A romantic portrait of Samoa as a natural and social idyll, Moanais structured as a ‘day-in-the-life’ narrative which follows the eponymous Moana and his family as they prepare for a feast and dance. These ceremonials are to celebrate a coming-of-age ceremony – the tattooing of the hero, and his implied union with ‘the highest maiden in the village’ (title card), Fa’angase.

The action begins with Fa’angase and others gathering leaves and taro root; subsequent scenes see Moana and his brothers capture a wild boar, take to the sea for turtle and fish, catch a large crab, and gather coconuts. His mother makes cloth from mulberry bark and paints it for the traditional item of clothing, the lavalava, and we see the feast being prepared: fish are wrapped in leaves and placed on hot stones with green bananas, coconut custard and taro. The climactic scenes see Moana practice the sivadance with Fa’angase (who remains off-screen) before submitting to the painful attentions of Tufunga, the tattooist. Finally, Moana and Fa’angase, dressed in full regalia, dance the siva in public.

Much has been written about the beauty of Flaherty’s cinematography, and the depth and clarity of his images. Flaherty himself has spoken of the extensive use of a telephoto lens for close-ups in the filming of Moana (Flaherty, 1971, 97), to which he attributes not only the elimination of self-consciousness on the part of his subjects, but also the creation of ‘a stereoscopic quality that gave the picture a startling reality and beauty’ (ibid.). John Grierson, anonymously reviewing Moana in 1926 (‘Moana is lovely beyond compare’; Grierson, op. cit, 26), drew attention to the tonal depth created by the use of panchromatic film stock and praised the ‘superb’ camerawork of the film, and though such compliments contributed to Moana being lavished with ‘the highest critical praise’ on release, Murphy notes that the film’s reputation on these matters and others has significantly declined (Murphy, op.cit., 66). Nevertheless, the significant influence that the film had on Grierson himself should be recalled when examining the British documentary movement he developed under the aegis of the Empire Marketing Board from 1927 onwards.

Barsam has written that the film’s major failing is that where Nanook rendered the unfamiliar life of the Inuit as a series of human universals with which an audience could identify, Moana offers no such satisfaction: ‘there is virtually nothing universal in the experience’ of the protagonist (Barsam, 1988, 37). This may well be so. However, the narrative structure is nonetheless powerfully involving, on the psychological if not on the thematic level, as it accumulates a series of minor successes or interesting processes (hunting, fishing, cooking, flirting) which all anticipate future pleasures (principally food and love).

Yet, far from the denouement illustrating the fruit of these various labours, the final scenes present the viewer with a graphic record of real pain as Moana is tattooed. We do not get to see the fish and breadfruit removed from the firestones, the new skirt put on, the feast consumed, or the hero married, and while the final siva dance provides an implication that there will be some sort of consummation, in fact its meaning is unclear. During the tattooing scene, a title card indicates that what we see is taking three weeks (in fact the process took six: Barsam, op.cit., 37), and the chronology of the film is suddenly scrambled. The whole drama abruptly becomes sacred and obscure: the entire village dances; Moana’s brother appears to enter a trance; the tattooist declaims a silent oration at a kava ceremony. 

This final frustration of audience expectation – Grierson dimly registers it, saying that the lack of a ‘pictorial transcription of the sex life of this people…mars [Moana’s] completeness’ (Grierson op. cit.) – and the sudden disruption of comprehensible narrative order give the film a strange aftertaste. The idyll it tries to display is made wholly alien; everything is suddenly suffused with magic and ritual. After the painful intensity of the initiation process and the heightened states of the participants, the dance does not bring Moana and his companion down to earth again. Instead Flaherty abandons them in a state of trance-like excitation without release, suspended forever in an endless dream that documents his own filmic vision of a Samoan society more imaginary than it was real. It is a vision that harkens back to the most venerable European fantasies about island life in the South Pacific, and in many ways Moana can be seen as an elaborately staged rendering of these fantasies, newly burnished to a convincing and seductive shine by the authority with which Flaherty handles his medium. 

Francis Gooding