Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Conclusion
The primary aim of this study has been to reach an understanding of Ward’s aesthetic
approach, and of how this aesthetic has emerged both in terms of theory and practice.
In the process, I have discussed the influence of both European and locally-inflected
traditions of Romanticism and Expressionism, Ward’s personal background and
training, and the application and development of this aesthetic though each of his films.
A secondary aim has been to situate Ward in the context of the New Zealand film
industry, exploring the importance of his contribution and examining evidence of local
cultural input in his work, while at the same time, discussing the reasons why his films
were markedly different from those produced in New Zealand at that time. In a sense,
my thesis has also been a test of the auteur theory’s strengths and weaknesses as applied
to a filmmaker who seems to be one of New Zealand’s strongest candidates for
authorship. My approach has been to not only examine the texts themselves, but to look
at the process by which they were produced. This was partly to counteract the
criticisms frequently made about auteur studies – the tendency to commit errors of
attribution and the tendency to ignore both the constraints imposed by the industry and
the social and historical contexts within which films are made – and partly to document
and analyse the process of filmmaking as an aesthetic in practice. I have sought to
clarify the complexities of collaboration, an issue that is often seen as one of the
weaknesses of an auteurist approach, by examining all the available documentation and
interviewing Ward’s associates in order to determine their contributions to the films.
By researching a variety of sources, I hope to have provided the most comprehensive
study to date of the biography and career of this important filmmaker.
I began my research on the basis that what made Ward’s films different from other New
Zealand films at the time was that they seemed to be directly linked to the European art
film. I came, however, to see this as too glib a way of categorising his work since it did
not fully explain its New Zealand “flavour” or Ward’s highly original approach. It was
necessary to go further back to the roots of film as art and to nineteenth-century
European Romanticism, to understand the complex historical and artistic traditions that
informed his approach. Romanticism provided a useful starting-point because Ward has