Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Ward explained that: “I always intended it in black-and-white, I’d written it in the
screenplay, I thought it would be better dramatically, in terms of storytelling. It was
essentially a storytelling decision. And also I thought it would work stylistically”. 776
Ward and Simpson had tested a number of black-and-white film stocks but ended up
using colour stock because it made the transitions from black-and-white to colour
possible in shots such as where the torch is thrown by the miners down the mine shaft.
The first part of the shot is in black-and-white, but as the torch spins around and around,
it progresses into colour. That Ward was aiming for a very high contrast look
reminiscent of Rembrandt for example, in the black-and-white sections is attested to by
Simpson: “It was a visual thing that he liked and he had seen before and really wanted
to push it”. 777 The “painterly” look of the film was further achieved by the side lighting
used in some shots to create a chiaroscuro effect.
In the contemporary sections of the film, a range of colours reminiscent of medieval
painting is used in order to give the sense of the twentieth-century city “as seen through
medieval eyes in terms of music and palette”. 778 To reference the colour and lighting,
Simpson and Ward looked at illustrations by Georges de la Tour and the work of many
medieval miniature painters. According to Simpson, some of the night lighting that was
eventually used was radically blue because it was similar to the cerulean blue of the
medieval miniature painters that Ward wanted to imitate. 779 Other elements of the
mise-en-scène that echoed this blue were the colours of “roadside telephone boxes,
police lights and the moonlit blue-grey apparition of a nuclear submarine. By contrast,
the fiery colours of the medieval dream of hell, here the modern world with its
technological monsters of destruction, are those of Bosch, Brueghel and Grünewald.
The fires of medieval torches become the sodium orange lights of the motorway and the
glow of metal in a twentieth-century furnace”. 780 Colours were also inspired by
“medieval stained glass, as in the cathedral at Chartres, as in the Duc de Berry’s Book of
the Hours, rich blues, gold, blood-red, rich greens”. Other sources of inspiration for the
look of the film were drawn from medieval woodcuts, and the apocalyptic etchings of
Dürer, as well as from a more recent artist, Doré, the nineteenth century Bible illustrator
776 Campbell and Bilbrough, "A Dialogue with Discrepancy: Vincent Ward Discusses the Navigator," 14.
777 Lynette Read, interview with Geoffrey Simpson, 29 September 1999.
778 Nayman, "The Navigator: Vincent Ward's Past Dreams of the Future," 31.
779 Lynette Read, interview with Geoffrey Simpson, 29 September 1999.
780 Ward quoted in Snow, "Performance: Visionary Force," 30.