Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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imposed in industrial society, by prioritising myth and the fantastic over the reality
principle and by instrumentalising the growing independence of visual perception from
the other senses”. 189 These ideas will certainly be relevant to the medieval elements of
Ward’s films.
It is also important to consider the production of German Expressionist films in the
context of established industries. Thus, “From an industry viewpoint, Expressionism
was the result of product-differentiation, an attempt to compete with the Hollywood
product in the European market”. 190 Despite the relatively small number of
Expressionist films produced, the importance of Expressionist cinema for the German
film industry “cannot be underestimated”, according to Silberman. Not only did it
provide the industry with economic processes. “Far from being the norm, these films,
perhaps no more than forty of them, were made with a specific goal: to create a quality
product and attract middle-class audiences to the cinema”. 191 Elsaesser points out that
many films in the early 1920s “were produced to coincide with the opening of new
picture palaces in Berlin”, in order to attract a “specifically bourgeois audience”. 192 In
addition, according to Erich Pommer, the producer of the majority of these films: “The
German film industry made ‘stylised films’ to make money, and to try to compete with
Hollywood”. He explains that while the Danes and the French had their own film
industry, and while the Hollywood industry, by the end of World War I was moving
towards world supremacy, Germany needed to provide something different that would
be able to compete with these other “a distinct image of cultural legitimacy, which
became a competitive factor both for domestic and international audiences”, but it also
“introduced innovative modes of representation and functional changes in the status of
art and entertainment for the middle classes”. 193 There are some elements here that
obviously have little relevance to Ward’s situation, but others that do remind us of the
debates that surrounded Ward’s early films. Should the newly emerged New Zealand
feature film industry imitate Hollywood and concentrate on popular entertainment, or
should it seek to pursue its own distinct path, following the example of the European art
film?
189 Silberman, German Cinema: Texts in Context 20.
190 Erich Pommer quoted in Huaco, The Sociology of Film Art 36.
191 Sabine Hake, The Cinema's Third Machine: Writing on Film in Germany 1907-1933 (Lincoln and
London, Canada: University of Nebraska Press, 1993) 109.
192 Elsaesser, Weimar Cinema and After: Germany's Historic Imaginary 59.
193 Silberman, German Cinema: Texts in Context 19.