An aura of predestined doom surrounds Murnau’s 1931 Tabu. There are several causes for this. First, the film is Murnau’s final work, premiered 9 days after his death in a motor vehicle accident. Thus, viewers are wont to impute a sense of fatality to the movie. This is a fallacy – no doubt, Murnau planned a long and happy life after completing the picture -- but, probably, unavoidable. Second, the film itself seems to labor under a curse – whispered rumors of hauntings and malign influences surround the picture. Finally, the movie’s subject matter itself, a weird combination of German expressionist gloom and South Seas romance inflects the way that we approach the film: there is a price to be paid for innocent eroticism and that price is death.
F. W. Murnau was born Friedrich Plumpe in Bielefeld, Germany in 1888. His family was comfortably wealthy and mercantile. Murnau studied philology at the University of Berlin but gravitated into the world of theater. Homosexuals were welcome in that field, particularly in Max Reinhardt’s sphere, and Murnau was, more or less, openly gay. Theatrical careers were not respectable in late 19th century (Wilhelmine) Germany and the young man changed his name from the rather banal and crude-sounding Plumpe to Murnau when he worked as an assistant director with Reinhardt during the years 1911 to 1914. (Murnau is the name of an artist’s colony where Kandinsky and other luminaries of the early Expressionist and Blue Rider movements spent their summers – the director also had a cottage in that village.)
Murnau enlisted in the army during World War One. Initially, he served in the infantry, an assignment that he thought boring. He used family influence to finagle his way into the Luftwaffe. Emulating Baron von Richthofen, Murnau flew a number of successful combat missions as a fighter pilot. He probably survived the war due to a mistake – he got caught in fog over the Alps and had to make a forced landing. The airfield was in Switzerland and he was interred there for the last year of the war. The other combat pilots with whom he served were all killed, including a handsome young man who had been Murnau’s lover.
After the war, Murnau worked in Berlin in the film industry. Most of his early films are lost. He revolutionized the movie industry with his vampire picture, Nosferatu (released in 1922), the first film of that kind to be an international smash-hit. After a few more pictures made in Germany, most notably his version of Faust and The Last Laugh, Murnau emigrated to Hollywood where he was hired by Fox Studios. His first American film, Sunrise, is a monument to the late Silent film industry, often characterized as the most beautiful movie ever made. Sunrise won the first Academy Award bestowed in Hollywood for best picture. Murnau directed three other films for Fox including City Girl, a Kammerspiel quite unlike the extravagant earlier films involving elaborate spectacle and camera effects. (Murnau was versatile and City Girl shows that he could effectively direct a light romantic comedy with melodramatic accents.) The other American films Murnau made are now lost.
One of Murnau’s close friends in Berlin was Walter Spies. Spies was the son of the German ambassador to Russia and had been, mostly, raised in Moscow and a dacha in the Ural mountains. Spies was also homosexual and closely affiliated with the Russian post-revolutionary avant-garde – he knew Eisenstein and many Soviet dancers including Anna Archipenko. In 1923, Spies traveled as a collier to the South Seas and took up residence in central Indonesia. For several years, he worked for one of the Indonesian sultans as a director of his patron’s orchestras, including a Balinese gamelan ensemble. Fascinated by the gamelan music,
Spies moved to Bali where he also studied traditional dance forms.
Murnau’s Hollywood films after Sunrise (1927) were not successful at the box-office. Irving Thalberg suggested that Murnau travel to the South Seas to make a film with Robert Flaherty. Murnau hoped to visit Spies with whom he remained in contact by letters. Accordingly, Murnau agreed to the assignment, primarily because it would give him an excuse to see his old friend again.
Robert Flaherty was famous for his documentaries. In the minds of most film audiences, Flaherty was best known as the director of Nanook of the North (1922). Flaherty had made another documentary in the South Seas at Bora Bora and Papeete in French Tahiti– Moana released in 1926. Moana is a hybrid, a documentary involving many staged sequences – today, the film would be characterized as "docufiction." Flaherty was blustery, outspoken, and aggressive Irishman who was drunk most of the time. Murnau was concerned that it would be difficult to collaborate with him. Flaherty was bogged down in a film about the Indians at Acoma pueblo – Acoma, the City in the Sky – and so Thalberg closed-down production on that film, being shot in western New Mexico, and sent Flaherty to the south seas to make a fiction film co-directed with W.S. VanDyke. That film released in 1929 was called White Shadows in the South Seas. Accordingly, Flaherty was still in Tahiti when Thalberg sent Murnau to those islands to work on Tabu.
