Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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with traffic scenes on the Newmarket viaduct”. 802 The storyboard of scene 84 where
Connor climbs the cathedral spire to place the cross on top includes elevations of the
cathedral and exact sketches as to how the cross is to be winched up. Other drawings
for this scene indicate suggestions for camera angles. Every film involves a great deal
of production planning but Ward’s shot-by-shot storyboard is unusually detailed.
The storyboard also proves that the narrative of the film was carefully thought-out,
contrary (at least on one level) to the opinions of critics such as Brian McDonnell who
commented: “I feel that (Ward) has the finest visual sense of any of our directors.
Unfortunately, this wonderful eye is not matched by an equal facility with scriptwriting
or the fundamentals of storytelling […]. In the final analysis, the film badly needs a
writer more able than Ward or his collaborators. One finally gets sick of painterly
moments with no coherent structure”. 803 Tim Pulleine offered a similar criticism: “The
Navigator throws up some difficulties in ascribing meaning to its strange concatenation
of events. In some respects, the film’s procedures” [such as Griffin watching the
television images] “appear rather schematic […]. Certain passages, however – in
particular, the harbour crossing with the white horse in the rowing boat – register as
little more than exercises in picturesque surrealism”. 804 McDonnell sees the story as a
parable but is unclear about parable’s final meaning: “Does Ward mean that little New
Zealand, like little Griffin, cannot escape the nuclear world, that our anti-nuclear policy
is misguided? Does he intend to say with his Totentanz [dance of death] imagery that
there is no possibility of beating the AIDS threat?”. 805
An alternative reading to such “commonsense” readings is that of Russell Campbell
who suggests aligning the film with the surrealist tradition, and sees “the very concept
of medieval miners stumbling round Auckland” as having “the lunatic impossibility of a
flaccid pocketwatch”. He cites the motorway sequence as another example of an
incongruous (surrealist) juxtaposition. In other words, “the refusal, finally, of the
narrative to submit to rational explication” can be justified as the assertion of a surreal
logic. 806 The film thus explores “an alternative vision” that regards New Zealand’s
position on the country’s nuclear-free policy as stemming not from “rational refutation
802 Snow, "Performance: Visionary Force," 31.
803 Brian McDonnell, "The Navigator - Badly Off Course," North and South March 1989: 128.
804 Tim Pulleine, "The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey," Monthly Film Bulletin (1989): 145.
805 McDonnell, "The Navigator - Badly Off Course," 128.
806 Russell Campbell, "The Blindfold Seer," Illusions.10 (1989): 15.