Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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descend into the imagination; they rose into it. The last method, of course, is the
method of Transcendentalism. 138
The Romantics’ interest in the unconscious is linked to the figure of the doppelgänger,
which “is always present to the romantic mind and recurs in innumerable forms and
variations in romantic literature”. 139 Hauser describes the Romantic as:
rushing headlong into his double, just as he rushes headlong into everything dark
and ambiguous, chaotic and ecstatic, demonic and Dionysian, and seeks therein
merely a refuge from the reality which he is unable to master by rational means.
On this flight from reality, he discovers the unconscious, that which is hidden
away in safety from the rational mind, the source of his wish-fulfilment dreams
and of the irrational solutions of his problems. 140
In Hauser’s view, this sense of the irrational is at the centre of Romantic art. “The
characteristic feature of the romantic movement was not that it stood for a revolutionary
or an anti-revolutionary, a progressive or a reactionary ideology, but that it reached both
positions by a fanciful, irrational and undialectical route”. 141 This approach also
accounts for the Romantics’ interest in the grotesque, in its sense of being “something
ominous and sinister in the face of a world totally different from the familiar one”. 142
The grotesque can be seen as contradicting “the very laws which rule our familiar
world”, and as such, is related to our fears of the unknown. 143 “When applied to
landscapes, the word indicated a lack of order as well as a sombre and ominous
mood”. 144 The grotesque is also associated with “the malice of the inanimate objects
and that of animals”, a feature which is also evident in German Expressionism and will
be discussed more fully later in the chapter. 145 Clearly, many of today’s films have
non-rational ingredients but few films have such a strongly dreamlike mood as Ward’s.
(We will examine these ‘dream’ elements in our close analyses of films.)
138 Peckham, The Triumph of Romanticism 14.
139 Hauser, The Social History of Art 669.
140 Hauser, The Social History of Art 670.
141 Hauser, The Social History of Art 653.
142 Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature 21.
143 Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature 31.
144 Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature 77.
145 Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature 115.