Write a 3-4 page, double-spaced analytical essay on the film Moana (1926) to delve into the complex and fluid natures of the documentary genre.

Requirements: 1300 words

1 FILM 204-1: Documentary Film & Media History Assignment #1: Analysis Paper Weight = 100 points; 20% of final grade Deadline: September 30th at 5 P.M. EST Uploaded to Canvas This assignment requires you to write a 3-4 page, double-spaced analytical essay on the film Moana (1926) to delve into the complex and fluid natures of the documentary genre. To show your understanding, you should apply ONE of the main ideas that we have so far learned in your analysis of the film. Through the lens of the selected concept, you are asked to approach your analysis through THREE different angles/elements/aspects, to support the key idea of your essay. For this assignment, I am interested in your understanding of the documentary genre after learning the different approaches to digesting its nature and characteristics. For this purpose, I suggest that you proceed with this assignment by following these steps: 1. Watch the film Moana (1926) on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lejJBlCAal0 2. Read the recommended reading regarding the film’s production background. ¥ Excerpts from “Moana and the Pacific,” by Paul Rotha in Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography on pages of 57-66, 68-69, 71-73, and 74-77 [Available on Canvas under File tab – Reading for Assignment #1] 3. Choose ONE of the following ideas as the central topic of your analysis: ¥ Grierson’s definition of documentary ¥ The ambiguous distinctions between documentary and fiction genres ¥ Realistic characteristics of documentary genre ¥ Filmmakers’ creative treatment of reality in their films ¥ Documentary as evidence, including the indexical qualities of documentary images and sounds ¥ Documentary as rhetoric ¥ Rhetorical functions of images and sounds in documentary films ¥ Nonfiction discourse of documentary rhetoric ¥ Principal strategies of nonfiction discourse 4. Watch the movie again and take detailed notes on specific scenes that you might want to use as examples in your paper. 5. Organize and present your ideas in an analytical essay of about 1000-1200 words, broken up into 5 paragraphs with approximately 200-240 words per paragraph. 6. Format: double spaced, 12 pt., standard fonts and margins, name and SIS ID on first page.

2 More detailed requirements for the essay: ¥ Your paper should be organized around a key, coherent idea, which should be explained in the opening paragraph of your essay. In the first paragraph, you should also provide a brief introduction to the film, and then explicitly identify the key concept you will use to analyze the film, and then explain the meaning of the concept in your own words. The opening paragraph should also provide a succinct overview, introducing the THREE different angles/elements/aspects that you will use to approach your analysis in ensuing paragraphs. ¥ In the body of the essay, you should focus on an individual angle/element/aspect in each paragraph. For instance, if you choose to discuss how the idea of documentary as rhetoric is embodied in Moana, you may want one paragraph to concentrate on the analysis of Flaherty’s proposition in making the film, another paragraph explaining his deliberate selection of certain cinematic elements in support of his proposition, and a third paragraph interpreting his emphasis on particular aspects of Polynesian people’s living styles, which should be related to Flaherty’s rhetorical purpose. Note: you don’t have to follow this exact analytical approach, it simply shows what I expect for the organizational structure of your paper. ¥ In your concluding paragraph, you might want to wrap up your approach by doing one or more of the following: a reiteration of the key concept that you have used to analyze the film, a summary of the key ideas that you want your readers to take away from the essay, a clarification of the complexities or subtleties of the documentary genre as reflected in this film, and/or the ways that your analysis of the film might contribute to readers’ understanding of the genre. ¥ Your analysis should be specific and go deeper than a surface level description of the film. You can choose to conduct a detailed textual analysis of specific scenes from the film, as examples to illustrate your analysis. Also, you are required to cite ideas from the recommended reading to support your opinion as they are relevant. Be sure to include either footnotes or endnotes if any information is cited from the reading. ¥ When crafting your paper, some questions you can ask yourself include: What is the main idea you want to communicate with this essay? How does the selected concept give you a unique perspective in developing a deeper understanding of the film? Which aspects of the film and its production process verify your main idea? What specific examples from both the film text and the reading can be used to illustrate your ideas? ¥ Budget your time. You will need to watch the film several times, first for comprehension and later to take more detailed notes. You will also need sufficient time to read the two recommended reading closely and then draft your essay. Therefore, start working on this assignment as early as possible. ¥ I strongly recommend that you outline your paper before you begin writing. An outline forces you to think about structure and sequence, about which ideas belong where, and about how they can flow smoothly.

3 ¥ Keep your tone objective and scholarly: this is not about whether you personally like or dislike the film. Opinions and assertions need to be backed up by evidence and analysis. ¥ Before turning in your paper, PROOFREAD YOUR WORK. Repeated occurrences of typos or grammatical errors will affect your grade for this assignment. ¥ Any AI generated content included in the paper will fail you in this class. If you have any questions or concerns as you work on this paper, feel free to sign up and visit my office hours, or send an email to me at [email protected].

Chapter Title: Moana and the Pacific Book Title: Robert J. Flaherty Book Subtitle: A Biography Book Author(s): Paul Rotha Book Editor(s): Jay Ruby Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16xwc79.9JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/termsUniversity of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Robert J. FlahertyThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and thePacificChapter 2It was wholly in Hollywood’s character for the major distributing companythat had spurned the first offer of Nanook to offer Flaherty the chance toproduce his next film. A major reason was that Jesse L. Lasky, productionhead of Famous-Players-Lasky, the studio end of Paramount Pictures Corpo-ration, was fascinated by exploration.1 In his memoirs published in 1957,Lasky attributed this fascination to boyhood fishing trips with his father inMaine, later camping trips with Zane Grey, the writer of popular Westerns,and pack-trip vacations with hired guides in Alaska, the High Sierras, theCanadian Northwest, and down the Columbia River.A second reason may have been that Paramount, like other Americandistributors, was finding that the overseas markets for its films were be-coming very remunerative (Griffith 1953). Lasky may have realized that thepicture Paramount had ignominiously rejected the year before was nowdoing good business in Europe and that it had cost peanuts to producecompared to the run-of-the-mill programme pictures coming from the stu-dio. Lasky saw in Robert Flaherty an unusual filmmaker, who should re-ceive more respect than the hack directors at his studio.A third reason, suggested by John Grierson,2 was the influence exer-cised by twenty-nine-year-old Walter Wanger, then working as a producerunder Lasky. “Wasn’t Wanger somewhat responsible for those special ex-cursions into realistic cinema by Lasky,” writes Grierson. “About that pe-riod Wanger read a piece of mine, brought me in to see Lasky, exposed thefinancial returns of Paramount to me and invited me to make an analysis ofthe bearing of realism on box-office returns. It brought the first analysisof the difference between ‘Western’ and ‘Epic.’ Wanger was sort of impor-51This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

52 Robert J. Flahertytant in all this. He was really interested in the new wave of criticism. Hewas the only intellectual they had on the Lasky level.”It is not clear whether Lasky went to see Flaherty, or whether he sum-moned Flaherty to come to him. It is known, however, that Lasky eitherwrote or spoke words to the effect of “I want you to go off somewhere andmake me another Nanook. Go where you will, do what you like—I’ll footthe bills. The world’s your oyster.”3Flaherty, who presumably still considered himself an explorer ratherthan a professional filmmaker, must have been shaken. “I was elated,” hewrote. When approached by Lasky during the winter of 1923, he was at hishome in New Canaan working on writing. He promptly contacted Fred-erick O’Brien, whose book White Shadows in the South Seas had been apopular success in the United States since its publication in 1919. They ar-ranged to meet for dinner at Flaherty’s favorite haunt, the Coffee HouseClub near Times Square, to which representatives of Revillon Freres hadintroduced him. O’Brien brought George Biddle, a wealthy young man whohad recently been painting in Tahiti, and it is said that Grace Moore, who wasjust beginning to sing at the Metropolitan, and Mrs. Flaherty were alsopresent.Before the evening was over, Flaherty had been convinced that, hav-ing spent so many years in the frozen North, the obvious and most sensiblething to do was to go to the opposite extreme. “You’ll go south, to Poly-nesia,” O’Brien is alleged to have said. “Study the islanders. You’ll make abeautiful film” (Taylor 1949). Biddle and Grace Moore, both of whom hadvisited Tahiti, agreed with O’Brien. Samoa, the only place where a truePolynesian culture survived, was the location they recommended. “Go,”said O’Brien, “to the village of Safune on the island of Savaii and you maystill be in time to catch some of that beautiful old culture before it passesentirely away”4Flaherty had made up his mind that at all costs his wife should accom-pany him on his next expedition. “But what about the children?” Mrs. Fla-herty asked. They were six, four, and two years of age. Flaherty at oncedeclared that they must go, too, to be schooled in the ways of nature. Thedecision that this time Frances Flaherty would go with her husband is im-portant. For nearly ten years she had been living in different homes whileFlaherty was in the North, first for Mackenzie and then making his film. Shehad been influential in the discussions on the editing of Nanook but hadnever before played an active role in filmmaking itself. She would becomea gifted still photographer as well as a close collaborator on all future Fla-herty films.The expedition to Polynesia consisted of Flaherty, his wife, their threesmall daughters with a red-haired Irish nursemaid, and Flaherty’s youngerbrother David, who was to be production manager. When called to join theThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 53expedition, he was working in a coal and wood office in Port Arthur; herecalled that it was “the coldest winter on record.” He first heard of theventure in a telegram that read approximately: “All arranged with Famous-Players-Lasky make film in South Seas STOP Sailing San Francisco for Sa-moa April 24th come earliest possible STOP Salary two hundred dollars amonth—Bob.””It changed the course of my life,” says David Flaherty modestly,meaning that he was associated with making his brothers films for manyyears and became a good filmmaker in his own right. “Within two weeks,”he adds, “I had joined Bob and his family in New Canaan and within weekswe were on the bosom of the broad Pacific, far from the snow and ice, coal-dust and clinkers.”5Flaherty took an electric generating plant, developing outfit, and 35-mm projector. But he also took a Prizma color camera. It was the Prizmacamera that filmed the Kinemacolour film The Delhi Durbar in India.6 Hetook two Akeley No. 5 motion picture cameras with a gyro-head tripodsuch as he had used on Nanook, and several feature films for showing tothe movie-unconscious Polynesians. Legend has it that a piano was part ofthe equipment, but fact confirms only the presence of the famous violin.Before they set off, the Flahertys were given a dinner in New York atthe old Waldorf-Astoria. Eminent and influential personages from big busi-ness, Washington, the arts, sciences, and various powerful American foun-dations were present. All, however belatedly, hailed the discovery of thisnew kind of filmmaking Flaherty had demonstrated in Nanook. Speechesproclaimed this new use of the motion picture as a means to unite theworld’s peoples to create better understanding and serve the cause of in-ternational relations. The Flahertys departed with the unanimous blessingsof this distinguished gathering of American culture/ This dinner was tobe of some importance two years later when Flaherty ran into problemsover the distribution of his picture.They sailed from San Francisco in April 1923 in an old steamer, theSonoma, bound for Tahiti. Frances Flaherty recalls:We were making a film for Hollywood, and we were very consciousof the fact. Bob had no illusions whatever as to what Paramount ex-pected of him in the way of thrills and sensations for the box-office.All the way down on the steamer we talked about it, about the sea-monsters there doubtless were down there around those islands;doubtless the Samoans had encounters, fights for their lives, withthem. And when one day a report came in from another ship at seathat one of these monsters had been sighted—a giant octopus, its ten-tacles spread over the waters from a body the size of a whale—wewere sure we were on the right track.8This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

