Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Cinema Without Walls. Corrigan regards auteur theory as a “particular brand of social
agency”, evident in the status of the auteur as celebrity. 65 He argues: “if auteurism – as
a description of movies being the artistic expression of a director – is still very much
alive today, the artistic expression of contemporary directors is fully bound up with the
celebrity industry of Hollywood”. 66 Meaghan Morris has also noted that today “the
primary modes of film and auteur packaging are advertising, review snippeting, trailers,
magazine profiles – always already in appropriation as the precondition, and not the
postproduction of meaning”. 67 My thesis will take account of this commercial process
as it impinges upon Ward’s career, but obviously my conception of him as auteur
continues to look back to the aesthetic debates initiated by Romanticism and critics such
as Bazin. To see an auteur as a brand-name is only one, very narrow reading of the
term. As Caughie implies, the various forms of and debates around auteur theory cover
a large part of the “tradition” of film criticism over the years.
In my exploration of various notions of authorship, I was particularly struck by
Rivette’s notion that an auteur is someone who speaks in the first person, as this seemed
to me to be one of the most important distinctions between Ward’s work and the films
of other New Zealand directors of the same era. To understand Ward’s films it is
necessary to reach some understanding of who this person is who is speaking, and how,
and it is therefore appropriate to explore his personal history, the industry in which he
operates, the artistic traditions of Romanticism and Expressionism and the New Zealand
context, all of which inform his highly individual approach to filmmaking. While some
of Bazin’s notions of auteurism also seem applicable to Ward – in particular that he
writes his own stories (or is closely involved in the script-writing process), and that he
has a personal vision and identifiable visual style – I wish to avoid some of the excesses
of auteur theory by exploring the contributions made by Ward’s collaborators and by
acknowledging the constraints placed on the director by practical contingencies and by
the industrial contexts in which his films were made. To do so has necessitated an
examination of as much of the filmmaking process as possible. While my research has
tended to support Downie’s emphasis on Ward’s exceptional involvement in many
aspects of production, and on the force of his “sensibility”, the interviews I conducted
65 Corrigan, "Auteurs and the New Hollywood," 43.
66 Corrigan, "Auteurs and the New Hollywood," 38-39.
67 Meaghan Morris quoted in Timothy Corrigan, A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture after
Vietnam (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991) 106.