Murnau’s sense of geography was a little inexact. He seems to have thought that Tahiti and Indonesia were the same place. Instead, Murnau was disappointed to find that he was supposed to work with Flaherty in Tahiti and not Bali. For a number of weeks, Murnau collaborated with Flaherty and, ultimately, the two men agreed upon the script that was ultimately shot. By this point, Flaherty’s alcoholism had become an insoluble problem and Murnau complained that he couldn’t work with his co-director. Flaherty was removed from the project. Murnau, then, persuaded the Studio to send for Walter Spies. Spies came from Bali and agreed to serve as a dance consultant on the film – he was responsible for choreographing the motions and gestures of the native actors participating in Tabu. Although the script is a collaboration between Robert Flaherty and F. W. Murnau, the footage accumulated to make the film was almost entirely shot under the direction of the German. (On the first day of production, Flaherty’s camera jammed and ripped film passing through it; after that day, all camerawork was directed by Murnau). Murnau’s process was to develop immense amounts of footage and, then, work the actors on editing – it is said that 90 hours of film were shot, mostly around Bora-Bora.
Murnau returned to Hollywood to supervise editing the film. He completed the picture and planned a trip to Santa Barbara to celebrate the successful wrap of the film. Murnau, who did not drive, selected his chauffeurs on the basis of their attractiveness and not their skill in operating a motor vehicle. His 14-year-old Filipino house-boy was driving his car when he lost control and slammed into a telephone pole along side the Pacific Coast Highway just south of Santa Barbara near Rincon Beach. Murnau was instantly killed. He was 42. The director’s body was returned to Germany where he was buried at Stahnsdorf, about 12 miles from Berlin. Greta Garbo, a close friend, commissioned a death mask and kept it in her study for the rest of her life. (The death mask is claimed to be the nexus of paranormal phenomena – rapping and knocking noises and other ghostly manifestations.)
Murnau and Spies had built a house together in Tahiti at Papeete. Apparently, they selected a location for the house that was itself tabu and the structure was also said to be haunted. It burned down in the 1935, was rebuilt and burned down again in the 1980's. After Murnau’s death, Spies returned to Bali where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1938, Spies was arrested for homosexual conduct and put in prison. He was released in 1939 after the intervention of Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, with whom he was friends. In 1942, Spies was interned as an enemy non-combatant – Indonesia, at that time, was part of the Dutch East Indies. The authorities sent Spies back to Germany. With other deported persons, he was loaded on the S. S. Imhof for return to Europe. A few miles from port, a Japanese submarine torpedoed the Imhof – it sank and Spies drowned.
A year ago, someone broke into Murnau’s grave at Stahnsdorf and stole the great director’s skull. Wax was found on some of the other bones, suggesting some kind of occult ritual. Murnau’s huge skeleton – the man was 6 foot 11 inches tall – was the only corpse desecrated. Murnau’s brothers, also occupying the grave, were not disturbed. To date, the skull has not been returned.
The Apogee of the Silent Film
Tabu was one of only two silent films released by American studios in 1931. The other film, also estimable, was Charley Chaplin’s City Lights. (Only Murnau and Chaplin had sufficient prestige in Hollywood to compel the studios to yield to them with respect to allowing these films to be released as silent movies.) The aura of doom surrounding the picture also arises in this context: Tabu is the last film of its kind. (Edgar Ulmer, the production liaison on the film, remained in Hollywood while Murnau was in the South Seas shooting the movie. Murnau was in Polynesia from May 12, 1929 through November 8, 1930 – that is, during the first broad application of sound technology to film. Ulmer wrote to Murnau and provided him with a very lengthy and detailed technical account as to the new technology, suggesting that Murnau consider re-shooting some parts of the film with synchronized sound. Murnau declined and said that he thought that the merits of silent film were so obvious that the art form would continue to exist and survive side-by-side with sound films – Murnau thought that more poetic or lyrical films were well suited to being produced and projected in silent format. Accordingly, Murnau believed that film as an art would in the future embrace both silent films like Tabu as well as talking pictures.)
The German critic, Lotte Eisner, writing about Tabu calls the film the "apogee of the art of silent film" and "visually perfect." Murnau was famous for his moving camera and for streamlining his narratives so that very few titles were necessary to explain the images – his picture The Last Laugh (in German, Der Letzte Mann) was the first important silent film to be made entirely with out intertitles. In Polynesia, Murnau couldn’t move the camera; the infrastructure necessary for those effects did not exist. As a result, Murnau relied upon powerful evocative, sculptural staging of his actors against lush tropical landscapes and carefully designed editing. The movie’s cinematography was awarded an Academy Award for best camerawork in 1931.