54 Robert}. FlahertyBefore he left New York, Flaherty had been given a glowing descrip-tion of Savaii by Frederick O’Brien. It was the last remaining island uncon-taminated by modern civilization; its inhabitants, “an almost Grecian race,”were as superlatively beautiful as the landscape; and in the village of Sa-fune there lived one white man who knew the Polynesians and their lan-guage and would therefore be invaluable. To this man, a German tradernamed Felix David, O’Brien gave Flaherty a letter of introduction, whichwas to have strange and unexpected results.O’Brien’s glamorous description of Samoa was somewhat exagger-ated. A more realistic account of both islands—Savaii and Upolu—at thattime may be found in Newton A. Rowe’s enthralling book, Samoa Underthe Sailing Gods (1930). Rowe held the post of agricultural or district in-spector and spent the years 1922-26 on the two islands. In his book, henot only recounts with sympathy and understanding his experiences withthe native population, but he also provides a documented indictment of theadministration under the mandate of the New Zealand government, towhich I later refer. He describes the island to which the Flahertys weregoing as follows:Savaii—said to be the cradle of the Polynesian race—the largest andmost westerly of the Samoa group, is split up into separate parts, ornatural fertile divisions, by three lava-fields which have flowed downfan-wise to the coast from the central wooded masses of the volcanicinterior, which attain a height of 6000 feet. It is about 170 miles incircumference. . . . Between the lava-fields range long and fertiledistricts; and along their shores lie the bulk of the native villages,for there are but few settlements inland. Above the villages rise orstraggle native coconut-plantations, penetrating the forest, from whichare produced copra. In every village of any consequence, numerically,is a store or trading-station…. The island is encircled by a fairly goodroad, which stops short, however, of the lava-fields. (Rowe 1930:147)Both Flaherty and his wife wrote colorful descriptions of the two yearsthey and their family spent preparing for and making the successor to Na-nook. The account that follows has been put together from the writings ofboth of them, some written at the time and some in later years, togetherwith subsequent notes supplied by David Flaherty.They arrived at Pago-Pago in American Samoa in early May and thentook the schooner to Apia, the main town on the island of Upolu, whichwith the nearby island of Savaii had been mandated by the Treaty of Ver-sailles in 1919 to the New Zealand government. After spending two orthree weeks outfitting in Apia, they took another schooner to their finaldestination on Savaii, the village of Safune. Flaherty described the voyage:This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 55I don’t think that either of us will ever forget the morning westood off the reefs at Safune waiting to get in. All that long we’d beencrossing the sea, the boat rocking and rolling. We had to keep awakeand watch the children from rolling like logs into the sea. All we couldhear was the thunder of the sea—of big seas smashing.We waited there a long time before at last daybreak came. I’venever seen such big seas in my life. They were higher—and we rearedhigher—than the boat was long. How in the world we could get a pas-sage through the reef I couldn’t imagine because it looked like a solidwall of rearing water.9 However, our good skipper began maneuver-ing until a small lull opened between the seas. Then he opened up theengines and shot through a passage not much wider than the boatitself.When we got into the lagoon, we were like a cloud floatingthrough the sky. The water was as clear as the air too. We could seedown to the coral gardens, the slowly waving plants and fishes all col-ors of the rainbow. From the very first everything seemed fabulous—a fantasy. Here ahead of us was the gleaming crescent of the beachwith the great coconut-trees towering above it. Nestled among thetrees were the native huts, beautiful houses of bamboo and thatchshaded by the palms, red acacias and perfumed frangipanis, andamong them a great trading-station, a white, weather-worn and green-shuttered structure. It had two flower-grown verandas, one aroundthe main floor and one around the second story. Even from a distance,it was obvious that the lower floor was the store and the upper theliving quarters of its occupants.When the schooner finally berthed at the long, slender finger of awharf, we could see the white-clad figure of the man we had come sofar to meet. From the upper veranda he gazed at us through binocu-lars. The natives streamed down the wharf and gave us the friendlywelcome that so endears one to the Polynesians.10The landing party was conducted up the beach to the gates of thecompound and then up the stairway to the upper veranda, where theirhost, the German trader Felix David, welcomed them. His hair was white,and he had a mustache in the Kaiser Wilhelm style. His face told at firstglance of the many years of isolation he had chosen for himself. He calledhimself the king of the island.The visitors were served a vast breakfast on the rear of the veranda,where a table was laden with food—mummy apples, breadfruit, pine-apples, coconuts, roast wild pig, and the rarest of rare mangoes. Flahertyoften recounted in later years the sumptuousness of this welcoming feast.Behind each chair stood a lovely Polynesian girl, naked to the waist, whoThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

56 Robert J. Flahertyfanned the guests, and in one corner a group of boys sang with their eyeshalf-closed and slapping their hands in rhythm.”There were little bananas no bigger than your finger,” says Flaherty,”and there were huge ones almost as long as your forearm. And I nevertasted such pineapples. I don’t think anyone who has never been in thetropics knows what a pineapple can taste like. Then there was a big fishthe trader opened up for us to eat. He looked carefully inside first andpicked out a silver shilling. If the shilling had been tarnished, we couldn’teat the fish.”The breakfast lasted for several hours, after which their host led theminto the big living room, the great doors of which opened onto the bluesea. The white fringe of the eternally booming surf was visible in the dis-tance. The atmosphere in the room was as unreal as their host. On thewalls were old lithographs and chromos, framed photographs of great fig-ures of the German stage and opera of the 1880s. Outstanding among thisfaded gallery was a painting of an imposing military figure, presumablyFelix David’s father, a rigid Prussian with fierce, upturned mustache, hold-ing a sword in front of him. In one corner stood a piano of the same pe-riod, laden with tattered, fly-specked music scattered at random.Felix David, to whom Flaherty had sent Frederick O’Brien’s letter inadvance of arrival, told them that he had informed the island chiefs that amotion picture was going to be made about the people of Safune. None ofthem had ever seen a film, nor in fact had David, who had left Europe inhis youth twenty-seven years before.Every evening the trader entertained the natives of the island with avocal concert. He had been trained as a young man to sing an operaticbaritone but had been thwarted from pursuing a promising career bythe firm objections of his Junker parent. As a result, the young Felix hadshaken the dust of European civilization and culture from his feet andhad installed himself on this island paradise, consoling himself with mem-ories of what his career might have been had it not been for his father. Histour de force in the evening recitals to the peace-loving villagers of Safunewas Siegfried’s death scene from Gotterddmmerung. Some of the olderislanders had probably heard this powerful rendition five thousand times,but they always came back for more.”The Flahertys began to settle in. They had come to make a picture ofpeople to whom they were complete strangers—unlike the situation whenFlaherty was making Nanook—and whose language they could not speak.Felix David would be invaluable as an intermediary. It appeared that thepeople obeyed his every command and that he ruled them in Teutonicstyle. Frances Flaherty recalled:The people we met when we arrived were like creatures of an-other time. We remembered the words of Henry Adams, friend ofThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 57Robert Louis Stevenson, who with John LaFarge the painter, lived inSamoa in the 1880s: “It is a deep wonder to me that I have not beentold that here is rustic Greece of the Golden Age, still alive, still to belooked at.”The villagers lived in about a hundred houses, which servedmostly as shelters against tropical storms, since life was actually livedout-of-doors, on the beaches, in the clement sea that was as warm asthe air, and in the palm jungles, where lurked no dangerous beastsexcept the wild boar, who kept himself to himself if left alone. Heremen and women played through the long days like children. Timehad no meaning. Life was a game, a dance, a frieze on a Grecian urn.(Griffith 1953:52)Before their arrival on the island, the sixteen tons of equipment forthe laboratory, the electric generator, the projector, and other apparatushad arrived. Because for insurance purposes high values had been as-signed to the equipment, Flaherty was at once called the “Melikani Mil-lionea.” For several days a chain of natives carried boxes and bales up to anold, disused, and overgrown trading post which, after another team hadmade it habitable, was to be their headquarters. It was situated amonggiant palm trees within view of David’s residence. It was the house whereFrederick O’Brien had lived. In due course, a greensward was clearedaway under the coconut trees so that a cinema screen could be erected atone end and the lighting plant and projector set up at the other. A little hutwas built at the mouth of a cave that would be converted into a laboratory,sheltered by a huge, outspreading breadfruit tree.David had arranged a meeting to introduce the Flahertys to the chiefsof the island. Some twenty-five chiefs, all of Safune, gathered in the villageguesthouse to be told why the white visitors had come to Samoa, espe-cially to Savaii and Safune, and how much Flaherty admired the Samoanpeople and their way of life. In return, the chiefs welcomed them, said thatthey hoped all would go well, and promised help. A great feast followed.”Our big idea,” said Frances Flaherty, “was that we should make a filmafter the pattern of Nanook of the North. We should find a man like Nanookthe Eskimo, a sturdy, dignified chief and head of a family, and then buildour picture round him, substituting the dangers of the sea, here in theSouth Pacific, for those of snow and ice in the North. We would present thedrama of Samoan life as it unrolled itself naturally before us, as far as possi-ble untouched by the hand of the missionary and the government. We be-gan by trying to tell the Polynesians in a booklet about the Eskimos and thepurpose behind filming Nanook” (Griffith 1953:54).A graphic description was then unrolled by Flaherty of how he hadlived with the Eskimo people and won their friendship and confidence. Hehad made the picture of them because “love overflowed in his heart for theThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

58 Robert}. Flahertypeople of that country, on account of their kindliness and their bravery,and also on account of their receiving him well, and because they lookvery happy every day of their lives in a life most difficult to live in thewhole world.” The men in New York (i.e., the film’s backers) had seen thatMr. Flaherty had done a very useful thing in making this picture. “Suchpictures as this will create love and friendship among all the people of theworld.” Misunderstandings and quarrels among nations will cease, saidFlaherty. And so the big men in New York (Hollywood was apparently notmentioned, perhaps because it might have given the islanders wrong ideas)had now sent Flaherty to Samoa to create another such picture among thedescendants of the pure Polynesian race of ancient times as they were inthe days before missionaries and traders had arrived to change their cus-toms. (We wonder how Felix David liked interpreting these words.)Frances Flaherty recalled, however, that the screening ofNanook someweeks later made little impression on the islanders. They appeared pleasedto see something which Flaherty—or Lopati as he was now known—hadmade, but apart from that, Nanook s celluloid activities left them unmoved.”I do not believe,” adds Mrs. Flaherty, “they had any sense of importancethat we wanted to make a picture of them, too, for the benefit of some far-away country.” One doubts, also, if Jesse Lasky, sitting in his executive suitesome five thousand miles away, would have wholly subscribed to the al-truistic motives that were said to be the reason why his studio was backingFlaherty’s second production.While the organization of the unit’s headquarters and equipment wentahead, Flaherty was at pains to get to know Felix David better. He foundtime to go and have a glass or two of mummy beer and a chat at the trader’shouse. Felix continually showed his pleasure at Flaherty’s presence. Hewas anxious to see the films that Flaherty had brought. “Ach, Gott!” hewould exclaim. “The new art. Are we not brothers in the craft just asO’Brien had predicted.” And the more beer he drank, the more he wouldsink into maudlin reminiscences of his frustrated career. In his eyes theconsiderable sums of money the film unit would pay him for his serviceswere a small fortune.In between his fits of despondency, Felix David was at first very help-ful. His servants scoured the island for suitable subjects for filming, in-formation, and whatever else Flaherty might need. But Flaherty wasconfronted with a problem which only he, with perhaps the aid of his wifeand brother, could solve. What was to be the theme of his film?”No sooner were we landed,” writes Frances Flaherty, “than Bob be-gan a search of the deep-sea caverns underlying the coral reefs whichfringed the island, for giant octopuses and tiger sharks. For weeks andweeks he searched. And when at last he did not find them and had to admitthey simply were not there … he just sat on our verandah with everythought falling away from him.”12This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 59Flaherty himself wrote of this period from the location itself:During my first few weeks in Samoa, I was disgusted. The drench-ing heat did not help my feeling for the charm and spirit of the coun-try; the natives I could only see as mobs and rabble. The fortunes ofthe film seemed low indeed. These reactions, however, were simplythose of any superficial traveller hovering around Pago-Pago or Apia,the two ports of call. Only when I left the white man’s settlementsin this incredible spot, became acclimated and began personally toknow the Samoans, to live amongst them, to have them in my house,to journey with them, did my interest and enthusiasm revive. . . .. We are living in one of the finest native villages in all Samoa. . . .It stands within the shelter of the tall rocking coconuts. Beyond thescreen of trees and the outline of the chocolate-topped thatched fale(house of the village chiefs), is the strip of sea, blue as blue, save forthe single thin line of white which is the booming, grumbling reef(without which no South Sea island is complete).It has been no easy task to get the right characters for the film.Like the Eskimo, the photographable [sic] types are few. Taioa, the tau-pou (village virgin) of Sasina was my first find. Here should follow theinevitable picture—raven hair, lips of coral, orbs (meaning eyes) etc.,etc. But to you, not knowing the fine type of Polynesian, such a pas-sage of words would mean nothing. I can only say that when, after afeast of pigs, taro, breadfruit, wild pigeons, mangoes and yams, to theaccompaniment of siva sivas and Ta’alolos hours and hours long,I bargained for and bought her face from the proud and haughtyalbeit canny chiefs of Sasina, and she and her handmaid came upthe palm-lined trail to Safune, the old women here told her betweentheir teeth that they would see she was killed by dawn. (Flaherty1924:9-13)He tells us elsewhere that when he met the chiefs of Safune, he foundthat they were so proud that their village had been chosen as the locationfor the film that they boasted of it to every other village on the island.13Every morning the Flahertys could see from their veranda all the chiefswalking in a solemn procession to their meetinghouse, wearing lava-lavasround their waists, their torsos gleaming in the sun from the coconut oilwith which they had been anointed, fly-switches over their shoulders, anda big, blazing, red hibiscus tucked behind each ear, as was the custom inSamoa. They would go to their fono-fali and begin their ceremony for theday with the drinking of the kava.The taupou in Samoa is a village’s principal maiden, not only becauseof her rank but also, theoretically, because of her beauty. She is treated likea princess. She officiates at all ceremonies, especially the making of kavaThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

