Year: 1924
Director(s): Robert & Frances Flaherty
Country: US
Language: n/a
Nanook of the North (1922) was such a success at the box office, that it inspired Director Robert Flaherty to sign a contract with Paramount Pictures, who wanted him to make a similar movie set in the South Seas. In 1923, Flaherty took his family to Savai'i, a volcanic island which at the time was part of British Samoa. Flaherty and his wife Frances worked with locals until 1924 to recreate rituals and traditions that decades of missionary zeal had tried to erase.
In Moana, customs of Polynesian natives on a Samoan island, centered on the daily life and on the coming of age ceremony of the young man Moana. It reconstructs Polynesian culture before the coming of Western culture. Flaherty treats the Samoan life as almost that of a paradise - the only discomforts being wild boar and the pain of tattooing.
Despite selling less tickets than his first film, Moana's influence over the years has been incalculable. It was for this movie that critic John Grierson first used the term "documentary." Of course to call it a documentary in the purest sense would be incorrect, rather it should be considered a masterpiece of "docufiction". Indeed it has a narrative and a goal; to show the world just how beautiful a seemingly "primitive" culture can be.
Flaherty's views on the subject are quite ahead of his time. America was 40 years away from the civil rights movement and for the most part minorities were demonized in the press and considered less civilized than their white counterpart. The film portrait of people unencumbered by modern society. Mainly, the director sees the Samoans as complex, fully formed personalities, and treats them with respect and appreciation, even during the movie's charged erotic encounters.
In 19975, Flaherty's daughter travelled back to Savai'i to create a comprehensive soundtrack for her father's silent work. Despite the compromised visuals, her work was championed by film historian Kevin Brownlow and composer Virgil Thomson. In 2014, archivist Bruce Posner and Finnish filmmaker Sami van Ingen finished a restoration of Moana and have since shown it for the world to see. This work of art is more beautiful and more accessible than ever before. Praise it! 5/5
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