L'ultimo eden

Say the name and most people will think of the 2016 animated Disney feature. I just looked at Robert J. Flaherty's documentary about life in Polynesia; after all that time in the Arctic filming NANOOK OF THE NORTH, a couple of years with his wife and children in warm Samoa must have been a very pleasant working vacation. In the early 1980s, a version was released with a new soundtrack, but I looked at a version with none.

These days our concepts of documentaries are informed by an additional ninety years of development. Documentaries are compiled by interviews and delving into archives and by following the subjects around, waiting for something interesting to happen in a cinema verite way; anthropology is a well-developed discipline. In the 1920s, there were no such standards, everyone was inventing new techniques as they went along, Paramount hoped to recoup the money advanced Flaherty for the project, and Flaherty understood the rhythms and techniques of film -- its poetry, if you will. As a result, to the practiced eye, many of the events of this film were carefully staged and edited. Wait until about a third of the way through the film You'll see a youngster, Moana's younger brother, climb a tall palm, gather coconuts, and bring them down. Not only is the sequence edited, with another member of the family watching, but the camera's vantage shifts dramatically, from watching the youngster climb -- from afar -- to watching him twist the coconuts off the tree -- from a few feet away. Clearly this entire sequence was shot over several days.

On the other hand, there are several bits that clearly preserve actual techniques of the period: Moana and her mother making cloth; hauling a turtle aboard an outrigger; cleaning taro, freshly pulled from the earth.

If there is a message in this movie, it is that these people live closer to the earth and sea than the movie's audience. Even a rural audience in this period would be thoroughly civilized, from farm animals, to guns for hunting, to harvesters, to the movie projectors and screens that showed them this film. There is a message that the riches that these trapping of civilization bring are fine and dandy, but so is a coconut you have climbed the tree to get for your family and yourself.

Moana was filmed in Samoa in the villages of Safune district on the island of Savai'i. The name of the lead male character, moana means 'deep water' in the Samoan language. In making the film, Flaherty lived with his wife and collaborator Frances and their three daughters in Samoa for more than a year. Flaherty arrived in Samoa in April 1923 and stayed until December 1924, with the film being completed in December 1925.

The youngest of the children Robert and Frances Flaherty brought with them to Samoa was their then-3-year-old daughter Monica. In 1975, Monica Flaherty returned to Savai'i to create a soundtrack for her parents' hitherto-silent film, including recording ambient sounds of village life, dubbed Samoan dialogue and traditional singing. The resulting "Moana with Sound" was completed in 1980, with help from filmmakers Jean Renoir and Richard Leacock, and first shown publicly in Paris in 1981.

The version I saw on Netflix was the sound version, and I can hardly imagine watching it any other way. Although there may be dubbing and it is not the original cast, this does not seem to hurt the picture (especially because I cannot understand what they are saying).

Maybe this is "docufiction", but it still has some level of authenticity that could not longer be done today. Samoa of the 1920s is not Samoa of the 2010s. Even if some scenes are staged or a little bit fake, it captures the people in about as close to reality as is possible. And for that reason, it is worth seeing if you have an anthropological interest. (I feel like it is more realistic than "Nanook", at least.)

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, though iron blades are used. Daily tasks like cooking, fishing, hunting and gathering are most of the picture.

Mainly interesting for the material settings. Flaherty treats the Samoan life as almost that of a paradise - the only discomforts being wild boar and the pain of tattooing.

...this time focusing on Polynesian islanders, specifically the island of Savai'i in the Samoans. Most of the film depicts the gathering and hunting of foodstuffs, be it trapping a wild boar, fishing, catching a large sea tortoise, pulling up taro root, and in one famous scene, watching a young boy climb a perilously tall tree to gather coconuts. Everything leads up to a rite of passage ceremony involving dancing and tattooing.