60 Robert}. Flahertywhen visiting chiefs arrive. The higher the chief, the more important is theceremony. All the chiefs plan one day to marry off their taupou to a visitingchief, the higher the better so that she may bring great prestige to hervillage.Flaherty searched the village of Safune for a girl suitable to play theheroine in his film but without any success. The chiefs then came to himand offered him their taupou for the part—the highest honor they couldpay him. Special arrangements could be made, they said, to make her avail-able to Lopati. But Flaherty had already noted the taupou of Safune, whowas far from young or even attractive. He solemnly thanked the chiefs fortheir offer but courteously declined to accept it.Shortly after, he found the ideal girl for his film. She was the taupouof the nearby village of Sasina. He did not know, of course, that no twovillages on the island of Savaii were as jealous of one another as Safuneand Sasina. He knew only that he had made up his mind that Sasina’s tau-pou, whose name was Taioa, was perfect for the part. The chiefs of Safunereceived this news with a marked lack of enthusiasm. Flaherty turned toTrader David to solve the problem.Two days later, the chiefs of Sasina brought the beautiful Taioa andgraciously presented her to Flaherty for his film. He expressed gratitudebut noticed none of the local Safunes were in sight. The blinds were drawnon their huts, and the village was as empty and still as a graveyard. After theSasina chiefs had left, Flaherty asked Trader David how he had arrangedfor the girl to be brought. “It was simple,” said Felix, “I just asked the chiefsof Safune if they wanted you to go and make the picture at Sasina. Theywere so infuriated by this idea that they at once agreed to allow you tobring here and use the taupou from Sasina” (Flaherty 1924b).Taioa was given a space for her sleeping mat on the Flahertys’ ve-randa. There she sat by the hour, strumming her guitar and smiling. Cam-era tests were made, and Flaherty was delighted. He set about solvingother problems. But one month later there was a vacancy on the veranda.All that was left was a piece of green velvet. Soon it was discovered that oneof the boys from the village was gone, too. “And,” said Flaherty, “the Safunechiefs just laughed and laughed.”Undismayed, the Flahertys found another girl, Saulelia. She had lessfascination than Taioa, admitted Flaherty, but she had beautiful long blackhair. They began filming with her and were happy with the results. As timewent on, Flaherty became more and more enthusiastic about Saulelia andshot some twenty thousand feet of film on her. But one morning she ar-rived for work with her hair cut as short as that of a man. Flaherty could notbelieve his eyes. Weeping, Saulelia revealed that she had been deserted byher lover and,fa’a Samoa, she must cut off her hair.Finally, Flaherty had success with a third girl, Fa’angase. She had fol-lowed him around shyly wherever he had been filming. Occasionally sheThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 61would bring him a flower. She was very young, almost a child when theyhad first arrived at Safune, but as the months went by she was growing up.Fa’angase came from the other end of the village. Her father was a highchief. He agreed that his daughter should take part in the film but in-sisted that Lopati must treat her as if she were his own daughter. He ex-plained that his end of the village was very high in rank, but the end wherethe Flahertys had their house was low and always had been so. Therefore theboys around the visitor’s house were not high class, and Flaherty must bevery careful how they behaved when Fa’angase was around. Promises weregiven and filming began again with the new heroine.Two boys had been trained to work in the laboratory that had beenconstructed in the cave. They had to work in semidarkness, and they madeup jokes and sang and laughed to keep away the evil spirits. When Fa’an-gase was cast in the picture, the boys couldn’t control their excitement.They teased her unmercifully. When they emerged from the cave labora-tory, having helped to process some film that had been shot of the younggirl, they shouted, “O Fa’angase, her legs are bowed, and her eyes—onelooks one way and the other looks the other way.” Happily, Fa’angase tookit all in good humor.One day, however, the joking and high spirits were missing. Wonderingwhat was wrong, the Flahertys saw that the chiefs from their end of thevillage were huddled together in a meeting. Alarmed, Flaherty asked TraderDavid what was happening. The chiefs, it seemed, were angry. Trouble wasbrewing between the two ends of the village. The chiefs from the high-class end were coming to take Fa’angase away from the film. All work wasstopped until the matter should be settled.That night a procession of chiefs from the high-class end of the villageapproached the Flaherty house. Flaherty was dismayed at the prospect oflosing his leading lady, upon whom he had spent thousands of feet of film.At that moment, Fialelei,14 the woman who acted as an interpreter for thevisitors, arrived in great agitation. All the chiefs from the low-class end ofthe village, she said, were hiding among the coconut palms with knives intheir hands. But by this time the procession of high-class chiefs had arrivedat the house. With grave courtesy, they said they wished to ask a favor ofLopati: would he go with them down the path to the bridge across the river,which divided the village into its two halves, so that they could return insafety to their homes? Fa’angase was not mentioned. Flaherty hesitated amoment. Then he and Frances stepped forward and, with the chiefs be-tween them, led the way down the path in the half-light to the bridge, overwhich the chiefs filed to their own end of the village. Not a sign or soundcame from the men waiting with their knives in the shadow of the palmtrees.The next morning, Fialelei came to the Flahertys to say that Willy, thehouseboy, wanted a holiday. “What for?” asked Flaherty. “Willy is married,”This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

62 Robert}. FlahertyFialelei replied. “Married?” exclaimed Mrs. Flaherty, in surprise. “To whom?And when?”So the story came out. While all the trouble had been going on aboutFa’angase, the boys who worked for Flaherty had gone across to the otherend of the village and abducted a bride for Willy. Who should the bride bebut the taupou whom the Flahertys had rejected for their first heroine!Fa’angase stayed with the film until all the shooting had been finishedto its maker s satisfaction.The summer months of 1923 glided away. Flaherty was still searchingfor some of his characters and his theme but at the same time making innu-merable tests of likely types. October came and still not a foot of film hadbeen shot that would be of use in the final picture. Then two momentousevents occured, the first of great technical importance and the second ofsignificance for the film’s theme.In addition to his two Akeley cameras for black-and-white work, Fla-herty had taken with him a Prizma color camera, which required a filmsensitive to color; some of the new panchromatic film had been shippedout for this purpose. This special stock was not in general use at that time,films being photographed on orthochromatic stock such as Flaherty hadused for Nanook.When they developed the orthochromatic tests made of scenes of Sa-fune and possible characters and projected them at night, the Flahertyswere disappointed with the results. The lovely golden bronze of the Sa-moans, the wide range of greens of the islands luxurious foliage, the red ofthe flowers which the villagers wore in their hair, all came out dark andshapeless and with none of the luminosity that made the location and itspeople so beautiful.One day, for some unrecorded reason, maybe pure Flaherty cussedcuriosity, Flaherty loaded an Akeley camera with a roll of the panchromaticstock intended for the color camera, which had broken down. The resultswere in black and white, of course, but the figures of the Samoans hada wonderful bronze quality, and the greens of the foliage appeared in awide range of true tones. Flaherty’s enthusiasm was unbounded. As Fran-ces Flaherty wrote, “The figures jumped right out of the screen. They had aroundness and modelling and looked alive and, because of the colour cor-rection, retained their full beauty of texture. The setting immediately ac-quired a new significance. … At last we had the solution to our problem.The drama of our picture should lie in its sheer beauty, the beauty offa’aSamoa, rendered by panchromatic film” (Griffith 1953:54).Panchromatic film stock had to be developed in total darkness,whereas orthochromatic, which is not sensitive to red, could be developedwith the illumination of a red light. For this reason, using panchromatic,the work in the Flaherty field laboratory installed in the underground caveThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 63would become doubly difficult. In addition, although the newly inventedpanchromatic stock had been used in Hollywood for special effects such asskyscapes with cloud formations, it had never been used for a full-lengthproduction. The manufacturers of the stock, Eastman-Kodak, had in factwarned Flaherty that it was tricky and good only for occasional use forcloud effects.It was typical of Flaherty’s love of experiment that he made the mo-mentous decision to ignore the experts’ warnings and to shoot the wholeof his picture on panchromatic stock. He scrapped all forty thousand feethe had already shot and cabled Eastman-Kodak for more panchromatic.But he did not inform Lasky. This decision was momentous not only forFlaherty and his final film, notable even today for the extreme loveliness ofits photography, but the results when seen in Hollywood were withoutdoubt a major factor in the general adoption of panchromatic in place oforthochromatic stock by the film industry in all countries.A second factor not recorded in Flaherty or his wife’s writings butabout which Flaherty told me in London in 1931 was that he first experi-mented with the panchromatic stock at the time of day when the sun islow—either in the early morning or late afternoon. That is the time whenthe sun’s low rays creep underneath foliage so that shadows are long and astereoscopic effect is achieved on the screen. Flaherty said that wheneverpossible thereafter he filmed only in the early morning or late afternoonlight (Rotha 1931:19).It was this second discovery, just as important as the use of panchro-matic stock for black-and-white photography, coupled with Flaherty’s se-lection of pictorial compositions and mobility of camerawork that gave hiscompleted film its famous visual beauty.15Flaherty still had not found a theme for his film. Beautiful photo-graphic effect is one thing; quite another is the story or theme the filmintends to convey. It seemed as though for several months he expectedsomething sensational to happen.Mrs. Flaherty records:From white old-timers we eagerly questioned at the beginning, we re-ceived little comfort. One by one our list of hopes—sharks, octo-puses, robber-crabs—they negatived. A big octopus they had neverseen—did not believe it existed, certainly not in Samoa. “Wait,” saidBob to me, nothing daunted. He had had a similar experience amongthe Eskimos; one need not expect these aliens to know anything of thecountry except their own particular business in it. “Wait and questionthe natives, you’ll see.” (Griffith 1953:58)Then one day the Safune chiefs gave the Flahertys a feast to celebratethe passing through of a party of chiefs (malanga) from villages along theThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

64 Robert}. Flahertycoast of the island. Some of the party reported that a giant octopus hadbeen spotted in the passage of the reef at Sataua. It was tele lava, they said,with a body as big as one of the houses in the village here.The Flahertys did not find the idea of such a creature incredible. Theyhad heard once that the carcass of an octopus that was bigger than anyknown whale had washed up on the Madagascar coast. They had also heardthat in the deepwater reef at Asau Bay on the way to Sataua there were tigersharks. So they decided to scout the coast of the island westward and sentword of their coming by messengers.When they arrived at Asau, all the chiefs were assembled to greetthem, sitting cross-legged on mats. The usual welcoming ceremony andspeeches took place. Each of the chiefs and guests drank in turn in an or-der of precedence that strictly adhered to tradition. Finally, when all theceremony was done, they came down to business.They agreed to do everything the Melikani Millionea requested.Sharks could easily be lured with bait placed on the rocks by the shore inthe early morning. Armed with iron-pointed spears, they would awaitthem. But, said the puzzled chiefs, why should the great Millionea botherhimself with the pointless hunting of sharks when a special dance hadbeen prepared for him? Thus the Flahertys involuntarily found themselvesthe guests at yet another massive feast followed by a series of wonderfullyrhythmic dances which held them enthralled. The people of Asau, awarethat the white visitors were going to proceed in due course to the villagesof Vaisala and Sataua farther along the coast, were determined to present aperformance that would outshine any that might be organized by the rivalvillages.When they left in the morning, the Flahertys regretfully observed thehunters waiting in vain on the shore, the shark bait lying untouched onthe rocks.At Vaisala and Sataua, of course, exactly the same events took place—more kava, more feasting, more dancing, more promises, each villageanxious to show off its best. But there were no sharks, no octopuses, nosign of drama from the sea. “We returned from our malanga without anadditional foot of negative,” sadly writes Mrs. Flaherty.Sometime after this abortive search for what obviously did not exist,Flaherty must have concluded that his preconceived idea of making an-other Nanook, based on the struggle of the Polynesian people against thesea, could not be done. The drama of the fight for existence against hungerand climate, which had been easy to find in the Canadian North, was notduplicated in the sunlit, peaceful Samoan Islands. On the contrary, al-though food had to be hunted or fished, this was regarded more as a gamethan as a struggle to live. “Drama exists,” writes Frances Flaherty, “but it is avery subtle thing, quite apart from everything we understand. It is to beThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 65found in nothing more or less than custom—fa’a Samoa. Therein thepeople build their whole lives. If you break fa’a Samoa, you break theirlives to pieces and they die” (Griffith 1953:62).Flaherty had, however, learned much from the making of Nanook,most important, that to make a film interpretation of real people livingtheir real lives it was first necessary to live with them and to get to knowhow and why they do the most simple everyday things. He had yet to real-ize that this simple everyday act of existence might in itself be the basisof drama, that it did not need heightening by fights with octopuses andsharks. Mrs. Flaherty perceived this in hindsight, as indicated in the abovequotation, but Flaherty had not yet reached this solution to his problem.He had, however, shot many scenes of everyday incidents in village life,possibly with the intention of familiarizing the natives with his camera, formaking tests for his own observation, and for processing experiments inthe laboratory.Among the islanders who came to visit the Flaherty house was a womannamed Tu’ungaita, who later appeared in the finished film as the mother ofMoana s family. She came to the house to offer for sale baskets which shemade from strips vipandanus leaf dried in the sun. Mrs. Flaherty had theidea that it would be sensible if her own daughters also learned how tomake baskets, and Tu’ungaita came to stay at the house with them.The old lady was equally skilled in the process of making tapa, whichwas a bark-cloth used for siapos, that is, lava-lavas. It was even then a dy-ing craft; most of the printed cloth used for lava-lavas already came fromManchester or Japan by way of traders at Apia. But to watch Tu’ungaitamake tapa was to watch a beautiful exhibition of craftsmanship, and theyounger women and girls in Safune would gather round her to watch inadmiration. Flaherty, with his affection for traditional skills, was quick toobserve the beauty of this time-worn process. He filmed it in loving detail,presumably first on orthochromatic stock. It occupies a beautiful sequencein the final film, however, so he must have retaken it later on panchromatic.Possibly it was the screening of this ^pa-making sequence and othersimilar scenes of everyday occurrences that finally opened Flaherty’s eyesto the all-important fact that the real theme of his film lay right under hisnose and fine blue eyes. He may still have gone octopus hunting, but whenhe ultimately made up his mind, he had either to confess failure and returnto the United States or to recognize that his elusive theme was there andhad been there all along. Mrs. Flaherty believed that the discovery of therich potential of panchromatic stock gave Flaherty the clue to his theme.We agree that it may indeed have helped, but something other than a tech-nical discovery differentiated this new film, when it was finished, from theearlier and more primitive Nanook. It was the dawning realization in Fla-herty that the theme for which he had been searching for so many monthsThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