Intertitles
Tabu has no titles descriptive of the action. There is no scene-setting after the first ethnographic titles and no extraneous characterization of the images – in essence, what you see is what you get.
As in Nosferatu, Murnau uses documents in lieu of titles – Hitu carries a scroll announcing his mission to seize a virgin from Bora-Bora. The couple’s dilemma in Papeete, Tahiti is shown by diary entries and the credit account maintained by the pygmy Chinese merchant. Murnau’s felt intertitles interrupted films and were generally unnecessary if the movie was coherently constructed.
Tabu and Expressionism
Tabu marks the confluence of German expressionist interest in the South Sea Islands with Hollywood film making. As we have seen, Murnau produced Tabu with money from Hollywood and, indeed, returned to Santa Monica after the movie was complete. About the same time, German painters and sculptors were exploiting South Sea and primitivist motifs in their art.
In the late 19th century, Germany’s imperialist aspirations led it to annex as colonies substantial territories in Oceania. The largest German colonies in the south Pacific were Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (the northeast quadrant of Papua, New Guinea) and the Bismarck Archipelago, a number of fairly large islands off the east coast of New Guinea. These lands, with a dozen other island groups, comprised Deutsche Neuguinea – that is, German New Guinea. Before the First World War, German artists, naturists (nudists), mystics, and theosophists visited these colonies in swarms. Papua New Guinea and the south sea islands were thought to be a natural paradise, a place where human nature had not been deformed by economic or religious oppression. The Germans were obsessed with "race’ and "purity" and the people dwelling on small islands surrounded by thousands of miles of water were considered examples of undiluted and ethnically pure human beings, Naturvoelker ("Nature-people") living in accord with ancient tribal laws that expressed perfectly their racial essence. Although many German artists were content to study these specimens of undisfigured humanity by viewing pictures of them in ethnographic museums and by sketching their masks and other ritual objects, several of the greatest Expressionist artists actually traveled to German Polynesia and Papua New Guinea to live among the people on those islands. (In this respect, the Germans were following in the footsteps of Paul Guaguin, the grest post-impressionist painter who left Breton – and his wife and children – for an uninhibited life in French Polynesia.) Max Pechstein and Emil Nolde both spent considerable time in the German colonies in the South Seas and produced innumerable images of the people and landscapes of that place.
The interest in Oceania by German expressionists reflects an essential and motivating impulse for that artistic movement – art should express the inner essence of that which it depicts; optical appearance is secondary to the emotion that the object of contemplation induces in the viewer. Expressionist art attempts to convey the emotional essence of an encounter with the world and the people in the world – certain fundamental forms express certain fundamental emotions or forces that exist in reality. The artist’s objective is to pierce through optical or visual appearance to achieve an unmediated encounter with these fundamental forces. In effect, expressionism was one of the last bastions of Platonic thought, the idea that all appearances are underwritten, and arise from, essential forces and powers that are concealed from the eye. The veneer of civilization that religion and economics imparts to the man who lives in the city shields, and conceals from him, the real powers that exist in the world. These powers can be accessed through art or by ritual. The Naturvoelker of the South Seas were imagined to be people that lived in close harmony with these essential forces and powers and could, therefore, guide over-civilized Europeans into an encounter with these mysteries, ultimately, the enigmas of sex and love and death. (Imperium, a wonderful recent novel by the German writer Christian Kracht dramatizes many of these ideas – the story involves a German mystic who travels to the Solomon Islands before World War One to found a coco-vore utopia, that is, a utopia where its inhabitants eat nothing but coconuts.)
Although Murnau was interested in Expressionist ideas, I would hesitate to characterize him as expressionistic film maker. Actual expressionistic film making, properly characterized, is limited to a handful of movies made between 1916 and 1920, most notably The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Visual expressionism, particularly as expressed in the graphic arts, involved very significant distortions of optical reality – narrative films are generally wedded to an appearance of accurate optical reality; therefore, the kind of expressionist distortions evident in a film like Dr. Caligari were a dead-end – audiences wanted movies to reflect some semblance of optical reality.