Flaherty and his wife lived among the islanders for two years gathering footage. As in other films by the director, Flaherty staged some scenes, although ironically it was during a review of this film that the word "documentary" was first used to refer to movies. The version I watched was the beautiful 2014 restoration supervised by Flaherty's daughter Monica. It's known as Moana with Sound, as Monica went back to the islands and recorded ambient nature sounds as well as the chit-chat of natives in their own, non-subtitled, tongue, as well as some of their singing. This new soundtrack was placed over the silent footage from '26. After watching it, I would think the original film would be a bit less enjoyable without the sound. This movie was a hit on the exploitation circuit, where they played up the topless native girls.

The true definition of the cinematc genre 'documentary' has been debated since the early years of film when moving photographic images first recorded remote cultures living far from Western civilizations. Can staged events for film of long-ago abandoned habits still be regarded as a way of explaining how the ethnological practices of an exotic group of people live their daily lives?

Robert J. Flaherty first movie, 1922 "Nanook of the North," gave a glimpse of how an Artic Northern Indigenous people conducted their daily way of living. A couple of years later, contracted this time by Paramount Pictures, Flaherty and his crew set out to photograph a culture they assumed was untouched by modern conveniences in Pacific Samoa. Much to their surprise, despite the Polynesians living the life of tropical comfort, they were governed by a western-style form of government wearing contemporary clothing more like those found in Hawaii at the time. Still, Flaherty worked his magic by demonstrating how the island natives practiced centuries-old customs in his January 1926 "Moano." The movie's title was named after the male lead in the feature film, meaning 'deep sea, deep water.'

In a February 8, 1926, New York Sun review of Flaherty's work, John Grierson wrote, "'Moana,' being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth, has documentary value." This was the first time the term 'documentary,' taken for the French 'documentaire' was used to describe such a genre in cinema. Because of the way Flaherty manipulated the movie's characters, events and reenactment of their customs, today's critics are apt to label his work as a "docufiction," which describes filmmakers' managing the scenes filmed. Flaherty's justification in reenacting long-ago practices is done to give a better understanding of the exotic customs and natural events of these distant people.

The excitement of a majority of documentaries is to show how people survive against harsh elements or battle large beasts of nature in order to survive. Flaherty's initial observation of the Samoans was their environment offered no drama, that their way of living was relatively easy. So the filmmaker, besides capturing the stunning beauty of the tropical island, resorted to filming a way of life that was still labor-intensive in some respects. But he had to tweak other aspects of their day-to-day living to keep his viewers' interest.

Flaherty rearranged the members of the family he was following, injecting other Polynesians into the unit for their photogenic qualities and their acting abilities. Flaherty wanted to show a long-abandoned practice of introducing juveniles into manhood by the painful ritual of a body tattoo. He paid a teenager a large sum of money to be the guinea pig to undergo the ordeal. He also swapped the Samoan's modern clothes for traditional ones such as tapa cloth and topless attire.

A secondary documentary without the reshuffling of facts could easily have been following Flaherty's trials of filming with the basic visual technology available back then. Transporting 16 tons of filmmaking equipment, including color cameras and film stock, Flaherty's crew underwent quite an ordeal on this remote island. Beside camera malfunctions, Flaherty designed his movie to use the more vivid panchromatic black-and-white film, which he had to be develop on the island. Trouble was the more complex process of panchromatic unknowingly leached its silver nitrate into the water inside the cave Flaherty used as a darkroom. He drank some of the water, sending him to the medics to cure his ailment. He also found his raw film contained some spots on the negative, forcing him to discard several batches of footage.

Upon "Moana's" release, American audiences didn't warm up to the exotic scenes of the Pacific. But Europeans lapped up the tropical themes of Flaherty's feature film, assuring the future of documentaries could find an enthusiastic market for the newly-defined genre. In 1980, Flaherty's youngest child, Monica, who was brought over to Samoa in 1924 with her father, went back to record the sounds and dialogue of the island's village life. With the traditional songs of its people, Monica matched the audio with Flaherty's original, although much of the original film composite was denigrated. A few decades later, a more pristine and longer copy of 'Moana" was discovered. Matching Monica's soundtrack with the newly restored version presented the true essence of Flaherty's ground-breaking documentary.