significance of the futile struggle with the watery wasteland” or
of Ethan as an example of the New Zealand “Man Alone”, many critics pointed out the
film’s “constant interaction between external landscape and inner fantasy” and (as
previously discussed in Chapter Four) linked it to the notion of Innerlichkeit
(inwardness) associated with Romantic literature. 701 Lauren Jackson noted that the
reaction of German critics and audiences to these “elements of the German traditions of
Expressionism and ‘Innerlichkeit’” in Vigil, was one of “delight […]. Nearly every
German critic marvelled at the tremendous strength and power of Ward’s imagery”
which was seen as being “both menacing and mythical”. She added the telling
comment that reviewers often described the landscape as “exotic”, just as: “New
Zealand’s rural landscape must have seemed just as foreign to Vincent Ward’s mother
when she arrived here as a German-Jewish refugee and became the wife of a farmer. 702
The film was sometimes spoken of as a kind of German or European film that just
happened to have been made at the other end of the world. For example, a review in the
Hamburg Tageszeitung concluded that Vigil was “a story from the other end of the
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Vigil Pressbook.
701
Deb Verhoeven, ed., Twin Peeks: Australian and New Zealand Feature Films (Melbourne: Damned
Publishing, 1999) 156.
702
Jackson, "The Film Connection," 100.