Murnau’s involvement with Expressionism, nonetheless, is significant in several respects. (One key factor is Murnau’s name – the great director’s actual last name was Plumpe, not a particularly inspiring moniker; F.W. Plumpe assumed the stage-name "Murnau" because he particularly admired a German village with that name, a place in the country frequented by the great Expressionist painters and closely associated with them.) In my estimation, Murnau distorts reality to express inner states of being inconspicuously and without overtly disrupting the fiction that the filmgoer is seeing something realistic. In his massivley engineered (some would say over-engineered films) of late twenties – for instance, Faust and Sunrise, A Story of Two Humans – the most conspicuous expressionist effect is the director’s use of light. Murnau thought of light as ‘raum-gestaltende" effect – that is, "space-creating". Accordingly, in Faust and Sunrise, lighting effects create glares and halos, zones of intense brightness surrounded by the densest darkness. Murnau’s expressionist interests, accordingly, often appear in the director’s deployment of exceedingly non-naturalistic effects of chiaroscuro, intense light and dark with figures casting inky, ominous shadows.
Filming in the South Seas, Murnau was forced to mostly use natural light with reflectors. Therefore, he is not able to engineer the dense chiaroscuro that characterizes his later German films and some, but not all, of the surviving Hollywood pictures. (Murnau’s comedy City Girl shot before he departed for the South Seas is a conventionally lit, sunny, and pleasant romantic comedy.) Stripped of some of his characteristic pictorial resources (moving camera and intensely dramatic lighting effects), Murnau, nonetheless, demonstrates several strong Expressionist affinities in the way that Tabu is made.
How does Murnau portray space and topography in Tabu? I think close analysis of the film warrants a conclusion that Murnau’s use of optical space in Tabu is expressionistic. This effect is sub rosa – we don’t immediately perceive that the space occupied by Murnau’s Polynesian islanders is irrational and non-naturalistic. But if we attend close to the film’s mise-en-scene, we encounter puzzling incongruities. These incongruities are best explicable in these terms – the space in which the islanders live is constructed expressionistically: it conforms to an inner reality.
In the first half of the film, "Paradise", we are shown a world that is completely open in all dimensions. The world is a sort of playground for the desires of the Polynesian islanders. The paradox that the film presents in thematic terms is this: the Polynesians can effortlessly enjoy any pleasure that they want except the greatest pleasure, the consummation of sexual desire. (This theme of forbidden love undoubtedly arises to some degree from Murnau’s homosexuality. You can have anything you want except the person that you love.) In the opening sequence, Matiha throws spear after spear into shallow water, impaling fish without any apparent difficulty. (An omitted sequence from the film, later released as "Treibjagd im Sud-See" ("Fish hunt in South Seas") in 1940, shows the entire village driving fish into the shallows and, then, harvesting them by the hundreds – this is an intensely dramatic sequence, but one that shows fairly arduous efforts required to sustain life in these idyllic islands. One can speculate that Murnau excluded the footage from "Paradise" because it shows that real organization and the considerable effort of everyone in the village is necessary to harvest fish from the sea – that is, the frenzied activity of the sequence interferes with the idea of the Edenic "paradise" in the opening part of the film.) Space and landscape provide no obstacles – the boys effortlessly climb a waterfall to access the interior of the island. Motion is free and unobstructed in all dimensions – one boy scrambles a hundred feet up a palm tree without any difficulty; people use natural sluices in waterfalls to rapidly move between different locations. When a ship appears far beyond the boundary reef, everyone in the village is instantly waterborne – even tiny children are confident enough on the sea to leap into outrigger canoes and rush through turbulent seas, there is substantial surf at the reef, to swarm onto the boat. Climbing from the canoes onto the European vessels poses no problem – the natives seem preternaturally agile. Everyone moves like a dancer and, even, scenes of prosaic action involve actors who move as gracefully as ballet dancers.
But, of course, all of this is stylized. We can see this in the opening sequence – Matahi does not initially stand on the sharp, painfully jagged piece of coral in the surf. In fact, he stands behind the nasty-looking coral plinth in the opening scene on sand – the tide has not yet reached the coral boulder. But in the third or fourth shot of the movie, time has obviously passed and, now, the coral boulder is surrounded by water. In the following scenes, Matahi stands on the sharp rock, but seems uncomfortable. Within the first thirty seconds, the film presents us with shots that don’t match – in the opening scene, the surf is far away and rock stands on the beach; in the second scene showing the rock, the ocean is now all around the boulder. The blithe way that the natives move through their landscape is contradicted by various cues – first, the boys in the water seem to be walking or scampering carefully so as to not slice open their feet on sharp coral. We have a sense that the landscape somehow is too rugged, too sharp, too angular – that it opposes the way that the people move.
