Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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narratives, which often focus on the isolated individual and rely on inference and
association rather than action codes or oppositions of the usual kind.
Striking visual composition is something else that Ward’s films have in common with
German Expressionist film - certain shots in A State of Siege, for example, seem as
carefully composed as a painting. In Vigil, a great deal of attention is paid to unusual
camera angles – for example, the low angle shot of Ethan carrying the body of Justin
(reminiscent of religious paintings of the seventeenth century) or the eerie shot of Toss
holding herself underwater in the bath. So intense is the emphasis on angle and
composition that a shot that is not unusual or striking in a Ward film feels like a wasted
opportunity.
One interpretation of the underlying principle of Expressionism is that it is a type of
modern-day pessimism -according to Peter Krai, “le drame qu’est pour les
expressionnistes toute existence, la souffrance, le déracinement, la dépossession du Moi
par les forces ténébreuses et étrangères – socials ou purement intérieures” (“the drama
that is for the expressionists the whole of existence, the suffering, tearing out of roots,
the dispossession of oneself by strange and dark forces – social or purely interior”).
This pessimism is, however, according to Krai, counterbalanced by the ecstasy and
intoxication of the notion of living life to the maximum intensity (as we suggested
earlier in the discussion of grotesque and sublime elements). 182 This view seems to
echo Barlow’s analysis of the Expressionist’s journey, from a phase of alienation in
which the world seems threatening and demonic, to the ecstasy of a breakthrough to the
“ultimate essence” of the world - a notion we discussed earlier with regard to A State of
Siege.
Coates describes this awareness of a world beyond the material as an awareness of “the
uncanny”, and describes the doppelgänger, a figure prevalent in both Romantic and
Expressionist works of art, as “a key image in the repertoire of the uncanny”. 183 Patrice
Petro similarly links the “fantastic film” of Weimar cinema with the theme of the
double, or split self, which is “commonly employed to explore the crisis of self in terms
of a crisis of vision”. She goes on to say that: “fantastic films might be said to
destabilize or complicate identification, by rendering vision and selfhood
182
My translation. Petr Krai, "Autour D'une Brûlure: Le Cinéma Expressionniste Et Ses Commentateurs,"
Positif.291 (1985): 42.
183
Coates, The Gorgon's Gaze: German Cinema, Expressionism, and the Image of Horror 11.