ABSTRACT
For his first experiment in the woodcut narrative, Ward finds his most compelling model in the kinetic force of the silent film, borrowing from the movement and special effects of films by Walter Ruttman and Fritz Lang, the cinematic joie de vivre of Masereel’s novel, Passionate Journey and the manic cultural energy of the 1920s. At the same time, a distinctive portrait style emerges which often arrests the narrative momentum of the novel and encourages the reader-viewer to dwell on details in the individual woodcuts. Such a style also pits the natural and spontaneous Romantic sketch against the urban, polished and commodified Modernist canvas, the mountain against the skyscraper. The final chapters return to the nature of the opening and complicate the masculine hegemony of the city sections by introducing a powerfully feminine ethos which is then superseded by a fatally repressed homoerotic energy. Gods’ Man engages several moments of collision and crisis – between a new American Modernism and an older sensibility of German Romanticism; between the new dynamism of the cinema and the slow time of the Renaissance woodcut; and between the heteronormative conventions of the family and the dangerous new desires of same-sex union.
