Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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McCahon and Rita Angus turned to medieval art as a direct source of inspiration. 822
(Angus went so far as to say that “New Zealand is medieval in culture”. 823 )
Equally, however, the film’s concerns can not be exhausted by a national frame of
reference. The Navigator has been seen as Ward’s most overtly religious film. Tim
Pulleine, for example, points out the similarities to Tarkovskij “not just in terms of the
visual atmosphere and the mixing of monochrome and colour, but even more so when it
comes to the inexplicit but pervasive underpinning of religious symbolism”. 824 The
most obvious religious aspect of the film is the theme of sacrifice, which had earlier
appeared in Vigil in the sacrifice or offering Toss makes in an attempt to bring back her
dead father, and recurs throughout The Navigator in Ulf’s desire to make an offering of
the “little lady in wood” given to him by his mother before she died. It can also be seen
in the cross being placed on the cathedral spire as an offering, and finally in Griffin
sacrificing his life to spare the other villagers from the plague. Judith Dale has also
pointed out that:
There is a saviour figure. Griffin is the visionary and at times leader of this
small company, though less of a man than the others; the imagery of Jesus Christ
has always had an other-than-macho, less-than-fully patriarchal aspect, for
example, as the ‘lamb of God’. It is Griffin who a-spires, who climbs the sphere
to raise the cross, takes up his cross to raise the cross, as a crowd gathers at its
foot. In the filmic fiction of this cruci-fiction, there follows a prolonged and ex-
cruciating struggle between death and life as he finally fixes the cross in
place. 825
She sees further allusions to the passion story in similarities between the narrative and
the stations of the cross, and in the possibility that Connor represents Judas.
Despite these possible allusions to Christianity, it is important not to interpret the film
as a straightforward allegory. The villagers themselves do not have an homogenous
attitude towards religion – Martin is interested in the metaphysical aspects of religion
822 Gordon Brown comments: “the late medievalism of [Rita] Angus, [Sidney Nolan] and McCahon
reflects the extraordinary focal power exerted on the whole fabric of western culture by the triumph of
Italian [late medieval and Renaissance] painting”. Gordon H. Brown, Colin Mccahon: Artist, revised ed.
(Wellington: Reed Books, 1984) 71-72.
823 Rita Angus quoted in Melvin N. Day, Rita Angus (Wellington: National Art Gallery, 1982) 49.
824 Tim Pulleine, "The Navigator," Films and Filming.413 (1989): 35.
825 Judith Dale, "Circumnavigations," Illusions (1989): 44.