Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age (Paramount, 1926; reissued with sound, 1980)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last Wednesday night my husband Charles and I screened a new Blu-Ray release of a film I had literally been waiting for decades to see: Moana: A Romance of the Golden Age, made by Robert J. Flaherty and his wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty (her contributions were so important he gave her co-director credit) in 1923-24 and released by Paramount in 1926. Flaherty had been an explorer in northern Canada for over two decades (his directorial credit has the letters “F.R.G.S” after his name; it stood for “Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society” and was an award he’d been given under the British Commonwealth for his explorations in Canada) when he stunned the film world with a 1922 movie about a real-life Inuit hunter named Nanook and his and his family’s struggles to survive in the unforgiving climate of the Ungava Peninsula in northwest Canada. I’d been interested in Flaherty’s career even before I’d seen any of his films thanks to a copy of The Innocent Eye, a biography of him by Arthur Calder-Marshall my mother gave me in the late 1960’s. Produced by the Revillon Fréres’ trading company and released by another French firm, Pathé, Flaherty’s movie, Nanook of the North, was a sensation – and, as usual when an independent producer makes a movie that captures the attention of a large audience, the major studios came a-calling and offered to back Flaherty’s next project. Flaherty hadn’t had a next project in mind, but he was willing to take one on if he’d be able to document a pre-modern lifestyle and culture in its natural environment and make some money from it. To the end of his life Flaherty recalled the telegram he got from Jesse Lasky, production head of Paramount at the time: “I want you to go off somewhere and make me another Nanook. Go where you will, do what you like. I’ll foot the bills. The world’s your oyster.”

Frances Flaherty asked that her husband select a part of the world-oyster that would be comfortable and temperate enough that she could go with him, and a family friend named Frederick O’Brien – author of White Shadows in the South Seas, a book about how white settlers and traders had wrecked the traditional Polynesian culture – suggested they go to Safune, a village on Savai’i, an island in the Samoan archipelago, where “you may still be in time to catch some of that beautiful old culture before it passes entirely away.” Samoa is actually divided into two political jurisdictions, American Samoa, which is the only U.S.-ruled territory in the Southern Hemisphere, and Samoa, which at the time the Flahertys made their film was still a protectorate of New Zealand but was granted independence in 1962. (Samoa recently re-entered the news when the ruling party that had controlled its government since independence was voted out of office – and the prime minister who’d been in the job for 22 years responded by locking the doors of the Samoan parliament building and refusing to let the new government enter the building, let alone occupy it and start governing. Rachel Maddow covered this on her news show and compared it to Alexander Lukashenko, perpetual dictator of Belarus, forcing down an airliner over his country to arrest a prominent opposition journalist and his partner, as well as the antics of Donald Trump and the mob he recruited to go to Washington January 6 and stop the certification of the ballots that had removed him from office and replaced him with Joe Biden.)

O’Brien had written Flaherty a letter of introduction to Felix David, an émigré from Germany and a trader who had come out to the South Seas after his ambition to be an opera singer was frustrated by his family’s opposition. Felix David was also Gay, and at least part of his attraction to Samoa was the young, nubile Samoan boys he could seduce. He called himself “King of Savai’i” and would regale his Samoan audiences with renditions of classics of German opera, including Siegfried’s death scene from Götterdämmerung – his favorite. The Samoans had never seen movies – and neither had David, since he’d left Germany before they were widely shown publicly – but Flaherty had brought along a projector and a few prints of Paramount releases so he could explain to the natives what a movie was and demonstrate what he was doing with them. One film in particular caught the eye of the Samoans: the 1920 horror classic The Golem, made in Germany by UFA Studios and distributed in the U.S. by Paramount. “The massive stone figure of the Monster (a giant clay statue brought to life through Kabalistic magic by a rabbi to defend his Jewish community against anti-Semitic authorities), played by Paul Wegener, so struck the Safune people that for years later children would be named after the Golem,” Calder-Marshall explained in his book. Flaherty brought along his wife and his brother David, but for the rest of his crew – including the lab people who would actually physically develop the film – he trained locals.

What Flaherty hadn’t realized until he got to Samoa was that the challenges there, such as they were, weren’t at all like what he’d been used to in northern Canada that he had vividly depicted in Nanook of the North. The Samoans “had none of the heroic Eskimo virtues,” Calder-Marshall wrote. “Life was exceptionally easy. The sea wasn’t an implacable enemy. It was a heated bathing pool crammed with seafood. The land was so rich that ‘farming’ wasn’t work, but fun. Climactically Samoa was a denial of all the epic virtues which Flaherty had come to accept as the axiomatic contrast to the industrial situation which he loathed.” After realizing that his initial idea of having the Samoans beset by giant octopi, tiger sharks or other sea monsters they would have to fight was not going to work (though there’s a curious scene in the final film in which Savai’i is beset by an ocean squall of higher-than-normal waves that seems to be Flaherty retreating to the closest he could come to filming the sea storms he had shot in Nanook and would do again in his 1934 Irish-set film Man of Aran), he decided that the subject of his movie would be “fa’a Samoa,” the complex native culture and rituals that governed life on the islands and had essentially allowed the Samoans to rule themselves.