Simply put, the topography of the opening forty minutes of the film makes no realistic sense. A flower garland, apparently, drops from the waterfall that decorously slides down a coastal cliff. (The cliff looks sharp and dangerous, but the actors seem able to scramble up the cliff without any difficulty – my suspicion is that we are seeing the best of a hundred takes with respect to ascending the waterfall.) The boys decide to climb to the top of the waterfall. We see them begin that ascent and, then, immediately the film cuts to a waterfall and punch-bowl-like plunge pool where the maidens are bathing. The editing suggests that these locations are adjacent – in fact, later we find that the waterfalls and punch-bowl plunge pools are far in the interior of the island not directly above the coastal cascade as the cutting initially suggests. The action with the girls among the waterfalls is confusing – how many waterfalls are there: one or two or three? Probably, there are two waterfalls although this is hard to decipher. (In fact, it’s not clear where the waterfall scenes were shot – there are no waterfalls on Bora Bora.) The landscape with the waterfalls is weirdly accommodating – it’s less of a landscape than a water-park. And this stylization is essential to the film’s mood. When we ask "How many waterfalls are there?" The film answers: as many as are desired. The landscape seems to shift and warp according to what the characters desire – the topography in other words is pliable, it bends to the desires of the protagonists. Very few of the shots comprising the first section of the film match – for instance, when Matahi surprises Rire, he appears from a place where we don’t expect him to be. How did he magically get behind Rire? Again, the landscape seems less of a real place and more of a dreamscape of desires that are offered up by the terrain as soon as imagined.
(Opposed to this idyllic and strangely accommodating landscape is the impulsive violence of the characters. When the women beat Rire, they seem to be actually hurting her. Rire seems to have blood (or, at least, Schmutz) of some kind all over her legs and shoulders – Matahi wipes off the substance whatever it is. The other woman involved in the cat-fight has a very noticeable black-eye. In other words, this is a paradise in which people strike one another, hold each other’s heads under the water, and, in fact, get visibly injured.)
The uncertainty about the film’s landscape is enhanced in the bravura sequence involving the islanders taking to the sea to clamber onto the sailing ship. A dramatic, double-horned mountain looms over the village. But where exactly is the mountain? It seems to shift position in relationship to the bay as the scene progresses. The geometry of the bay is uncertain and the distance of the sailing ship from shore seems also to vary from shot-to-shot. The armada of canoes striking out across the bay provides Murnau with a splendid opportunity to move his camera and the effects that he achieves in this sequence are extraordinary, particularly the fugue-like contrast between motion and counter-motion – the canoes hurtling seaward, while Matahi heads to shore to pick up his little brother. This part of the film has an exhilarating character, a sense of great freedom and motion, a visceral joyous energy that is suddenly impeded by the ominous figure of the priest, Hitu. Prior to the appearance of Hitu, the viewer has the impression that the island and sea around it are perfectly, and effortlessly, penetrable – people can move in every direction without encountering any kind of obstruction.
Murnau uses space and topography in a similarly non-naturalistic way in the "Paradise Lost" half of the film. Hitu appears without warning out of nowhere – it is unclear as to whether we are to interpret his appearances as real or imaginary. French Tahiti (Papeete) where the second half of the film takes place is ruined, a paradise lost infected with booze and cash-money. Rire and Matahi’s destruction is over-determined – of course, we can accept Murnau’s narrative showing Hitu’s malign influence as the cause of their doom, but, we are, also, I think warranted in construing Hitu figuratively, as an embodiment of the forces that destroy the couple. And, of course, the champagne poured by Matahi in the party, and purchased on credit, precipitates the film’s catastrophe – the native people of Tahiti were, in fact, savaged by alcohol, traded their women for booze, and, then, economically destroyed. Matahi and Reri’s plight seems a metonym for the calamities that contact with Europeans inflicted upon the South Sea islanders.
One of the most noteworthy and memorable scenes in silent cinema is Nosferatu’s appearance on a death-ship in Bremen harbor in Murnau’s 1921 unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. With rats underfoot, Nosferatu slinks away from the ghost-vessel that has glided to a stop in the misty, dark harbor. The appearance of Nosferatu is a harbinger of doom for the young lovers in that film and, also, symbolizes the onset of a great pestilence, rat-born plague, that kills most of the people in Bremen. In Tabu, Murnau returns to the image of death gliding ashore in a sailing ship – it is interesting that the ship carrying Hitu is conspicuously European in appearance. This verifies my suspicion that Hitu, in part, embodies the forces of alcohol and mercantilism brought to Polynesia by the Europeans – in fact, one might argue that the failure to placate the Polynesian gods by offering Reri as a virgin consecrated to them has, perhaps, doomed the entire culture to ruin at the hands of the Europeans. In any event, the appearance of Hitu is non-naturalistic and ambiguous, signified by imagery of fatalistic doom invoking Murnau’s earlier vampire film – one of the first great international blockbuster hits of the silent film era.
