Moana (1926)

Directors: Robert J. & Francis Hubbard Flaherty
Writers: Robert J. & Francis Hubbard Flaherty with titles by Julian Johnson
Stars: Ta’avale, Fa’amgase and Pe’a

Index: That's a Wrap!

No, not the Disney animated film; that came out in 2016. And no, not their new live action version; that’s 2026. This is 1926 and it’s a very different picture, a slightly old fashioned look at life in Samoa from Robert J. Flaherty, maker of a similar film, Nanook of the North, in 1922.

John Grierson, a critic for the New York Sun, invented a new word in his review to describe what Flaherty was doing with these films. He called it a “documentary”. Ironically, it isn’t a documentary at all, in the sense that we know it today. It’s what we might call docudrama, a fictional and scripted slice of life that’s rooted in reality and acted by actual natives.

That isn’t judgement, by the way, though it isn’t difficult to get to that point. What we see in this film is valuable to anyone with interest in the history of Polynesia and I appreciate the rituals and activities that Flaherty dramatises for us. We just have to acknowledge that they are only real at a remove.

For instance, Moana, a young Samoan man, and his family, wear traditional garments that were crafted using bark from mulberry trees, a fascinating process that Flaherty shows us, but Ta’avale, the young Samoan man playing the character, only wore them for this movie.

Fa’amgase, his fiancée, wasn’t his fiancée at all and goes topless for the most part, though the real Fa’amgase wouldn’t have done outside this film. They hunt and fish in the traditional manner, but only in staged reenactments.

And that’s fine. It’s a way to record the ways of this people visually so that they aren’t lost. And not all of them ever went away entirely. I see people pointing out that the traditional art of hand-tapped tattooing that is performed on Moana’s body (for real) at the end of this film, was anachronistic even in 1926, but I’ve seen a tattoo artist do this at a tattoo convention. It’s not mainstream but he was booked solid and I was in Phoenix, Arizona at the time.

In the film, Flaherty claims to have travelled to British Samoa with his wife Francis, then a mandate of New Zealand, and stayed there, on an island called Savaii, for two years. They had the help of an interpreter called Faialelei, who was the granddaughter of a chief and a friend of author Robert Louis Stevenson.

Reading up on the film, it seems they were in the then Territory of Western Samoa from April 1923 to December 1924, and they shared the experience with their daughter Monica, a toddler at the time. The ambience of the songs and language made an impact on her, enough to prompt her to return to a now independent Samoa in 1975 to record a soundtrack.

Therefore, this originally silent film is now a sound film and that’s the version I’m watching for its centennial. It’s a soundtrack that oddly matches Flaherty’s docudrama approach. The words spoken are what the characters speak in the film but they aren’t the ones speaking. It’s others half a century on. The songs were sung in 1926 but they weren’t captured. We hear an echo of them recorded later. Even the ocean sounds real but we’re listening to later waves. It’s all real, but at a remove, just like the rest.

The soundtrack helps the movie throughout and, at a few points, it really helps. There are a couple of scenes that would run long silent but don’t when there’s singing behind them. Here, I’m thinking of the fishermen navigating their boat over increasingly large waves or Moana’s struggle with pain as he endures his tattoo.

What’s odd is that, even given the work that it must have taken to lip read and recreate the dialogue and track down original songs from a long ago childhood, Monica Flaherty chose not to subtitle any of it. Therefore we now have an array of scenes with Samoan people talking in their native language but we have little idea of what they’re talking about.

What about the story, you ask? Well, there’s not much of one, to be brutally honest, as that was never quite the point. We follow Moana’s family throughout: him; his fiancée Fa’amgase; his cheeky younger brother Pe’a with a highly infectious grin; Lupenga, his older brother, old enough to be a generation adrift; and, I guess, his parents, Tama and Tu’ungaita.

They bundle leaves for housekeeping. They hunt wild pigs using snares, fish using spears and obtain coconuts by having Pe’a climb up a palm tree without any equipment whatsoever. They gather clams and smoke crabs out from under rocks. They catch a sea turtle and have a grand old time trying to wedge it into a long thin boat. They make a dress out of mulberry bark. And they dance and cook before Moana gets tattooed to document his coming of age. Is that a story? If so, that’s what you get here.

I enjoyed this but in a different way to some of the other docudramas I’ve seen. Flaherty’s Nanook of the North is much more dramatic, and so was Cooper and Schoedsack’s Grass, which I reviewed last year. This is fascinating to watch from an ethnographic standpoint, but it seems that life in Samoa wasn’t that troubled in 1926, even using old techniques a generation adrift. Therefore, this comes across as a romance, but more of Flaherty and Samoa than Moana and Fa’amgase. He clearly enjoyed his time there.

While that makes it easier to drift past than more dramatic equivalents, there isn’t a great negative side. Some scenes definitely run long and would have dragged in the silent version. I believe all the characters are named, but we’re not told the relationships between them. I had to crib that from IMDb. I hope it’s accurate.

Also, as respectful as it is for the most part, a tone that’s very believable, there’s a point at which it suddenly leaps headlong into ethnic cliché. “Work your charms and spells, witch-woman--and keep the devils out!” Ouch! And “this pattern of flesh, to you perhaps no more than cruel, useless ornament” is actually very cool indeed and didn’t need demeaning.

On the positive side, Ta’avale and Fa’amgase are both highly photogenic, regardless of how often the latter flaunts her boobs. The various processes shown were fascinating to me, even the dressmaking. I didn’t expect that but it’s a highlight for me, along with the scenes of the turtle after they caught it and got it to land. I was thoroughly enthralled by that hand drill.

Pe’a is a bundle of fun, hiding in the bushes from his mother with his broad grin. His climb of the coconut palm is seriously impressive, an impeccably dangerous feat. That’s a heck of a long way up and even longer back down again.

And so this ends up a fascinating piece, but a more minor entry in the docudrama genre of the day, even though it prompted a new word.