Flaherty took so long to develop his story that he stumbled on a technological advance that revolutionized filmmaking worldwide. He had taken along the two Akeley cameras he had used to film Nanook (it was an unusual brand of camera he had picked because it was lubricated with graphite instead of oil, which would have frozen in the Arctic climate) and also an elaborate gadget called a Prizma, which shot images through colored filters and used two strips of film at once. The idea was that if printed on stock of the same color used to shoot them and projected simultaneously on the same screen, the images would combine and create an illusion of color. The Prizma needed panchromatic film, which had a greater color sensitivity and produced a far richer palette of greyscales. Flaherty started shooting Moana on the then more common orthochromatic stock, which had worked for him in Nanook because almost all the backgrounds were solid expanses of white, but he found that the film couldn’t cope with the multicolored Polynesian environment; it reduced everything to murk. When the Prizma broke down, Flaherty put a roll of panchromatic film in one of his Akeleys – and was blown away by the results. “The figures jumped right out of the screen,” Frances Flaherty recalled. “They had a roundness and modeling and looked alive, and because of the color correction, retained their full beauty of texture. The settings immediately acquired a new significance.” No one had ever filmed an entire movie on panchromatic stock before – it had been used only for cloud scenes and other outdoor effects – and it was harder to work with: orthochromatic film could be processed under red light while panchromatic had to be developed and fixed in total darkness.

Moana became one of the most beautiful films made to that time (and even now), not only because of the use of panchromatic film but because Flaherty shot it either in the early morning or late afternoon, what cinematographers call “magic hour.” But there were also complications; two of the native film processors Flaherty had got involved in a murder, and Flaherty himself fell deathly ill from – he learned months later – drinking water from a pool in which, unbeknownst to him, the chemicals from the film processing had accumulated. The Flahertys left Samoa in December 1924 and spent the next year assembling a rough cut and trying to keep away the Paramount executives – who, when they finally saw it, they found it dull and unsaleable. “There were no octopi, no tiger-sharks, not even a hurricane,” Calder-Marshall summed up their reaction. “There was a slender love-interest, but Moana and the girl didn’t do anything.” Paramount agreed to release it nationwide if Flaherty could sell the film in limited release in six particularly tough movie towns and draw audiences – which he did by hosting meetings and buying subscription lists from magazines to draw more sophisticated, intellectual people who usually didn’t go to movies.

Flaherty had drawn his story as basically a series of incidents in the life of traditional Samoans, and had searched through the islands for people who had the old craft skills he wanted to shoot. He also gave his leading man, a young Samoan named Ta’avale, the character name “Moana” and concocted a plot in which he would be in love with a young woman named Fa’angase (Flaherty’s third leading lady after the first one had run off with a lover and the second one had broken up with hers and, according to Samoan custom, had to cut off her hair in response), but whom he wouldn’t be allowed to marry until he had had the entire lower half of his body, from the hips to the feet, tattooed. It’s interesting to note that the titles for this film describe the tattooing custom as obsolete and cruel – as if the Flahertys and Julian Johnson, the high-priced, highly regarded writer Paramount brought in to add credibility to the movie, felt they had to justify showing something so disgusting and pointless to an American movie audience, when today tattooing is an “in” ritual in America and a lot of people (especially, but not exclusively, men) go about with almost as much tattooing as Ta’avale/Moana in the film. Ta’avale would never have endured the pain of being tattooed if not for the movie; he was talked into it, according to Frances Flaherty, because it “was not only his own pride that was at stake but the honor of all Samoa” and as the central figure in the film’s longest and climactic sequence “he was certainly the hero of the film now.” Calder-Marshall quoted that and wrote, “It would certainly not be cynical to add that Ta’avale was well paid by Flaherty to undergo the traditions of his race.”

The trials of Moana didn’t end with its release; following its initial showings (where it got great reviews – including one from British critic, and later producer-director in his own right, John Grierson, who wrote that Moana “has documentary value,” the first use of the “D”-word in connection with a non-fiction film), it disappeared into the Paramount vaults and might have been lost forever if it weren’t for one of the great unsung heroines of film preservation, Iris Barry, curator at the New York Museum of Modern Art, who in the 1930’s convinced her bosses that films were as much an art form as any other and therefore they were something a museum should be interested and active in preserving and collecting. In 1975 Flaherty’s daughter Monica went back to Savai’i with veteran documentary filmmaker Richard Leacock and recorded a soundtrack for Moana consisting of Samoans of that time speaking in their native language, along with singing traditional Samoan songs, and they “married” their 1975 soundtrack surprisingly well to the 1923-24 picture to create a new version, briefly released in 1980 with the awkward title Moana with Sound. (This isn’t all that different from what Flaherty himself did with his 1934 production Man of Aran, in which after he shot the film on location he recruited his cast members to come to London and add voice-overs in a Gaumont-British recording studio because by 1934 a film couldn’t be released without some sort of soundtrack.) Both Charles and I wondered what it would have been like to see Moana in 1926 with a live musical accompaniment (which I would presume would have been based on Hawai’ian music because, while Samoan music was totally terra incognita to American composers and musical directors, Hawai’ian music was a long-established commercial property and plenty of American musicians – both Hawai’ians who’d emigrated to the mainland and mainlanders who had learned the style from them – knew how to play it), but the combination of silent images and post-recorded sound was surprisingly effective. In 2005 there was a further restoration that involved Flaherty’s great-grandson and various film archives aimed at creating the most physically impeccable version of the film and using the Monica Flaherty-Richard Leacock soundtrack to accompany it.

