Moana (film)

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Movie
German title Moana
Original title Moana. A Romance of the Golden Age
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1926
length 60 minutes
Rod
Director Robert J. Flaherty
script Robert J. Flaherty
production Robert J. Flaherty , Frances H. Flaherty
camera Robert J. Flaherty
cut Julian Johnson
occupation
  • Fa'angase
  • Pe'a
  • Ta'avale
  • Tu'ugaita

Moana (Subtitle: A Romance of the Golden Age ) is an American documentary directed by Robert J. Flaherty from 1926. It shows a deliberately romantic depiction of the earlier traditional way of life of Pacific Islanders in Samoa . Moana is the first film in film history to be referred to as a documentary.

action

Safune village with lake on Savai'i island , 1896

Flaherty documents everyday life in the village of Safune on the island of Savaiʻi . The recordings are arranged thematically according to the procurement of food and work materials ( taro and coconut harvest; wild boar hunting with a trap; fishing and shell collecting), processing / handicraft (manufacture of clothing; boat building), food preparation (use of fire; fish wrapped in leaves with coconut meat is cooked in hot stone) as well as art and culture (dance with man and woman; ritual dance; ceremony of tattooing ). As a contrast, scenes of stormy seas are cut in between.

background

After the popular success of his film Nanuk, the Eskimo , which was very profitable because of the low production costs, Jesse L. Lasky of Paramount Pictures offered Robert Flaherty to direct a film of the same kind at a location of his choice anywhere in the world. South Seas literature popularized by Frederick O'Briens (1869–1932) gave rise to a general interest in South Pacific culture. Flaherty consulted with the author, who recommended Samoa to him as the least westernized area in Polynesia.

Flaherty traveled with his family by ship from San Francisco to Samoa in April 1923 and stayed there until December 1924. However, the influence of the colonial rulers and Christian missionaries had already strongly pushed back the original culture there. Flaherty finally shot in the village of Safune on the island of Savaii with panchromatic film material, which was particularly well suited for shooting in the great outdoors. In mid-1924, Flaherty found that the film was unusable due to the use of unsuitable water for development. From July to December 1924 he made the recordings again. Flaherty had some traditions that were no longer part of the active cultural life of the islanders, such as the tattoo ceremony. The film was to be based on the narrative scheme of Nanuk, the Eskimo, around an exemplary local, but the ubiquitous “paradisiacal” conditions did not allow a “man against nature” plot. With the recordings of stormy seas alone, Flaherty then tried to depict life in the fight against the forces of nature.

Moana premiered on February 7, 1926 at New York's Rialto Theater on Broadway. In a film review in the New York Sun on February 8, 1926, John Grierson ascribed a "documentary value" to the film, which is considered to be the beginning of the use of the term " documentary film ". Unlike the Nanuk film, Moana was n't a box office hit.

After Moana , Flaherty returned twice to filming in the South Pacific. For MGM he shot Tahiti White Shadows in the South Sea with WS Van Dyke in 1928 , but left the production before it was finished. In 1929 he traveled to Tahiti with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau and supported him in recording Tabu on Bora Bora . The joint work of Murnau and Flaherty failed in September 1930 due to different ideas about whether a correct action should be implemented or the story should emerge purely thematically from the local conditions, and the film was finally completed by Murnau alone.

Moana with original sound

In 1975, Flaherty's daughter Monica, who was three years old when it was set, returned to Savai'i Island to add original sound and dialogue to the film. In 1980 the project was completed, but the original 35mm footage had since deteriorated. In the 2010s, film restorer Bruce Posner and director Sami van Ingen, a great-grandson of the Flahertys, searched for the best 35mm film rolls and used them to digitally restore the film. In 2014 Moana with Sound premiered at the New York Film Festival at Lincoln Center .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Grierson quoted in: Paul Rotha : Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography . P. 78f .: "documentary value"
  2. ^ Jack C. Ellis: A New History of Documentary Film. A&C Black, 2005, ISBN 978-0-8264-1751-0 , p. 21. Limited preview in the Google Book search
  3. ^ Jill Nelmes: An Introduction to Film Studies. Psychology Press, 2003, ISBN 0-415-26268-2 , p. 194. Limited preview in Google Book Search
  4. ^ Paul Rotha: Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography . P. 73.
  5. ^ Moana with Sound . In: Lincoln Center , September 2014, accessed September 24, 2016.