Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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Edwards’ New Zealand Film 1912-1996 was a valuable source of factual information. 79
Although highly erratic in its approach, Celluloid Dreams: A Century of Film in New
Zealand provided useful production details. 80 I found A Decade of New Zealand Film:
Sleeping Dogs to Came a Hot Friday helpful in comparing Ward’s films made in the
late 1970s and early 80s with other New Zealand films made during this period. 81 Film
in Aotearoa New Zealand contains interviews with leading New Zealand filmmakers,
including one with Ward that I have cited on several occasions in this thesis. 82
The paucity of criticism of New Zealand film, even for a major figure like Ward, has
been one of the prime motives for writing this thesis. What I wanted to achieve was to
do a thorough, wide-ranging analysis of one filmmaker’s work, situating it within its
local and international contexts. This is the first time such a comprehensive study of
Ward’s biography and career has been attempted and it raises some significant issues
relevant not only to the New Zealand film industry today but to contemporary film
culture within the global context.
Sequence of Chapters
The thesis is structured to move from a general discussion of local and European artistic
and filmic traditions that informed his work to a more specific or individual focus on
how Ward’s childhood and education contributed to the formation of his aesthetic, and
finally, to explore what this aesthetic meant in practice, in the construction and final
form of each of his major films. In more detail: Chapter One includes a summary of the
history and development of the European Romantic movement, and the Romantic
notion of the artist as visionary. It goes on to point out the links between Romanticism
and the European Gothic tradition, examines Expressionism as a later sub-set or variant
of Romanticism and discusses why Ward has often been identified as a contemporary
expressionist film-maker, a definition that sheds some light on his resistance to being
“pigeonholed” and the importance he places on the individual nature of his work.
79
Helen Martin and Sam Edwards, New Zealand Film 1912-1996 (Auckland: Oxford University Press,
1997).
80
Geoffrey Churchman, ed., Celluloid Dreams: A Century of Film in New Zealand (Wellington: IPL
Books, 1997).
81
Nicholas Reid, A Decade of New Zealand Film: Sleeping Dogs to Came a Hot Friday (Dunedin: John
McInroe, 1986).
82
Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa, eds., Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2nd ed. (Wellington: Victoria
University Press, 1992).