66 Robert J. Flahertywas no more and no less thanfa’a Samoa—the elaborate ritual custom ofSamoan life. At some unrecorded moment, this vital recognition must havebeen seeded in Flaherty’s mind.In all, Flaherty exposed some 240,000 feet of negative in making hisfilm of the Safune family. Today such length would not be considered ex-cessive on a major feature film, but in the mid-1920s, it was a very greatdeal of film to be used by a single director-cameraman on one location.There is no record, however, that Lasky ever complained. What was surelyremarkable was that this incredible amount of footage was developed andprinted by hand in a remote cave and that the two laboratory hands wereSamoan boys who had no previous experience with motion pictures. Fla-herty must have trained them very well, and they in turn, like the Eskimos,must have been brilliant learners. But the value of using the local people inactually making the film had been firmly established in Flaherty’s mindin Nanook. It was an integral part of his belief that the art of filmmakingwas a one-man job on the actual location. The less he relied on industrialprocesses, the purer the film would be.On Savaii, however, there were unexpected difficulties. After abouttwelve months’ work, it was noticed that dark flashes appeared on thedeveloped negative at regular intervals. When projected in the coconuttheater, the positive film was clearly unusable. Was the panchromatic stockunreliable, as Eastman-Kodak had warned? Flaherty at once stopped shoot-ing and carried out innumerable tests and experiments through June andJuly 1924 but failed to trace the cause of the defects. Morale sank low.Flaherty sent a young assistant whom he had hired in Apia, Lancelot Clarke(a Tasmanian and secretary to the resident commissioner in Savaii), to Hol-lywood and to Eastman-Kodak in Rochester, New York, to seek advice.Meanwhile, back at Safune, the filmmakers had an idea. On a trip toApia on the other island, David Flaherty had told a government chemist oftheir problem. The chemist had suggested that the water in the cave whichthey had fitted up as the laboratory might be too salty and had given Davidsome silver nitrate to make a salinity test.In David s words, “We knew the cave water was saline but in despera-tion we made the test anyway, dipping the test-tube into the cave water. Thesilver nitrate gave a precipitate, proving salinity. Then Bob suggested wemake another test, taking the water right from the bottom. This we did, andgot the same precipitate. But this time the water had a foul chemical odor.We realized that the chemicals which came off the film when we washed it,instead of being flushed out with the change of tide from the sea as we hadimagined, had been depositing themselves on each following batch of film.This must be the cause of the waver.”16 From then on they abandoned thecave water and washed the film in rainwater instead. The results, whenprojected, were perfect.This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 67Henceforth, all would be well—but every foot of film that had beenshot for the picture up to that time would have to be retaken. To do sowould not take long because they knew now exactly what scenes theywanted and which of their characters to use. The whole of the film as weknow it today was shot between July and December of 1924. Moreover,retakes are usually the bugbear of the film director.The discovery of the reason for the spoiled negative had a secondeffect: it explained the strange illness to which Flaherty had succumbedduring the expedition round the coast in the previous year’s search for thebig octopus and tiger sharks. No one had thought at the time that the sick-ness might have been due to Flaherty’s casual habit of drinking the water intheir cave laboratory.Flaherty had suddenly taken ill at a small village called Tufu a longway from their house at Safune. He was unable to eat any food and becamevery weak. All he could do was to take regular doses of an opiate to easethe pain. But it was clear that something must be done. A messenger wasdispatched to ask Trader David to send a boat to Falealupo, the nearestcalling point to the village where Flaherty lay ill.All Tufu was deeply concerned at the Millionea’s strange illness. Fivedays must pass before the boat could arrive at Falealupo. Mrs. Flaherty gaveinstructions for a litter to be made ready on which Bob would be carriedto Newton Rowe’s house at Falealupo.A procession was formed to make the journey to Falealupo, headedby Rowe mounted on his horse and including a native missionary with anumbrella. All went well until Rowe suddenly became aware that the pro-cession had stopped behind him. The missionary was insisting, with theassent of the Samoan members, that, ill as he was, Lopati must walk a shortpart of the way. Rowe was mystified but knew the people well enough toadvise the Flahertys to agree to the request. Bob was assisted on foot for ashort distance until a spot was reached where he was again placed on thelitter.Not until some time later did they find out the reason for this strangeincident. It seemed that the place where Flaherty had been required towalk was a spirit path that led to a rock on the coast from which dead spir-its had dived into the sea to find Polutu, their land of the dead. To havecarried Lopati across that spirit path would have gravely endangered hislife. Others had died that way, and the people loved him too dearly to allowsuch a risk.17At Falealupo, Newton Rowe, an old captain, and a white-bearded Cath-olic missionary, Father Haller (whom the islanders wanted to burn), caredfor Flaherty until the boat arrived with a Dr. Ritchie aboard.18 On the way toApia, David Flaherty was landed at Safune so that he could rejoin the threechildren who had been left in the care of their Irish nurse. Dr. Ritchie tookMr. and Mrs. Flaherty on to Apia, where proper medical attention could beThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

68 Robert}. Flahertyfound. A month later Bob was back at Safune safe and well. But it was notuntil the next year, when they discovered that the silver nitrate from thefilm had remained in the cave water and that Bob had been in the habit ofdrinking it, that the cause of his sickness was diagnosed. Flaherty said thathe was never comfortable in the heat of the Samoan Islands, probably be-cause of having spent many years in the opposite extremes of the far North.By the time production was suspended because of the trouble withthe negative, Flaherty had filmed most of what he wanted except for a finalsequence in the film. Now he had to reshoot everything and, in addition,he still had to find a climax. The climax must be an incident that aroselogically during the course of the people s existence. It was found in theceremony of the tattoo, an idea that was first suggested to Flaherty by New-ton Rowe. In his book, Rowe writes:A Samoan who is not tattooed—it extends almost solid from thehips to the knees—it has been remarked, appears naked beside onewho is; and in no way can the custom be considered disfiguring. In-deed, it enhances the appearance of a Samoan. The missionaries—with the exception of the Catholics—hated it, and still hate it, as arelic of “heathenism.” It matters nothing apparently to them that,while the custom stands, it militates against immature mating; andthat it is the one test in these islands, where life is so easy, that theyouth has to go through. (Rowe 1930:85)”I remember discussing the importance of tattooing with Bob andMrs. Flaherty,” recalls Rowe, “and it was I who contacted the old tattooer inAsau and persuaded him to go to Flaherty in Safune. I remember it particu-larly because there was some slight coolness between this old bird andmyself over government business, but his cupidity got the better of him.”19In the sequences already made and retaken, Flaherty had spun a slimthread of love between Moana, his hero (played by Ta’avale) and his hero-ine (played by Fa’angase). But until he was tattooed, Moana was still a boy,no matter his age. Thus the ceremony of the tattoo was the turning point inhis life, an event of the greatest importance, marked by much ritual andcelebration.Flaherty filmed the process in great detail. He had previously watchedit being performed on two other villagers and thus knew exactly whatwould happen.The process is very painful. Needle points of bone—like a fine-tooth comb, impregnated with dye—bite into the skin under thetap-tap of the hammer. The skin is held taut and the surplus dye andblood are wiped away as the needles tap along the line marked out forthe pattern. The whole pattern, like breeches of fine blue silk, extendsThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 69from above the waist to below the knee, solidly. But only a little tattoo-ing is done at a time, the amount depending on the strength of thesubject. Tattooing is the beautification of the body by a race who, with-out metals, without clay, express their feelings for beauty in the per-fection of their own glorious bodies. Deeper than that, however, is itsspring in a common human need, the need for struggle and for sometest of endurance, some supreme mark of individual worth and proofof the quality of the man. The Eskimo has struggle thrust upon him—he could not escape it if he would. He meets it like a man and weadmire him. In Polynesia, what is it that can keep alive the spirit ofman but his own respect for what he is—the God that is within him?And so it is that tattooing stands for valor and courage and all thosequalities in which man takes pride. (Griffith 1953:69-70)The tattooing of Ta’avale took six weeks, and a further two weeks wereneeded for his body to recover. Flaherty kept filming at regular stages allthrough the ceremony, with the boy’s “family” in attendance, soothing himand cooling his wounds. Ta’avale himself was said to have been proud ofthe ceremony.Late in the year, during the final weeks of production, an incident tookplace that could have had ugly results for the film, involving the two boys,Samuelo and Imo, who were doing the laboratory work. A young manfrom Sataua, who was one of a government malanga (traveling party) thatwas spending the night at Safune on its way round the island, made over-tures to one of the girls in the village. She was the wife of the native mis-sionary’s son, and Samuelo and Imo, as a point of honor, the pride of theirvillage, told the young man that he had committed a very wrong thing fa ‘aSamoa. In the heat of the ensuing quarrel, Imo thrust a bullet-tipped caneinto the offender’s neck. Within twenty-four hours the young man wasdead, the thrust having reached his spine. He was not found dead on thebeach (as some accounts of this incident state) but spent his dying hours ina Samoany«/e, attended by the government’s Samoan doctor, who was oneof the malanga, and the sorrowing Safune chiefs.In Samoa, the native law demands a life for a life. At any moment,therefore, the people from Sataua might be expected to invade Safune totake revenge. The village was cleared of all its women and children, whilethe men patrolled all night on guard. The Flahertys stayed behind theirbungalow walls. The immense amount of film that had taken so long toshoot was stored in camphorwood chests on the veranda. The family mem-bers, armed with a shotgun, took turns guarding the chests.One account of this affair states that Trader David was at the root ofthe trouble and had made the two boys drunk (Taylor 1949). Accordingto David Flaherty, this was not true.20 Felix David, however, had becomeThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

70 Robert}. Flahertya source of worry to the Flahertys. As the months passed, he had seenhis influence over the island population increasingly stolen by the visitors.His manner toward Flaherty cooled considerably, and he began to drinkdeeper of his mummy-apple beer. He took a particular dislike to the eve-ning screenings of films, which he saw as a threat to his own operaticperformances.Among the entertainment films which Flaherty had brought with himwas a copy of the famous German picture Der Golem, which became themost popular. Other titles were It Pays to Advertise, The Miracle Man, andSentimental Tommy, all Paramount pictures. The massive stone figure ofthe monster, as played by Paul Wegener, so caught the imaginations of theSafune people that it is said that for some years later many children werenamed after Der Golem.21 On more than one occasion the dominant figureof Felix David had risen up into the bright beam of the projector andshaken a fist at this rival attraction.The killing of the young man from Sataua brought a confrontation.Imo and Samuelo were taken to Apia to the jail. The Flahertys wrote a letteron their behalf to the authorities, stressing their good character, previousgood behavior, and faithful discharge of their duties. When Trader Davidheard of this letter, however, he reported to the resident commissioner ofSavaii that the Flahertys were “obstructing the course of justice.”For some time the Flahertys had known that Felix David, half-insanewith jealousy, would welcome any misfortune that befell them and givenhalf a chance would even induce it. They had known, too, that he was inleague with the resident commissioner, and it had lately been disclosedthat the bond between them was that they were both homosexuals, com-mitting their offenses against Samoan boys. But they knew, too, that bothmen were soon to be exposed.The two laboratory boys were tried in Apia, their charge being re-duced to manslaughter. Imo was sentenced to five years of imprisonment,Samuelo to six months. Sataua was thus appeased and Safune freed fromthe fear of Sataua’s vengeance. According to Newton Rowe, Father Hallerstopped the boat party from leaving Sataua to attack Safune.Not long after, the government launch from Apia with the justice au-thorities stopped first at Matautu, eleven miles along the coast from Safune,to investigate the charges against the resident commissioner. It was toldthat the administrator in Apia would give him the option of leaving thecountry, in. which case the charges would be dropped. The commissionergave the officials dinner, put them up for the night, and said he would givehis reply in the morning. The next day they found his lifeless body slumpedin a chair in his office with an army rifle, the trigger tied to his toe, lying onthe floor.The justice authorities went on to Safune and arrested Felix David. HeThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 71was taken to Apia and after trial banished forever from Savaii. He witheredaway and died a few years later.22Finally, one day in December 1924, Flaherty decided that he had allthe film he needed, and a date for departure was fixed. The 240,000 feetof film shot over two years (including all the wasted material) had underFlaherty’s instructions been reduced by Lancelot Clarke to the essentialfootage for taking back to Hollywood.The leave-taking was inevitably a sad moment. The Flaherty family hadformed strong friendships with the cast of their film and the other inhabi-tants of Safune. The children especially had come to live almost like Sa-moans. They dressed like them, spoke their language, and had learnedtheir songs and dances. It was a tearful and emotional moment when theparting came. A great feast was held with much dancing.At the last moment, as Flaherty records, there was nearly disaster:The boat that was to take us away lay rolling outside the reef. Our all-in-all, family, film and everything, was in one canoe. The seas weremounting. We made the passage through the reef—at any time a dan-gerous journey—safely. We got up to the rolling ship waiting for themoment to close in, unload and climb aboard. Suddenly the shiprolled violently over towards us. As it did its counter caught the gun-whale of our canoe. For a second we were sure we’d capsize, chil-dren, film and all. We were trembling when we climbed aboard.(Flaherty 1950:22-23)At Pago-Pago they boarded the Sierra, bound for San Francisco; fromthere they went to Hollywood. They spent the next few months making arough cut of the film. During this period Flaherty screened it in a very longversion to Laurence Stallings, the journalist and playwright, who wrote apiece about it, titled “The Golden Bough,” in his regular column in theNew York World, Stallings wrote of the as-yet unfinished film: “I do notthink a picture can be greater than this Samoan epic.” As a result, Famous-Players-Lasky’s eastern office (Paramount) telegraphed Flaherty to go atonce to New York and complete the editing there.In New York, more months were spent editing the film. Famous-Players assigned one of its top writers, Julian Johnson, to write the sub-titles. The final screen credits read, “Edited and Titled by Julian Johnson,”but we are assured by David Flaherty that Flaherty and his wife wrote thetitles and edited the film.23 Finally, a twelve-reel cut of the picture wasready for screening to Jesse Lasky, Adolph Zukor, Walter Wanger, and othertop brass of the studio. Their first reaction was enthusiastic, and they de-cided immediately to put out the film on a road-show release to play atselected key theaters at special increased admission prices. The film was,This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

