Draft 2 PhD Introduction - ResearchSpace@Auckland

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In his second year at Ilam, there were only four students who specialized in moving
images – Maria French, who became an editor with Television One, then went on to
work for the National Film Unit, Timothy White, and David Coulson. Coulson recalls
the collaborative nature of the course: “We all worked on each other’s movies and we
had a hundred feet of film for our first exercise. Vincent was the actor in my one and so
that was his first acting experience”. 305 The course allowed the students to not only
direct their own films, but to experience being an actor, to operate the camera and
lighting equipment, and to edit their own and other people’s films - a “hands-on”
experience in all aspects of film-making, a process of learning by doing.
Coulson notes that for their first studio television exercise, “most of us did something
very simple” but Ward was “always looking forwards and often using [the medium] to
the point of pushing it”. He also comments: “At the same time, he was always prepared
to put himself in the line”. As an example, he cites Ward’s role in The Cave. In the
film, “he played one of these guys who journeys up and comes out of the underworld
and then he came up through, as I recall, a frozen lake. They shot it backwards so he
jumped in and when it was played it was meant to look like he was coming up through
the ice. So, he would always push, keep pushing people to do stuff, but it wasn’t as if
he was working from a personal comfort zone”. 306
In his Filmography of Vincent Ward, Horrocks lists some other films made by Ward at
Ilam. They include Boned, (1976), which Ward directed and photographed, a six
minute film of stills animation, shot on 16mm film stock, about life on an isolated sheep
station. The film focuses on the casual violence and conflict between people and
animals, and appears to have prefigured some of the themes of Vigil. In the same year,
he made a number of other animation experiments with stills scratching directly on film,
and orthodox techniques. There was also a twenty-minute videotape, entitled Void,
which he wrote, directed and acted in. In this film shot by John McWilliams, Ward
played the part of a man “who plans to set up a camera and commit suicide on film, but
fails in the attempt”. The soundtrack included a number of interviews with the wives of
men who committed suicide, and Horrocks suggests that: “The ‘investigative’ style of
305 Lynette Read, interview with David Coulson, 16 August 2002.
306 Lynette Read, interview with David Coulson, 16 August 2002.