Moana (1926) - Robert J. Flaherty

Robert J. Flaherty’s South Seas follow-up to Nanook of the North is a Gauguin idyll moved by “pride of beauty… pride of strength.” Moana was filmed in Samoa (then under the Western Samoa Trust Territory) in the villages of Safune district on the island of Savai’i. The name of the lead male character, Moana, means ’deep sea, deep water’ in the Samoan language.[2][3][4] In making the film, Flaherty lived with his wife and collaborator Frances H. Flaherty and their three daughters in Samoa for more than a year. They arrived in Samoa in April 1923 and stayed until December 1924, with the film being completed in December 1925. Hoping that Flaherty could repeat the success of Nanook, Paramount Pictures sent him to Samoa to capture the traditional life of the Polynesians on film. Flaherty reportedly arrived with 16 tons of filmmaking equipment. This included both a regular movie camera and a Prizma color camera, as Flaherty hoped to film some footage in that color process, but the Prizmacolor camera malfunctioned. Moana is thought to be the first feature film made with panchromatic black-and-white film rather than the orthochromatic film commonly used at the time in Hollywood feature films. Flaherty developed his film as he went along, in a cave on Savai’i. In the process, he inadvertently poisoned himself and required treatment after he drank water from the cave that contained silver nitrate, which washed off the film stock. The silver nitrate also caused spots to form on the negative.[5] As in the earlier Nanook (and his later film, Man of Aran), Flaherty went well beyond recording the life of the people of Samoa as it happened. He followed his usual procedure of “casting“ locals whom he considered potentially photogenic performers into “roles“, including creating fictitious family relationships. He also, as in the other films, on occasion set up scenes in which exotic earlier practices were re-enacted as if still current. In Nanook and Man of Aran, it included setting up anachronistic hunting sequences. In Moana, at a time when Samoans were typically wearing modern Western-style clothing under the influence of Christian missionaries, Flaherty persuaded his performers to don traditional tapa cloth costumes (made from the bark of the paper mulberry tree, in a process shown in some detail in the film); the “maidens“ went topless. He also staged a coming-into-manhood ritual in which the young male lead underwent a painful traditional Samoan tattoo, for which the young man required a generous compensation. Those devices have led to Flaherty’s films sometimes being categorized as “docufiction“.[1] Still, it emerged that living off the land and the ocean in Samoa was comparatively easy, leaving limited scope for Flaherty to draw on his favored theme of “Man against Nature“ as he had in Nanook and was to again in Man of Aran. Thus, although the film was visually stunning and drew critical praise at the time, it lacked the raw drama of Nanook, which may have contributed to its failure at the box office. (Bruce Posner, the film’s restorer, commented: “God knows what Paramount expected. It was just poorly released. They tried to shift it into a love story of the South Seas, which it is, but not a conventional one.“)[5] The word documentary was first applied in a cinematic context in a review of this movie written by “The Moviegoer“, a pen name for John Grierson, in the New York Sun on February 8, 1926. Moana fue filmada en Samoa (entonces bajo el Territorio en Fideicomiso de Samoa Occidental) en las aldeas del distrito de Safune en la isla de Savai’i. El nombre del personaje masculino principal, Moana, significa «mar profundo, agua profunda» en el idioma samoano.2​3​4​ Al realizar la película, Flaherty vivió con su esposa y colaboradora Frances H. Flaherty y sus tres hijas en Samoa durante más de un año. Llegaron a Samoa en abril de 1923 y permanecieron hasta diciembre de 1924, y la película se completó en diciembre de 1925. Con la esperanza de que Flaherty pudiera repetir el éxito de Nanuk, Paramount Pictures lo envió a Samoa para capturar la vida tradicional de los polinesios en una película. Según los informes, Flaherty llegó con 16 toneladas de equipo de filmación. Esto incluía tanto una cámara de película normal como una cámara a color Prizma, ya que Flaherty esperaba filmar algunas imágenes en ese proceso de color, pero la cámara no funcionaba correctamente.