72 Robert}. Flahertyhowever, too long, and Flaherty was told to reduce it by approximatelyhalf. More months went by as this was done, and then the film was re-screened to the Paramount executives and salesmen.This time, far from hailing it as a masterpiece and a worthy successorto Nanook—by then a world classic—the Paramount boys were bored anddisappointed. “Where’s the blizzard?” one of them asked. Lasky said onlythat the film was still too long. A publicity woman with a very long cigaretteholder, who sat in the front row, complained that “there are not enoughtits.” Interest in Moana dropped below zero. The salesmen declared it hadnothing to sell it to the great American—let alone the European—mar-ket—no octopuses, no tiger sharks, not even a hurricane or a typhoon.There was this time, admittedly, a thin love interest, but the boy and the girldid not do anything. Any idea of road-showing the film was dropped.Once again Flaherty realized that to spend more than two years mak-ing a film in immensely difficult circumstances was only half the battle.Once again, as with Nanook, he would have to persuade the one-trackminds of the motion picture distributors and their salesmen that Moanawas a picture people might want to see if they were given the opportunity.For months he argued futilely with the Paramount office. He screened thefilm to such influential men as William Allen White and Otis Skinner andpersuaded them to write supportive letters to Paramount. At last he wastold, “Look here, this is what we’ll do. We’ll make a test of the picture to seeif you’re right or not. We’ll put the film out in six towns with no more andno less advertising than our usual run of pictures. These six towns will bethe hardest-boiled on our list. If it gets by them, okay, we’ll put the pictureout on general release.”In order of importance, these six tough spots for movies were Pough-keepsie, New York, in the East; Lincoln, Nebraska, in the Midwest; Pueblo,Colorado, in the Far West; Austin, in the huge state of Texas; Jacksonville,Florida, in the deep South; and Asheville, North Carolina, in the mid-South.”There was a saying about Poughkeepsie in the theatrical world,” re-members Flaherty. ” ‘If you think your act is good, try it on Poughkeepsie!'”(Flaherty 1950:23).Thus challenged, Flaherty was cornered. He knew full well that ifhis film was presented in these towns with no more publicity than Para-mount’s run-of-the-mill program pictures, it was bound to flop. So, withoutany reference to Paramount, he went to see Wilton Barrett, the head of theNational Board of Review of Motion Pictures in New York, and Colonel Joyof the Hays Organization. Both liked the picture and wanted to help. WithFlaherty they concocted a plan. They obtained the mailing lists of variousmagazines and lecture societies, which consisted of people who were nothabitual moviegoers. These people could be considered discriminating,what in recent years came to be called the “latent” audience. The NationalBoard then had leaflets printed about Moana, describing it frankly andThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 73telling how it differed from the routine movie and what Flaherty’s aim hadbeen in making it. Thousands of these leaflets were mailed to the nameson the lists.When the film was shown in Poughkeepsie, it did not flop as the Para-mount executives had predicted, nor did it do record business. It had aweek’s run, which was rather better than average. Reports from the fiveother towns showed the same results as in Poughkeepsie.At first Paramount’s people were elated. They even momentarily re-vived the idea of road-showing the film, normally done only for very costlyand spectacular productions, which Moana had no pretense to be. On sec-ond thought, however, they once again dropped this idea and decided toput out the film in the normal way without any special exploitation. Thesix-town experiment was wasted. Paramount advertised the film as”The Love-Life of a South Sea Siren.” It was booked for an opening week atthe Rialto Theatre on Broadway on February 7, 1926.Flaherty was now forty-two years old.II I Moana opens with a sequence reminiscent of Nanook but shown ingreater detail and with many more individual shots. A tilt-down from thesky through luxuriant foliage reveals the girl, Fa’angase. The little boy, Pe’a(Flying Fox), is there, too. Moana is pulling taro roots. Presently they moveoff toward the village, laden with food they have gathered. A trap is set for awild boar. The village of Safune is introduced by a lovely vista shot. A boarhas been caught in the trap, and there is a struggle to catch and tie it up.Everyone returns to the village.A fishing sequence follows, starting with the launching of a canoe.Fish are seen under the crystal-clear water. They are speared. The girl findsa giant clam. Everything is gay and carefree. Then in the quiet of the village,the mother, Tu’ungaita, is shown making bark-cloth. The process is seen ingreat detail with much use of close-ups. Finally, the cloth is ready to beused as a lava-lava.The little boy twists a rope ring to use as a grip for his feet in order toclimb a soaring coconut tree. The camera tilts up, following his move-ments, tilt by tilt, as he climbs higher and higher until he can twist off thefruit. The sea breaks over the reef into the lagoon, white spume shootingup through the blowholes. Moana, his elder brother Leupenga, and hisyoung brother Pe’a, breast the waves in their outrigger canoe. The canoe isfinally swamped, and its crew swim in the sea. They go off fishing along therocky shore, the waves breaking over them.Among the rocks, the little boy is busy searching for something. Hemakes a fire of coconut husk by rubbing two sticks together. A mystery iscreated by uncertainty over what he is trying to catch. It turns out to beThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

74 Robert}. Flahertya giant robber crab. Then follows a turtle hunt. A turtle is speared, and ahard struggle ensues to get it into the canoe. When they reach the shore,Moana drills a hole in the turtle s shell and tethers it to a tree. Fa’angasestrokes it like a pet.A meal is now prepared with great care and ceremony. Coconuts areshredded, breadfruit made ready, and strange foods wrapped in palmleaves are baked in an oven of hot stones. As with the bark-cloth making,all is shown in detail and in close-ups.Moana is now anointed with oil in preparation for his elaborate dress-ing for the siva dance. He and his betrothed perform their dance, thecamera concentrating almost wholly on the boy, following his beautifullyrhythmic movements.The villagers gather for the ceremony of the tattoo. The old tufunga(tattooer) prepares. A long sequence shows the gradual tattooing of Moana,the tap-tapping of the needlepoints into the skin, the rubbing in of thedye, the sweat being wiped off the boy’s brow, the mother fanning him witha palm leaf, and the grave, impassive face of the tattooer.Meanwhile, the ritual of making the kava goes on. When it is made,the coconut shell from which it is drunk is passed by the chiefs from handto hand in order of precedence. The people of Safune are now in fulldance with their siva. The sun is getting low. The dancing gets faster andfaster. Inside, the camera pans across the boy’s parents to their youngestson, Pe’a; he is asleep. The mother covers him tenderly with a tapa cloth.Outside, Moana and Fa’angase dance their betrothal dance as the sun sinksover the mountain.Between the making of Nanook and the completion of Moana, Fla-herty not only stumbled upon the wonderful visual qualities of panchro-matic stock but he also discovered the power of that fundamental attributeof the film medium—the close-up. In Nanook, a few close-ups occurredoccasionally but only as if its director-cameraman thought the audiencewould want to see something or somebody close up. Most of the action ofthe film was shown in long or medium shots. Close-ups, when used, ap-peared in isolation, inserted into a long shot at random as is often seen inamateur films.In Moana, Flaherty uses the close-up, sometimes very large indeed,in a succession of shots, not in isolation but in continuity, usually to show aprocess. The three outstanding and beautiful examples are the making ofthe bark-cloth, the preparation of the meal, and the ceremony of the tattoo.In the last, the contraction of the boy’s facial muscles at the pain of thebone needles and the anguished expression on his mother’s face as shefans his tortured limbs and waist—all this was complete truth shown largeon the screen, giving audiences a new experience. The way these se-This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 75quences were shot, the choice of camera setups, and the camera move-ment could not be bettered today. In fact, it is doubtful if Flaherty himselfever surpassed them in his later work.It may have been Flaherty’s desire to select and throw on the screen inlarge visual images the countless significant details of the everyday lifehe was filming that led him to use close-ups. Every admirer of Flaherty’swork—and their number is legion from Nanook to Louisiana Story?—comes to admire his superb powers of observation. His fine, searchingeyes missed nothing. We have said already that we believe his experiencesin the North helped him to this end. In the tiny Samoan village, unlike thevast expanses of the North, the world was very close to him, and he reactedby using giant close-ups of the details of its life.Moana shows, too, an increased use of camera movement, of panningand tilting to follow or anticipate action. Flaherty learned this techniquefrom no one. It was an instinctive response through the lens of the camera.No other director-cameraman used such camera movement at that period.The Russians favored in the main a static camera. The Germans mountedtheir camera on wheels to give it mobility. The Americans copied the Ger-mans but made the operation more complex. Only Flaherty used the cam-era itself on the gyro head to interpret his instinct for capturing movement.The little boy climbing the coconut tree has become a classic example ofFlaherty’s camera movement, but there are many others in Moana, culmi-nating in the final slow pan shot from the parents to the sleeping boy.Long-focus lenses were also used more daringly than before, herald-ing Flaherty’s frequent use of them in future films. His tendency to enlargethrough the long-focus lens may have been associated with Flaherty’s dis-covery of the close-up. When he found that he and his camera could notphysically approach close to what he was shooting—such as the giantwaves breaking over the reef and the canoes coming in on the surf—heused his long-focus lens for its proper photographic purpose.Flaherty, it should always be remembered, made no claim to being aprofessional cinematographer. He did not then possess, nor did he everattain, the expertise of the professional Hollywood cameraman. Both Fran-ces and David Flaherty make the point that Flaherty was like an amateur.He learned by trial and error. He used only two filters in his camera all thetime he was his own photographer as well as director.The visual quality of Moana is very lovely. The panchromatic emul-sion reveals the luminosity of the sun-drenched scene, the solidity androundness of the bronze Samoan bodies, the wide range of greens of theluscious foliage, the depth of the blue sky. Seeing the film today, one feelsno need for color.It must also be observed that, as with Nanook and the seal, Flahertyagain used the suspense element. The most notable example is when theThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

76 Robert}. Flahertylittle boy goes off to search for a robber crab. He spends endless time insmoking it out of the rocks, and what he is trying to catch is not revealeduntil the final act of capture.24The film as a whole has a wonderful organic unity. Everything thathappens in it is an integral part of the Samoan family’s daily life. No extra-neous incidents are introduced, no spectacular events fabricated. It is afilm of great calm and peace, reflecting Flaherty’s conception of the Sa-moan way of life. Even the sequences of the dances and the tattoo have noviolent or aggressive qualities. There is no conflict, only the boy’s sufferingduring the ritual of the tattoo.The one extravagance, if such it could be called, Flaherty allowed him-self was an almost unlimited supply of film stock. Film, he would rightlycontend, is the raw material of the cinematographer, just as paper or can-vas are the raw materials of the writer or painter. If nearly a quarter of amillion feet of film were used to produce the six thousand feet that finallymade up Moana, its use was justified. Nor must we forget that all the foot-age shot in the twelve months before the discovery of the spoiled negativein the summer of 1924 was wasted. The ratio between the length of thefinished film and the amount of the footage shot after the source ofthe defects was found would be much smaller; but this is a figure for whichwe have no record. Yet whatever the total footage used, the result is whatcounts. And if film stock is costly when compared with paper or canvas, orclay or stone, it is nearly always one of the smallest items in a film’s overallbudget.If the photographic quality of Moana still looks good today, it is a finetribute to its maker, to the Samoan laboratory boys who handled the pro-cessing, and not least to the manufacturers of the film stock, Eastman-Kodak. And we must also remember that the copies we screen today aretaken from dupe negatives, perhaps made many years ago; and if we see iton 16 mm, the quality will have further lessened. We recall well the deepimpression made by the photography when we saw the film for the firsttime in London in 1928. We had experienced nothing like it before.Another important quality of Moana was the degree of intimacy whichFlaherty achieved. For all its human feeling and warmth of approach, Na-nook had a detached quality as if one were observing its characters fromthe outside. In Moana, Flaherty took the viewer in among the people tobecome one with them and no longer a detached observer. Partly by hiscamera setups and partly by his consistent use of close-ups, Flaherty de-veloped this particular cinematic skill wholly out of his own experience.Moana was, after all, only his second film, and he was exploring the artand technique of the motion picture in a remote location without refer-ence to what was taking place in the film world as a whole. At that time hecould have known nothing of the new German camera techniques or theRussians’ exciting discovery of the basic principles of film editing.This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 77The intimacy with which Flaherty was able to invest his film was alsoattributable to two other factors. First, time was essential—time for him tostudy his subject at firsthand and to achieve an understanding with and winthe confidence of the people who were to be the characters of his film.Second, very few people were needed to put the film onto the screen.Only three people were involved: Flaherty was the combined director-photographer; David and Frances Flaherty helped him organize, gaveideas, and made the wheels of production turn smoothly. The processingof the negative was mainly a mechanical matter. In other words, Flahertyhimself was able to reduce the technical mechanics that stood betweenhim and his subject to a minimum. This fact is of great significance.All filmmakers know from experience that if you are trying to catchthrough your camera the actions and thoughts of real people—not profes-sionally trained actors—the more you can reduce the technical side of thetask, the less likely are your subjects to be inhibited, self-conscious, andcamera-shy. Flaherty was able to achieve a degree of intimacy with hissubjects which for many reasons, including the inflexible personnel re-quirements of British and American trade unions and the need for sound-recording equipment, has been rarely equaled since. The fake palm trees that decorated the facade of the Rialto Theatre inNew York were capped with snow when Moana was premiered on Febru-ary 7, 1926. But the weather was not to blind the critics and other influen-tial persons who came to see what Paramount billed as “The Love-Life of aSouth Sea Siren.”Of all the many lavish reviews, some from well-known critics, themost important in historical perspective was one that appeared the nextmorning, under the pseudonym of “The Moviegoer.” Grierson tells how hecame to write this famous piece:I first met Robert Flaherty around 1925. He had just come backfrom British Samoa with Moana, and he was having the difficulties hewas always to have in the last stage of production. In this case it wasParamount that did not see it his way. There was talk of a grass-skirteddancing troupe at the Rialto on Broadway and a marquee offering of”The Love Life of a South Sea Siren.”I was doing an extra column at the time for the New York Sun, inwhich I was supposed to be a bit more highbrow than Cohen, theranking film-editor, and the sort of odd body who looked after lostcauses, including, as I remember, most of the people who happenedto be good. I took Flaherty’s case like a sort of critical attorney25III:This content downloaded from 170.140.14ff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

