Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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One of the nineteenth-century Romantic painters mostly closely associated with the
sublime is Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840). In his paintings, the “literal human
standpoint” is reduced to the absolute minimum, so that the human figure is dwarfed by
nature. Twitchell links Friedrich’s work, interestingly, to “the nascent German
expressionism” in its “eerie sense of imminence”. 109 It is significant that in What
Dreams May Come, Ward would specifically refer to the work of Friedrich as providing
the inspiration for the scenes in Paradise. He and his collaborators wanted to create “a
sense of Paradise that was awesome or sublime” (his words) and he felt that the work of
Romantic painters such as Friedrich captured the power and awesomeness of nature in a
way that more modern paintings do not. 110
Twitchell contends that the sublime is still “an important modern artistic impulse”. 111
Certainly it is a concept that has resonances with Ward’s work. As John Downie
recently wrote:
The Navigator possesses many aspects of an adventure story, pure and simple,
but it has an ambition of theme, typical of Ward’s films as a whole, which
relates strongly to ideas of the Romantic Sublime, to an aspiring sense of
humanity, in which the human adventure in the world is to be characterised by
feelings of exultation, awe and scale – a heightening, a taking to lofty levels – in
which intellectuality and spirituality are combined to locate, in the early
nineteenth-century words of William Wordsworth (a Cumbrian, like Ward’s
miners) in “The Prelude”, as ‘something evermore about to be’. 112
Ward’s vision of nature as being at odds with humanity and even at times an implacable
enemy, in A State Of Siege and to an even greater extent Vigil, may seem to represent a
departure from the Romantic idea that the inner life of the Romantic and the natural
world are in harmony with each other. It is often said that while the Romantics saw
themselves as being in opposition to society, they aspired to be at one with the natural
world as the source of poetic inspiration. But Peckham challenges this oversimplification
by arguing that what was seen to be Romantic nature worship
109 Twitchell, Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770-1850 189.
110 Helene Wong, "Development Hell," Listener 21 November 1998: 34.
111 Twitchell, Romantic Horizons: Aspects of the Sublime in English Poetry and Painting, 1770-1850 207.
112 Downie, The Navigator: A Mediaeval Odyssey 49.