Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Then, as now, many people attributed the violence, suffering and bewilderment of the
period to the ‘end times’, the beginning of the Apocalypse, as foreseen in the book of
Revelation. Indeed, one of the most popular art works of the period was Dürer’s series
of etchings The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Tuchman believes that
contemporary society can readily identify with the people of the fourteenth century:
“After the experiences of the terrible twentieth century, we have greater fellow-feeling
for a distraught age whose rules were breaking down under the pressure of adverse and
violent events”. 714
Ward’s comparison is not so much between the plague and AIDS as between the plague
and the threat of nuclear war. Although some reviewers read The Navigator as making
an explicit comment on the threat of AIDS in contemporary society in the appearance of
the Grim Reaper commercial, warning of the dangers of the virus, which turns up on a
television set and is watched uncomprehendingly by the villagers, Ward has explicitly
said that this allusion “is not intended to be the major statement in the film at all”. He
now believes that perhaps he should not have used the commercial because of the
dangers of it being “overread”. At the time, however, he was unable to resist using “this
wonderful AIDS commercial that was shot with medieval death figures, in Australia. It
was just too appropriate […]. I tried to keep it in the background of the shot, rather than
alone and direct, so it would become a background statement rather than the main
statement. It was meant to be subtextual […]. The nuclear thing was more important to
me, certainly than the AIDS thing”. 715 The image of the Grim Reaper in the
commercial gained additional emphasis from its similarities with an earlier shot of the
Angel of Death flying across the moon, an image which, according to Ward was
“actually a replica of an engraving on a medieval cemetery stone in Père Lachaise
cemetery, outside of Paris. It’s the stone of someone who had died from the Black
Death”. 716
The script of The Navigator was written in the 1980s, at a time when New Zealand had
banned American nuclear ships from its waters, in an office not far from where the
Rainbow Warrior, a Greenpeace ship on its way to protest nuclear testing at Mururoa
714
Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century (New York: Albert Knopf,
1978) Forward xiv.
715
Russell Campbell and Miro Bilbrough, "A Dialogue with Discrepancy: Vincent Ward Discusses the
Navigator," Illusions (1989): 14.
716
Campbell and Bilbrough, "A Dialogue with Discrepancy: Vincent Ward Discusses the Navigator," 14.