78 Robert J. FlahertyThe review read as follows:The golden beauty of primitive beings, of a South Seas island thatis an earthly paradise, is caught and imprisoned in Robert J. Flaherty’sMoana, which is being shown at the Rialto this week. The film is un-questionably a great one, a poetic record of Polynesian tribal life, itsease and beauty and its salvation through a painful rite. Moana de-serves to rank with those few works of the screen that have the right tolast, to live. It could only have been produced by a man with an artisticconscience and an intense poetic feeling which, in this case, finds anoutlet through nature worship.Of course Moana, being a visual account of events in the dailylife of a Polynesian youth, has documentary value. But that, I believe,is secondary to its value as a soft breath from a sunlit island, washedby a marvellous sea, as warm as the balmy air. Moana is first of allbeautiful as nature is beautiful. It is beautiful for the reason that themovements of the youth Moana and the other Polynesians are beauti-ful, and for the reason that trees and spraying surf and soft billowyclouds and distant horizons are beautiful.And therefore I think Moana achieves greatness primarilythrough its poetic feeling for natural elements. It should be placed onthe idyllic shelf that includes all those poems which sing of the loveli-ness of sea and land and air—and of man when he is a part of beauti-ful surroundings, a figment of nature, an innocent primitive ratherthan a so-called intelligent being cooped up in the mire of so-calledintelligent civilization. . . .Surely the writer was not the only member of the crowd thatjammed the Rialto to the bursting point yesterday afternoon, who, asMoana shed its mellow, soft overtones, grew impatient with the grimeof modern civilization and longed for a South Sea island on the leafyshores of which to fritter away life in what “civilized” people wouldcall childish pursuits.Moana, which was photographed over a period of some twentymonths, reveals a far greater mastery of cinema techniques than Mr.Flaherty’s previous photoplay, Nanook of the North. In the first place,it follows a better natural outline—that of Moana’s daily pursuits,which culminate in the tattooing episode, and in the second, its cam-era angles, its composition, the design of almost every scene, are su-perb. The new panchromatic film used gives tonal values, lights andshading that have not been equalled.After analyzing the structure of the film, Grierson discusses the se-quence of the tattooing:This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 79Possibly I should become pedantic about this symbolizing of theattainment of manhood. Perhaps I should draw diagrams in an effortto prove that it is simply another tribal manifestation of the coming ofage? It is not necessary, for the episode is in itself a dramatic truthfulthing. And if we regard the tattooing as a cruel procedure to which thePolynesians subject their young men—before they may take theirplace beside manhood—then let us reflect that perhaps it summons abravery which is healthful to the race.The film, time and time again, induces a philosophic attitude onthe part of the spectator. It is real, that is why. The people, these easy,natural, childlike primitives, are enjoying themselves or suffering asthe case may be before the camera. Moana, whom we begin to likeduring the first reel, is really tortured and it affects us as no actingcould. Moanas life is dramatic in its primitive simplicity, its innocentpleasure and its equally innocent pain.Lacking in the film was the pictorial transcriptions of the sex-life ofthese people. It is rarely referred to. Its absence mars its completeness.The most beautiful scenes that Mr. Flaherty conjures up are (1)Moana’s little brother in the act of climbing a tall, bending tree flungacross the clear sky; (2) the vista showing the natives returning afterthe doer [sic] hunt; (3) Moana dancing the siva (4) all the scenesin the surf and underwater; (5) the tribal dance.I should not, perhaps, say that any group of scenes is any morebeautiful than any other; for all are beautiful—and true.Moana is lovely beyond compare. (Grierson 1926)In this review, Grierson used for the first time the word “documen-tary,” derived from the French critics who thought up the word “documen-taire” to describe serious travel and expedition films as distinct fromboring travelogues. The word was to stick, to be widely defined, to bewidely misapplied by critics and others who never troubled to search forits origins; but nevertheless to become a descriptive term not only in thecinema but in theater, fiction, radio, journalism, and television.Of other contemporary reviews, the following epitomizes the out-pourings of praise bestowed on Flaherty and his film:Mr. Robert E. Sherwood wrote, “It has within it the soul of an admirablerace.” Said Mr. Austin Strong, Robert Louis Stevenson’s son-in-law: “Youhave no protagonist nor have you betrayed us with a falsified story—instead, with the unerring instinct of the artist, you have weaved a pat-tern from Nature herself, from sky, clouds, water, trees, hills and theeveryday simple acts of men, women and children. Theocritus didno more. He took the sky and clouds, trees, shepherds and maidens,79This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

80 Robert]. Flahertyand sang of goats and swineherds, and the hills of his beloved Sicily.Heaven knows I don’t want to be fulsome, but as I told them last night,and they afterwards agreed with me, Moana reaches the dignity ofan epic poem, and will always be a classic in the hearts of those whosee it.”And Matthew Josephson added: “Flaherty has done more thangive us only a beautiful spectacle. With his broad vision he has sud-denly made us think seriously, in between the Florida boom and ourhunting for bread and butter in Wall Street, about the art of life. Here,he says to us, are people who are successful in the art of life. Arewe that, with our motor-cars, factories, skyscrapers, radio-receivers?”(Griffith 1953:71-72)For all this rapturous reception, however, Moana was not chosen, aswas Nanook, as one of the ten best films of the year. The Film Daily Year-book of 1926 records the votes of 218 critics. The German film Variety(known in England and Europe as Vaudeville) headed the list with 169votes; the Hollywood picture La Boheme was tenth with 49 votes. In be-tween were Ben Hur, The Big Parade, The Black Pirate, Stella Dallas, TheVolga Boatmen, What Price Glory? and The Sea Beast. Moana was in-cluded among the honorable mentions with 24 votes. On the other hand,like Nanook, Flaherty’s new film was to receive high critical acclaim in Eu-rope, this time especially in France and Sweden.Finally, Flaherty received a letter from C. H. Hall, an Australian en-gineer based in Apia, who was keenly interested in photography. After ad-vising the Flahertys about some of their problems, he had accepted aninvitation to join them and was with them for most of the filming. When agroup of chiefs came from Savaii to Apia to see the film, Hall was present:The film possessed no new beauty [to them]. They watched si-lently the feats of climbing, swimming, pig-hunting, and canoe adven-tures as commonplace events in the old Samoan way of life. But theymissed nothing of the scarcely perceptible gesture and detail of cere-mony so full of significance to them.The picture faded from the sheet, and they turned sadly away,knowing full well that never again would these things be. To my en-quiries, the picture was lelei lava (good exceedingly). Their onlyother answer to my many questions was that it wasfa’a Samoa; settingit aside at once as something sa (sacred) and beyond the comprehen-sion of the alien papalangi. (Griffith 1953:72-73)It is no real surprise that Moana did not do as well at the box office asits predecessor. Terry Ramsaye notes that it “grossed about $150,000 inThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 81a period when Sidney Kent was distributing Gloria Swanson pictures for amillion apiece” (1951). Because it will never be known what the film costto make, its profit or loss cannot be calculated. Even if it made a minuteprofit, however, which is unlikely, we should remember that the motionpicture industry is not, and never has been, interested in modest or evenwhat any other industry would regard as reasonable profits. It wants 100percent profit or more.Paramount s head distribution executive told Flaherty later that if thestudio had had a series of such good but modest-budget films as Moana, itmight have developed a specialized form of distribution such as Flahertyhad proved could be made to work. As it was, Moana was left to its ownisolated fate. Its cost was but a drop in the ocean of the company’s annualexpenditure on production. It could easily have been written off among ahalf-dozen program pictures.A further point regarding Moana’s commercial value to Paramountcame to light when in 1931 or 1932 David Flaherty went to a meeting of theAcademy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the Hollywood RooseveltHotel. The occasion was to welcome Sidney R. Kent, formerly Paramount’sdistribution wizard, who had recently been made head of 20th-centuryFox. Speaking of distribution problems, Kent said, “Now there are somepictures that are off the beaten track, pictures that don’t jump out of thecan, thread themselves into the projector and say, ‘Here I am, go out andsell me.’ These pictures require more effort and special handling. But ifit weren’t for pictures like these—pictures like Moana and Grass andChang—where would our foreign distribution be today?”26A postscript to this account ofMoana’s distribution is worth telling inview of the revolution in distribution methods that resulted from competi-tion from television. Flaherty proposed to the Rockefeller Foundation inNew York a plan for a permanent organization to do for any worthwhile”offbeat” film from any part of the world what had been done for Moanain the six tough towns—an exploitation aimed at the “latent” audience.The foundation’s officers were impressed and arranged a meeting of theirboard in a club on Wall Street to discuss the project. Among those whowere invited was one of the chief officers of the Hays Organization, thetrade body that represented a domestic censorship for the industry. With-out attacking the proposal, this gentleman maintained that any such inter-esting project should come within the province of the Hays Organizationand not be the business of a foundation. Those words doomed Flaherty’sproposal for specialized distribution.”Some years ago,” wrote Flaherty in 1950, “fearing that the negative ofMoana might somehow get lost, I wrote to Paramount and asked them if itwould not be possible to turn it over to one of the film museums so thatit might be preserved. The letter was never answered. And only recently,while getting the prints of Louisiana Story made at the company’s labora-This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

82 Robert}. Flahertytories on Long Island, I learned that the negative of Moana no longerexisted; to make room, no doubt, for other newer films, it had been de-stroyed”27 (Flaherty 1950:25).premiere in February 1926, Flaherty stayed either in New York or at hishome in New Canaan, Connecticut. His reputation among the motion pic-ture trade in Hollywood may not have rated high, but his status as an art-ist of the cinema was recognized and respected by the intelligentsia ofNew York. In the course of the year he made two short films for privatesponsors.The Pottery-Maker was produced for the Metropolitan Museum of Artin New York and sponsored by the actress Maude Adams, who was a greatadmirer of Flaherty’s. It was a humble experiment using the new Mazda in-candescent lamps, the first film to use them exclusively instead of mercury-vapor lamps, and was shot in the basement of the museum in collaborationwith the arts and crafts department.It opens with a title about the craft of the potter and then discloses apotter working in his shop. A little girl looks in through the window andthen enters the workshop with her mother, who was played by the widowof General George Custer. They are dressed in late nineteenth-century cos-tumes. The potter greets them and, to their delight, proceeds to demon-strate his craft. The little girl hops around the room, and while the potter sattention is distracted, she damages the pot he is molding. He cheerfullystarts over again. The lady finally buys a pot, and the potter makes a presentof another sample of his work to the little girl. They leave, and the pottergoes on with his craft, firing the pot he has just made.28The film runs to a full reel and conveys information only through afew subtitles. The action, such as there is in a small room, is broken downinto numerous camera setups, with a good deal of close-up work on thelittle girl’s feet and on the potter. In showing the latter at work, there is justa hint of camera movement following his hands, an anticipation of the fa-mous camera movements that were to distinguish the pottery-making se-quence in Industrial Britain five years later. But the film is not importantto Flaherty’s development as a filmmaker. Unless one knew, one wouldhardly recognize that it had been made by him.Flaherty’s collaboration with Maude Adams inspired that energeticlady to try to launch a film based on Kipling’s Kim in India, to be made incolor, but the project never got beyond wishful thinking.The second film he made in 1926 was Twenty-Four Dollar Island, fi-nanced, we are told, by a “wealthy socialite,” but no one seems to know forwhat purpose.29 It consisted of a series of shots, some chosen with a goodDuring the year 1925, after the completion of Moana but before itsIV:This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 83sense of design, others pedestrian, of rooftop vistas of Manhattan Islandand its harbor. A great many shots were taken with a long-focus lens fromthe tops of skyscrapers, producing a curious, flat, foreshortened effect.”The film,” Flaherty is quoted as having said, “had a viewpoint of New Yorkthat people in the streets never have.” He overlooked the fact that a largeproportion of New Yorkers work in high buildings whose windows pro-vide views similar to those he took with his camera. He added, “It gave theeffect of deep, narrow canyons thronged with the minute creatures whohad created this amazing city” (Weinberg 1946).Herman Weinberg thought the film had some “wonderful shots of in-coming liners via telephoto-lenses, poetic vistas of ships, smoke lines ofrope, dock activities, etc. It also had much footage showing New York in’abstract’ compositions (in which the city looked like the one in Fritz Lang’sMetropolis, a cold, soulless mound of concrete, steel and glass). Therewere few people shown, except occasional workers on excavations and thelike.”30Lewis Jacobs thought highly of the film, which he called unique:Flaherty conceived the film as a “camera poem, a sort of architec-tural lyric where people will be used only incidentally as part of thebackground.” Flaherty’s camera . . . sought the Metropolitan spirit insilhouettes of buildings against the sky, deep narrow skyscraper can-yons, sweeping spans of bridges, the flurry of pressing crowds, thereeling of subway lights. Flaherty also emphasized the semi-abstractpictorial values of the city: foreshortened viewpoints, patterns of massand line, the contrast of sunlight and shadow The result, as the direc-tor himself said, “was not a film of human-beings, but of the skyscrap-ers which they had erected, completely dwarfing humanity itself.”. . . Fascinated by the longer-focus lens, he made shots from thetop of nearly every skyscraper in Manhattan. “I shot New York build-ings from the East River bridges, from the ferries and from the Jerseyshore looking up to the peaks of Manhattan. The effects obtained withmy long-focus lenses amazed me. I remember shooting from the roofof the Telephone Building across the Jersey shore with an 8 in. lensand, even at that distance, obtaining stereoscopic effects that seemedmagical. It was like drawing a veil from the beyond, revealing lifescarcely visible to the naked eye.” (Jacobs 1949:116).The unknown sponsor of the film, however, did not have the sameresponse as the appreciative Jacobs and Weinberg. In some devious way,the film came to be first shown as a backdrop for a stage ballet, The Side-walks of New York, presented at the Roxy Theatre, but was drastically short-ened to one reel for the purpose.31 The original two-reel version has notbeen preserved, but a copy of a one-reel version is in the Museum of Mod-83This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

