Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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particular kind of commodity, subject to the vicissitudes of an irrational
market. 187
Certainly Ward’s films emphasize rural/urban tensions. The tensions can run both
ways, in the sense that Ward’s mother had the shock of moving from an urbanised
European context to a backblock farm in New Zealand. The fictional characters in the
films, such as Avik in Map of the Human Heart, often make equally dramatic shifts.
Other dramatic shifts in Ward’s work include: from life to death in What Dreams May
Come, and from medieval times to the modern world in The Navigator.
Anton Kaes has made an interesting link between Expressionism and Medievalism:
Warum gab es nach dem ersten Weltkrieg inmitten von Urbanisierung,
Industrialisierung und einem nie vorher so deutlich gespürten
Modernisierungsschub, ein solch bemerkenswertes Interesse an mittelalterlichen
Figuren, am Okkulten und Mythischen, an Figuren wie dem mittelalterlichen
Irrenhausarzt und Mörder Dr Caligari und dem Hypnotiseur und Börsenmakler
Dr Mabuse, an Golems und Vampiren?
(“Why, after World War I, in the middle of urbanization, industrialization, and a
never before so clearly noticeable thrust towards modernization, was there such
a remarkable interest in medieval figures, in the occult and the mythical, in
figures such as the medieval doctor in a lunatic asylum, and murderer, Dr
Caligari, and the hypnotist and stockbroker, Dr Mabuse, in Golems and
vampires?”) 188
Kaes goes on to answer the question by arguing that Expressionist films such as Dr
Caligari and Dr Mabuse, der Spieler (Fritz Lang, 1922) show the dark and hidden side
of the apparent progressiveness, rationality and modernity of Weimar society and that
the depiction of tyrants and of totalitarian order and omnipotent control can be
explained as compensation for the increasing fragmentation and feeling of helplessness
of modern industrial life. This view is similar to Marc Silbermann’s assertion that
Expressionist films “opened up new aesthetic ways of creating and organizing social
fantasies: by valorising the autonomous subject against the oppressive rationalism
187 Budd, ed., The Cabinet of Dr Caligari: Texts, Contexts, Histories 13.
188 My translation. Jung and Schatzberg, eds., Filmkultur Zur Zeit Der Weimarer Republik 61.