The result is a film of astonishing beauty and power; the images seem to leap off the screen – the opening establishing shots of the Samoan countryside reminded me of the black-and-white postcards of the period, which had a wealth and richness of detail almost no movies achieved in the 1920’s – and the beauty of Samoa comes through so strongly in the panchromatic black-and-white images it’s one of those movies that makes you wonder, “Just why the hell did anyone ever think the movies needed color?” At the same time it’s easy to see what put off the Paramount executives: there really isn’t much of a storyline, We see Tu’ungaita (playing Moana’s mother) making a lavalava, the traditional Samoan woman’s dress, peeling the basic material from the bark of a mulberry tree, stretching it and adding patches as needed, then dyeing it with flowers and nuts. We see a scene of the Samoans hunting some sort of animal which the titles present as the only truly dangerous beast on the island – and it turns out to be a wild boar (Flaherty was big on filming hunting sequences that don’t reveal until the very end just what animal is being hunted). We see it and a turtle the villagers capture later being brought in alive and not killed until they’re ready to cook them (which, as Charles pointed out, was the sort of thing you had to do with meat or fish animals before refrigeration existed), and at the end we see Moana undergo the tattooing ritual, with the titles elaborately explaining just how painful it is and how they can do only a few inches at a time because the person getting tattooed couldn’t stand it. There’s also a famous sequence in which Flaherty pans up the trunk of a coconut tree to show Pe’a, Moana’s younger brother in the story, climbing up so he can cut down coconuts and let them fall to earth so they can be harvested; nearly every Hollywood film set in Polynesia for the next two decades copied that effect.

“The film has a wonderful organic unity,” Calder-Marshall wrote of Moana. “Every incident is an integral part of the family’s everyday life. It is a lyric of calm and peace. Even the dances and the tattooing have no violent or aggressive qualities.” He quotes one odd comment that John Grierson made in his review: “Lacking in the film was the pictorial representation of the sex-life of these people.” Even in the genuinely “pre-Code” period of the mid-1920’s Flaherty was pushing the envelope with the shots of Fa’angase topless – her breasts are shown in just about every scene she’s in and, when Flaherty ended up at MGM in an attempt to do a film of Frederick O’Brien’s White Shadows in the South Seas, he was put off by the project (and eventually quit it well before it was finished) when the producer, Hunt Stromberg, responded to a screening of Moana by saying, “Let’s fill the screen with tits.” (The 1930 Production Code even had an exception to its flat ban on showing women’s breasts on screen: it was acceptable if it was footage of native women who habitually went about that way if it was filmed in their native country.) At the same time, it’s known that the native Polynesians came as close to a totally sexually free lifestyle, with no jealousy, no possessiveness and no expectation of monogamy, as any human population ever has, though they had one huge advantage that will never be repeated: they had no sexually transmitted diseases. (Those microbes didn’t exist in their environment until white people brought them in – and I remember reading that and thinking, “That’s white people for you! We ruin everything.”)

Moana is a masterpiece of its kind, and the only reason I can think of for anyone not to like it is we’re simply not used to slowing ourselves down to the softer, gentler pace of the traditional Samoan lifestyle. (In Flaherty’s attempt to show Samoan life as it had been in what his subtitle called “the golden age” instead of what it was in the mid-1920’s, he slipped up only once: when Moana is shown sharpening a wood stake to turn it into a harpoon for catching fish, the knife he’s using is clearly a modern product of Western manufacture.) Critic Matthew Josephson, reviewing Moana when it was new, wrote, “With [Flaherty’s] broad vision he has suddenly made us think seriously, in between the Florida boom and our hunting for bread and butter on Wall Street, about the art of life. Here, he says to us, are people who are successful in the art of life. Are we that, with our motor-cars, factories, skyscrapers, radio receivers?” And so we spend the 98-minute running time of Moana with people who are successful in the art of life and live in a state of harmony with nature we modern urban dwellers can only dream about – and are thankful for the industrial infrastructure of electricity, television, video disc players and the like that allow us to see it at our leisure and then screw ourselves up and head back to work to earn the money to pay for these modern conveniences – including being able to sit at home and watch a movie about people who didn’t (at least until we came to their islands and taught them to) have to worry about any of that.