84 Robert]. Flahertyern Art Film Library, New York. When screening it for reassessment in Au-gust 1957, we could not wholly subscribe to the above fulsome praise.Much of it seemed ordinary even for the time at which it had been shotand certainly most repetitive, but in fairness it must be recorded that Wein-berg remarks that the best footage is missing from the one-reel version.We do not favor the notion, however, that a potential minor master-piece was the victim of vandalism, as implied by Jacobs and Weinberg.As John Grierson remarks—and he worked in a modest capacity withFlaherty on the film, “learning how to get behind a camera”32—Flahertynever intended it to be a complete film in itself; it was a notebook. He wasloaned two cameras to shoot it, and the stock was supplied free, possiblyby Eastman-Kodak.With Manhatta (1921), made by Charles Seeler, the painter, and PaulStrand, the photographer, which was also a visual pattern expressive ofNew York City, Twenty-Four Dollar Island can certainly claim to be amongthe earliest of the city genre of films, later to be developed by Cavalcanti inRien que les heures (1926-27) and Walter Ruttmann in Berlin: The Sym-phony of a City (1927) and followed by many others. It was without doubtan ambitious display of the peculiar properties of long-focus lenses, if notparticularly imaginative in its conception.When he was shooting this picture, Flaherty relaxed in the eveningsat the Coffee House Club or some other favorite haunt. He often invitedfriends, or strangers met by chance, to come along the next morning towatch him at work on such-and-such a location. The following day, he ei-ther went to an entirely different location or he had forgotten the invitationand regarded the visitors with complete surprise.Toward the end of 1926, Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was given aspectacular premiere on Sunday, December 5, at the Biltmore Theatre withseats selling for $5 (Seton 1952:87). Flaherty attended the opening withErnestine Evans and Maude Adams and, according to Miss Evans, he wentto see it again several times. He said, “Potemkin is one of the most revolu-tionary steps forward ever made in the cinema” (Weinberg 1946).In the summer of 1927, Flaherty was surprised to be again approachedby Hollywood. His friend Howard Dietz, then in charge of publicity atMetro-Goldwyn-Mayer, first sounded him out and then with his agreementrecommended him to Irving G. Thalberg, Hollywood’s “boy genius,” whowas in charge of production for MGM at its Culver City studios in Holly-wood.33 Thalberg had bought the screen rights of Frederick O’Brien’sWhite Shadows in the South Seas, a book that had made a deep impressionon Flaherty.By long-distance telephone, Thalberg asked Flaherty to co-direct thefilm with W. S. Van Dyke II, one of MGM’s staff directors, who had a reputa-tion as a successful maker of Westerns. Mrs. Flaherty apparently viewed theoffer with suspicion, but Flaherty, with the almost childlike and unboundedThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 85enthusiasm for new propositions that characterized his entire life, ac-cepted the invitation. If all worked out well, it was agreed that Frances andthe children should join him in Tahiti, where the film was to be made.Arriving in Hollywood, he soon found that, as often happens in themovie world, Thalberg had bought O’Brien’s book only for its intriguingtitle. The book had no real story; it was a series of episodic but fascinatingtravel incidents by a sensitive writer aware of the exploitation of the Poly-nesians. Laurence Stallings was called in to collaborate with Flaherty intrying to work out a story line from the book. They tried instead to sellThalberg the idea of making Typee, Melville’s great story of the South Seas,but the young studio boss stuck to his choice of White Shadows. Stallingsapparently then quit the project and was replaced by Ray Doyle, an MGMstaff writer, whose name is bracketed with Jack Cunninghams as co-authorof the “original story” on the screen credits of the finished film.While in Hollywood, Flaherty met Albert Lewin, who subsequentlyproduced such films as The Good Earth, Mutiny on the Bounty, and TheMoon and Sixpence, but who was at that time a scriptwriter and assistant toThalberg. He recollects that Flaherty, as well as writing the screenplay, wasbusy casting. Among those tested for the part was Francesca Bragiotti, adancer, who later married John Lodge, the United States ambassador toSpain. Bob often went to Lewin s home. “We had good times,” says Lewin,”good food, drinks, singing, dancing and talk—lots of very eloquent andexciting talk.”34Headed by Van Dyke, a full-scale technical unit with assistants and as-sistants to the assistants, Clyde de Vinna as cameraman, and Raquel Torresand Monte Blue as the two stars set sail for Papeete. It was an armada com-pared with the little unit that had gone to Savaii. From the start, Flahertymust have found himself ill at ease with a group of technicians who wereskilled only in Hollywood’s synthetic methods of filmmaking. The inevita-ble happened, as described by Richard Griffith:It was the behaviour of the men from Hollywood, when they got toTahiti, that revealed to Flaherty that he would never succeed in mak-ing a film out of his friend s book. Civilization was creeping into Ta-hiti, but it was still a terrestrial paradise. The tropic moon shone downon the beach, the soft waters lapped it, the Tahitians sang Polynesiansongs in the coconut groves beyond, and, down on their knees in thesand beside a tiny radio, the cameramen were listening to Abe Lymanand his orchestra from the Coconut Grove in Hollywood. “Why not goback to California and make the picture in the Coconut Grove there?”asked Flaherty.35 (Griffith 1953:76)It was not long before Flaherty told Van Dyke that he had seen enoughto know they could not work together, that their viewpoints were diametri-This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

86 Robert}. Flahertycally opposed, and that he intended to return to Hollywood. He did so andtore up his remunerative contract with MGM.About this time, early 1928, an American contributor to Close-Up re-ports having met him in Hollywood:Flaherty is a humorous, sandy-haired, somewhat portly Irishman. Hehas the air of a harassed papa dumped unceremoniously down in anest of madmen. By the time this is published, he may be in the SouthSeas, or in the Canadian Rockies, or in the insane asylum; but at themoment he is tearing his hair out by the roots in the M-G-M lot atCulver City, a dreadful suburb of Los Angeles. Moana was his last in-dependent [sic] venture. In order to continue making pictures hewas forced to accept a contract that would assure him money enoughto go on with his experimental ideas. But he soon discovered thatmovie producers experiment with money, not with ideas. (Needham1928:48-49)Flaherty is also remembered in Hollywood about this time by Mar-gery Lockett, who recalls that he was often in the company of a group ofstudents from the Harvard Film Foundation. They formed a devoted entou-rage and brought encouragement to Flaherty after the debacle of WhiteShadows. “He could be found,” says Miss Lockett, “out on the cliffs takinglong-focus shots of the ocean,” but she does not remember why he wasshooting except for “experiment.”36 He usually ate, it seems, at the un-fashionable Japanese seafood restaurants and was a vagrant in Hollywood.When Flaherty returned to his home, he accepted an advance royaltypayment from his friend Maxwell Perkins, then with the publishing houseof Scribner’s, to write his autobiography. Flaherty always found writingabout his experiences difficult, and although he had already published MyEskimo Friends and was later to write other books, it seems fairly safe tosay that he did not write one word of the autobiography. It is said that oneday Perkins and Flaherty collided in a club (presumably the Coffee House)and the latter said, “Why don’t you put me in jail, Max?” to which Perkinsastutely replied, “My dear fellow, the longer you wait, the more story I’llhave”37 (Taylor 1949).After the debacle of his disagreement with MGM, Flaherty had everyreason to believe that any working partnership between himself and Holly-wood was inconceivable. Nevertheless, the Hollywood mind is perverselyunpredictable. In the early summer of 1928, the Fox Corporation engagedhim to make a film about the Pueblo Indians in New Mexico. He wentthere with his wife, David, and Leon Shamroy as cameraman. Reports onwhat exactly happened vary. A gossip note at the time said, “Robert J.Flaherty is preparing another screen-opus, this time with the Hopi IndiansThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 87in New Mexico . . . with headquarters established at Santa Fe, he is at pres-ent living among the people of this aboriginal pueblo tribe, securingscenes of their picturesque daily life and their ancient ceremonies”(Anonymous 1928:64).According to Robert Lewis Taylor, the filming had begun before theFlahertys arrived.He hurried out to join the unit. When he got off the train, he foundthat the work was clipping along nicely. The studio beauticians weregreasing up a pair of fairly well-known Hollywood stars, who wouldprovide the love-interest that, Flaherty learned, was to be the back-bone of the Acoma study, and for the mob scenes the casting peoplewere hiring all the Indians in sight, including large numbers of Na-vajos, Apaches and Utes. He stuck around for a week or so, made theacquaintance of two authentic but stunned Acomas, and then returnedto the East, richer by no wampum. (Taylor 1949)Like other parts of Taylor’s readable “Profile,” this fanciful accountdoes not tally either with Weinberg s Film Index or with David Flaherty’srecollections. Weinberg states—and we should remember that Flahertycollaborated in compiling his work—that the unit worked for a year on thepicture and that much footage was shot but Flaherty abandoned the projectwhen Fox wanted to inject a love story that was “incompatible with the filmas planned—(RJ.F.)” (Weinberg 1946).David Flaherty relates that he was taken off the picture and brought toHollywood toward the end of 1928 to work as a technical adviser “on a filmthat Fox was going to make in Tahiti of a South Seas story my brother and Ihad written.” Berthold Viertel, the German director, was already engagedon the script. David made a preliminary visit to Tahiti, and when he re-turned “a few months later and was about to rejoin the unit in New Mexico,”he learned from F. W. Murnau, the distinguished German director alsoworking for Fox, that the picture had been called off (D. Flaherty 1952).Both these accounts suggest, therefore, that Flaherty spent at leastseven or eight months on the Acoma Indian film. Richard Griffith simplyremarks that “production was stopped when first rushes revealed that thefilm was beginning to center around a small Indian boy instead of the ‘ro-mantic leads’ (white) whom Fox had sent along to adorn the tale” (Griffith1953:76). At some point during the production, David Flaherty recalls,Flaherty went down into Mexico proper to find a “star” for the film. It wasthere that he heard for the first time the story, said to be true, of the bullbeing “pardoned” in the bullring. When he returned to Santa Fe, he wrotethe story, calling it “Bonito, the Bull.”38The Acoma Indian film was never completed, and no record existsThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

88 Robert}. Flahertyas to what happened to the footage. It was almost certainly destroyed inone of those periodic turnings-out of film storage vaults which all studiosmake from time to time. This third flirtation with Hollywood was to beFlaherty’s last.exodus from Germany to Hollywood. The world impact of the golden pe-riod of German cinema (1920-26) caused the Hollywood moguls to senda shower of tempting offers across the Atlantic, and a procession of direc-tors, writers, cameramen, art directors and actors streamed into the bigAmerican studios.One of the most talented of these was Friederich Wilhelm Murnau, atall, thin Westphalian with keen eyes, a soft voice, and hair variously de-scribed as reddish or golden. A shy, sensitive, and lonely man, he was anabsolute dictator and a perfectionist in his film work. At the time of hisarrival in Hollywood, in July 1926, he was thirty-seven, five years youngerthan Flaherty. His film The Last Laugh, scripted by Carl Mayer and starringEmil Jannings, was already regarded as one of the great screen classics ofall time and had made a deep impression in the United States, as had histwo subsequent films, Tartuffe and Faust.William Fox considered himself more than fortunate in having se-cured Murnau to direct a film in Hollywood. On Sunrise, from a script byCarl Mayer (who did not go to Hollywood), he spared no money. Despitevast sets and highly elaborate camera mechanics, Sunrise was only partiallysuccessful, an uneven mixture of Murnau s sincerity and Fox’s pretentious-ness. But Murnau s prestige with Fox remained high. His second Holly-wood picture, The Four Devils, despite a dialogue sequence added at thelast moment, was far less successful. Murnau then began his third and lastfilm for the studio, Our Daily Bread, much of which was shot on a farmat Pendleton, Oregon. The aim was to make an epic film of life in the Da-kota grainfields revolving aroung the farming customs and traditions, withwheat as the never-changing symbol. When it was nearly finished, Fox gotcold feet. Talking sequences were added and comic gag incidents inserted,but to no avail. The film was eventually released as City Girl in an abbre-viated version, but it never played New York or other big cities.David Flaherty had met Murnau in 1928 with Berthold Viertel. On thisoccasion Murnau lavished praise on Robert Flaherty, saying, “Your brothermakes the best films.” He also indicated that he was getting impatient withHollywood methods.Their next meeting was so important that it is best told in DavidFlaherty’s words:It is a matter of film history that in the late 1920s there took place a bigV:This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 89A few months later, I was back in Hollywood from Tahiti. I hadhardly checked in at a hotel near the Fox lot when there came a phonecall from Murnau. “You must come along to dinner this evening,”he said.As it happened, I had just arranged to dine with one of my fewfriends in Hollywood, a Danish actor named Otto Matiesen. I said Iwas awfully sorry . . . any other evening. . . .”But you must come!” Murnau protested. I could see he was usedto having his own way.”But I really can’t,” I said.”All right, then. Tomorrow.” He was obviously annoyed.Murnau lived alone with his servants in a castle perched onthe highest hill in Hollywood. I felt flattered to be the only guest at thelong table which gave an eagle’s eye view of the lights of Hollywoodand Los Angeles far below. His face glowed as he told me that he hadjust purchased a yacht, a Gloucester fisherman. She was a beauty—there were pictures of her—The Pasqualito. But Murnau was chang-ing the name to the Bali, for to that far paradise he would sail her.Hollywood was taking too much out of him, all this pressurefrom the studio, all this artificiality. He would break out of this prison.On the way he’d stop at Tahiti.”You’ll never believe an island could be so beautiful, Mr. Mur-nau,” I said, “I’ll give you some letters.”He’d stop at Samoa, too: I could give him letters to people I knewthere, too. Lord, how I envied him!Then almost casually, he said, “Like to come along?”When I recovered my speech, I stammered that I’d give my rightarm to go along, only I had to get back to New Mexico and the PuebloIndian film. Then he broke the news that the studio was about to calloff the film. The camp near Tucson had been burned out, and besidesthat, Bob and the studio were not seeing eye to eye on the story—thestudio wanted to work in a love-story and all that.Now Murnau unfolded his plan. Bob was through in Hollywood.He himself was fed up with it. He had bought this yacht. He and Bobwould join forces, go off to Tahiti, Samoa, Bali, and make their pic-tures far from the heavy hand of Hollywood.39 We’d put in a call toTucson. We’d drive the 500 miles there in Murnau s roadster and seeBob the next day.At Tucson, Bob told Murnau the story of a pearl-diver which hadcome out of his unhappy White Shadows experiences in Tahiti. Mur-nau was fascinated.”This will be the first Murnau-Flaherty film,” he said.The news that Flaherty and Murnau were quitting Hollywood toThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

