Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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an Art Film […]. And as we well know, in an Art Film, we never know what is
happening; we never really know what it’s about. But we do know, this being an Art
Film, that it’s supposed to be good for us”. 885
Map of the Human Heart presents an interesting example of the complex issues
surrounding national identity. As a multi-national co-production, made while Ward was
living in Australia, it could not, at first glance, be conceived of as a ‘New Zealand’ film
in any sense. The locations of the film and its characters are a world away from New
Zealand, yet Allen Meek, a New Zealand academic living in the United States when he
first saw the film, was profoundly affected by its relevance to him as an expatriate New
Zealander. He comments that the scene where Avik and Albertine, both Native
Canadians encounter each other on the dance floor in a ballroom in England during
World War II struck him as
uncanny, no doubt partly because I saw it in the context of my own displacement
as a New Zealander living in the United States […]. This transplanting of tribal
peoples into the imagery of Anglo-American popular film, while based in
certain historical actualities, presents a telling example of cinematic dream-work
in a post-colonial situation. The encounter presented me with a dream image of
my own national identity in crisis. 886
Meek’s reading of the film is from a post-colonial standpoint, from which he argues
that:
Map of the Human Heart tells a story about the catastrophes of colonisation and
of world war, the two related through the experience of those colonized peoples
who found themselves drawn into a military conflict fighting on behalf of their
European ‘fatherland’. So Avik, the Inuit protagonist in Ward’s film, finds
himself flying bombing raids over Germany in World War Two with a crew of
white colonials including an Australian and a Canadian. Avik’s story
individually embodies the history of colonization. Catching tuberculosis by
contamination with a white Canadian cartographer, his body – as colonial
885 Kan quoted in Downie, "Seeing Is Not Believing," 4. Kan was reviewing the film for TV3’s Nightline.
886 Allen Meek, "New Zealand Cinema Leaves Home," NZ Journal of Media Studies 3.1 (1996): 40.