90 Robert}. Flahertymake their own films in faraway places created quite a stir in the filmcapital. Murnau’s technical excellence and Flaherty’s nose for thedrama in primitive peoples—these were not long in attracting capitalto the enterprise. Murnau, whom Flaherty conceded was a better busi-ness man than he, signed the contract with Colorart, a young companywhich, like William Fox a few short years before, was hungry for pres-tige. (D. Flaherty 1952)Thus Flaherty and Murnau formed a partnership to make, they hoped,a series of films under the banner of Murnau-Flaherty Productions, Inc.,independent of the major studio companies. Flaherty’s sole experiencewith studio work had been the little Pottery-Maker film in the basement ofthe Metropolitan Museum! Murnau’s first recognition that the real scenemight be more convincing than studio fabrication had occurred only theprevious year in the wheatfields of Oregon after more than ten years ofconcentrated work in the controlled conditions of the efficiently equippedstudios of Neubabelsberg and Hollywood! It was, to say the least, a curiouscollaboration of talents and outlooks. But the two men had one pricelessvirtue in common—integrity.4Frances Flaherty had different ideas about the new setup, which hadno connection with filmmaking. First, the three Flaherty daughters weregrowing up fast and Mrs. Flaherty believed that not only was American edu-cation very expensive but it might also fall short of European standards.Second, she remembers that she had the premonition that a gigantic eco-nomic collapse in the United States was not far ahead.41 She was correct.The big crash on Wall Street came very shortly after she left with her threedaughters for Germany.The Bali, with Murnau and the film unit, including David, sailed fromSan Pedro late in April 1929. Flaherty followed the next month by mailsteamer, but, since Murnau stopped at the Marquesas and the Paumotos,Flaherty reached Papeete well ahead of the Bali. The news Murnau gavethem was not good. He was living on credit. Colorart had not sent the pay-ments called for in the contract. There followed weeks of cabling back andforth, and at last they all had to accept the unhappy truth: Colorart was nota sound concern. They were stranded.Murnau then did the only thing possible: he decided to finance theundertaking himself. Flaherty had no money. But the picture would haveto be made as economically as possible. As a start, Murnau paid off thecrew of his yacht and sent them back to California, replacing them withTahitians. “Had Murnau been by nature prodigal,” adds David Flahertydryly, “and Bob frugal, the arrangement might have worked out well. Butsince Murnau was by nature frugal, and Bob notoriously the opposite, itbrought little comfort to either. Neither one had asked for this situation;This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 91there it was.” But it was Murnau who now held the purse strings (D.Flaherty 1952).Flaherty had a very clear idea of what he wanted the film to be about.” ‘We’ll make the kind of picture they wouldn’t let me make of White Shad-ows! It was not to be ‘another Moana! He did not want to record again thefading forms offa’a Samoa, but the reasons why they were fading. It was atheme that had fascinated him for a long time—the impact of ‘civilization’on primitive cultures” (Griffith 1953:77-78). In his many years in theNorth and again in Samoa and Tahiti, Flaherty had seen how contact be-tween the exploring, trade-seeking white man and the indigenous nativecould bring out the worst in both their natures. Hence we can surmise thatwith sudden, new-found freedom from Hollywood control and an inspir-ing partnership with the sensitive, intelligent Murnau, Flaherty must havebeen passionately anxious to make Tabu, as the film was to be called, intoan indictment of the impact of white civilization on the Polynesians.In White Shadows in the South Seas, O’Brien had written of theMarquesans:They were essentially a happy people, full of dramatic feeling, emo-tional, and with a keen sense of the ridiculous. The rule of the tradercrushed all these native feelings. To this restraint was added the bur-den of the effort to live. With the entire Marquesan economic andsocial system disrupted, food was not so easily procurable, and theywere driven to work by commands, taxes, fines and the novel and kill-ing incentives of rum and opium. The whites taught the men to selltheir lives, and the women to sell their charms. Happiness and healthwere destroyed because the white man came here only to gratify hiscupidity. (O’Brien 1919)This was the situation that Flaherty wanted to portray in the new film, andplenty of evidence was available in Tahiti.In his now customary way, Flaherty set up a laboratory in a back-streetshed in Papeete and trained a seventeen-year-old half-caste boy to carryout the film processing. Another half-caste, Bill Bambridge, a member ofan influential commercial family, was engaged as a major-domo, inter-preter, and (with David Flaherty) assistant director. Bill had performed in asimilar capacity for the MGM units that made White Shadows in the SouthSeas and The Pagan, and he had proved to be an indispensable and invalu-able member of the small unit. He also played a small part in Tabu as aculpable native policeman.Though he had brought with him his Akeley camera, Flaherty was notthis time to undertake the sole burden of the photography. During thefrantic period of cabling back and forth with Colorart in Hollywood, thatThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

92 Robert}. Flahertyshaky company had sent out a Hollywood crew consisting of a professionalcameraman, a laboratory man, and a unit manager. This trio, however, ar-rived in Papeete without any funds and found themselves stranded like theothers. Murnau promptly sent them back to Hollywood on the next mailsteamer.When Murnau finally decided to break with Colorart and to financethe picture himself, the camerawork again devolved on Flaherty. But theAkeley camera was giving trouble. Around Christmas, when they were onlocation at Bora-Bora, it finally broke down altogether. David Flaherty re-members Murnau saying with wistful sadness, “If only Floyd Crosby werehere with his Debrie camera!” (Murnau had met Crosby on the trip toTucson, where the latter was working as second cameraman on the ill-fated Acoma Indian film.) The next day, by a remarkable coincidence, aschooner from Papeete brought a cabled message to Murnau and Flaherty:”Just finished filming in Caribbean STOP May I join you in Tahiti—FloydCrosby.” Crosby arrived with his Debrie camera on the next mail steamer.42One further member of the crew who was recruited was Bob Reese, ayoung American who was at loose ends on the islands and became a gen-eral assistant.The divergence of views between the two creative partners must haveoccurred at an early stage. Flaherty, as in his previous films, sought a storythat arose out of the Tahitians and their environment, the story of their ex-ploitation, while Murnau was influenced by a career in which most of hisfilms had depended on versions of stories with well-defined plots adaptedfrom novels or plays. He wanted, therefore, a story with a well-defined plotrather than the Flaherty conception of creating a film around a slender butcentral theme. Murnau found his plot in a legend derived from the age-oldPolynesian custom of the tabu, in which a maiden is consecrated to thegods and as a result is forbidden to all men. Tragedy must overwhelmany who try to violate the tabu, even if moved by love. The young pearlfisher who falls in love with the maiden is destined to be consumed by thesea. The gods win.However much Flaherty revolted against this fictionalized story, hedid not break openly with Murnau. He was far too gentle-natured to createtrouble for a fellow creative artist. This situation was very different and farmore difficult for him than the one with Van Dyke. Murnau was a giftedfilmmaker whose work Flaherty admired; a man of sincerity and artistictalent. The problem was that their approaches to the subject of the film-to-be were utterly divergent. And Murnau, Flaherty must have known, wascarrying the full burden of cost. What course could Flaherty take but tact-fully and courteously to withdraw more and more into the background asthe film progressed?David Flaherty makes the historically important point that it was on thebasis of Flaherty’s original pearl-diver story told by him to Murnau at TucsonThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

Moana and the Pacific 93that Colorart backed the venture. When Murnau and Flaherty learned in Ta-hiti that Colorart had withdrawn, Murnau decided to change the story “sothat Colorart could have no grounds for suing Murnau-Flaherty Produc-tions, Inc., for the money they had actually been advanced.”43Visitors to Tahiti at the time were Jack Hastings (later the earl of Hunt-ingdon) and his wife, and their recollections are of interest:Both my wife and I fell under Flaherty’s spell, were charmed andloved to listen by the hour to his stories. He related them so vividlythat I can still clearly see Flaherty driving his team of huskies with theinevitable violin tied to the top of the load…. I was puzzled how twopeople with such divergent points of view as Murnau and Flaherty haddecided to make a picture in partnership.. . . Murnau thought that hehad the certainty of a release for the film but only if it turned out to bethe sort of picture which he considered would be acceptable and sureof a box-office success. Flaherty was only interested in making whathe believed would be a work of art with integrity. He refused to com-promise or have anything to do with a “dramatic” story; for him thedrama was in the life of the islanders.44To play the part of Reri, the virginal maiden, they had found AnnaChevalier in a local bar. She was seventeen and very beautiful, with “Gre-cian features,” according to Flaherty. She had, it would seem, none of theshyness and modesty of the Savaii girls whom Flaherty used or tried to usein Moana. On the contrary, once started on movie work, it was hard tocurb her enthusiasm.As production went ahead during 1930, Flaherty was less and lessinvolved. In September he decided to sell Murnau his share in their com-pany for a few thousand dollars, which he later received in irregular in-stallments. Lord Huntingdon writes:About this time, money was short and as I had call on some capitalfrom a small film company of which I was a director, I decided to joinMurnau and got the consent of the other directors to invest the cashin this project.45 Murnau naturally kept complete control over the di-rection but I found him amenable to accepting another point ofview though usually only after considerable argument. As far as I wasaware, Flaherty never resented my joining with Murnau nor the ulti-mate success of the picture but it was a subject we simply did not dis-cuss. Perhaps Flaherty was fortunate in not being in the partnershipany longer because the whole project turned out to be unlucky. Wewent to Bora-Bora and Murnau insisted against the strong feelings ofthe islanders in using as a location a small atoll in the main lagooncalled Motu Tapu which was exceedingly convenient and undisturbedThis content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

94 Robert J. Flahertybut which the Polynesians were most reluctant to go near. By a strangecoincidence, from then on everything went wrong. Film stock waslost, schooners failed to arrive on time, Reri (our leading-lady) be-came pregnant, we nearly all contracted mumps and Bob Reese, theyoung assistant, got so badly burned in an accident that he had tospend weeks in hospital.46In spite of these mishaps, however, production was finished to Mur-nau’s satisfaction toward the end of the year, and the whole unit, includingFlaherty, sailed back to California on the mail steamer.A resume of Tabu and our own reassessment of it are not includedhere because we do not regard it as a Flaherty film. It was essentially Mur-nau s work with very few of Flaherty’s ideas or conceptions, and it revealedlittle of his influence.47Flaherty stayed in Hollywood only a short time after returning fromTahiti and took no part in the editing of Tabu. He is rumored to have triedto set up a film based on his “Bonito the Bull” subject. Douglas Fairbanksand Alexander Korda were both reported to have been interested in theidea but nothing materialized (Weinberg 1946). Weinberg also mentionsthat Flaherty helped Eisenstein, who had fallen out with Jesse L. Lasky ofParamount, to obtain a visa for Mexico. This probably occurred whenEisenstein was arrested in Mexico City in December 1930, and several in-ternationally known people, including Chaplin and Einstein, cabled theMexican government on his behalf (Seton 1952:193).By this time, Frances Flaherty was safely settled with the three girls atOdenwaldschule in southern Germany. Flaherty decided to join them andarrived in time to spend Christmas 1930 in the Bavarian Alps. He thoughthe might manage to get invited to make a film in Russia. When Flaherty leftthe United States, not to return for almost ten years, he was forty-six andhad produced only two films, which had gained world renown—Nanookand Moana. David Flaherty remained in Hollywood and worked on somescripts for Murnau before the latter s fatal accident, but Robert Flaherty didnot learn of Murnau s tragic death until he was in GermanyIn the 1950s when we touched down at Honolulu during a worldflight, the first thing noticed outside the airport was a huge neon sign ad-vertising a filling station. It blazed one word—MOANA.48This content downloaded from 170.140.142.252 on Sat, 21 Jan 2023 20:32:04 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms

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