At the end of the movie, Matahi’s desperate pursuit of the skiff in which Hitu has abducted Reri is designed as a kind of anxiety nightmare. Hitu’s skiff glides smoothly as if yanked over the waters by an invisible agency. By contrast, Matahi’s pursuit is obstructed not once, but twice, by barrier reefs exposed above the water, painfully sharp coral outcroppings that the young lover has to run across. Why don’t these reefs block Hitu’s skiff? Why don’t the exposed reefs pose an obstruction to the old witchdoctor? As we have seen in other contexts, space is used expressionistically – the topography that is unimpeded, open sea to the skiff, is blocked with painful barricades of coral reef as far as Matahi is concerned. As in a nightmare, Matahi’s pursuit of the skiff keeps encountering obstacles, piles of rock rising enigmatically from the sea that he must cross. The final sequence could not be improved in terms of concise brevity and uncanny, but precise horror. Matahi comes close to the boat and seizes a rope dangling from it. Hiru locks the girl away but putting down the hatch over her – figuratively, he is sealing her into a dark casket. We don’t even really see her face when he locks her away – she has already departed into his dark realm. The close-up of Hitu’s hand using a preternaturally sharp knife to slice through the rope to which Matahi is clinging is an astounding image – not only does the film show us a literal event, the lifeline to Matahi being cut, but, also, something larger and more intensely ominous: Hitu is one of the Fates, Nemesis, cutting the thread that symbolizes a human’s life.
As Nemesis expands to seize control of the film, the idea of tabu similarly expands. At first, Tabu is just the name of the film, the title of a story. Then, Reri becomes tabu. Later, we see a sign posted in the sea signifying that a part of the lagoon is tabu. Then, the film ends with the word filling the screen – tabu has come to mean "end" and, now, it seems that an entire world has fallen under it’s malign spell.
Murnau described the film’s theme in these terms: "Men are given to create their own tragedies when destiny is too generous with them."
A Snatch
of poetry:
(...at eve they)
Voyage on gentle gales from Fairy-Land,
Where Melodies round honey-dropping flowers,
Footless and wild, like birds of Paradise,
Nor pause, nor perch, h overing on untamed wing!
These lines are from Coleridge’s poem "The Eolian Harp". Birds of paradise were known to the English primarily as anatomical specimens collected in the South Sea islands and, particularly, Papua New Guinea. The natives who prepared the specimens skinned them and removed their legs. This practice led to a belief that the birds were without feet and, according to the Norton Anthology of English Literature, "spent their lives hovering in the air and feeding on nectar."
Return to the Islands
In 1930, when Tabu was being filmed in French Polynesia (Tautira), Henri Matisse was visiting the island. Matisse closely observed the film’s production and made many sketches of Reri and the Polynesian landscapes. Matisse’s watercolors and sketches of the Polynesian girl are among his most evocative works.
Later, Reri of Tabu was recuited by Paramount to tour the United States. (Reri was not quite the naive Polynesian maiden shown in the film – Murnau met her in a bar in French Tahiti where she was working as a cocktail waitress; her name was Anne Chevalier.) Reri came from Polynesia to the United States where she promoted by the studio as a new starlet, the debutante of the hour. She performed in the Ziegfield Follies and made many professional appearances for her fans. Five years after her arrival in the United States, Reri returned to Tahiti. She stayed for only a couple of days – "it’s too boring," she proclaimed, "there is nothing to do."
Tabu has a very important cultural status in Polynesia. The film is frequently revived on the islands. At showings, people reminisce about the characters in the film, villagers that the older men and women can recall. In that respect, the movie serves as a link between the Polynesians today and their ancestors shown in the film. Reportedly, screenings of the film are festive affairs, more like family reunions that conventional movie-going with banqueting and much carousing accompanying the movie. The portrait of old Polynesia shown in the movie, imagery that was idealized when the picture was shot, has replaced Tahitians actual memories of the period of the time displayed in Tabu – in effect, the movie has substituted its vision of the islands for reality.
QUIZ:
2. This writer suffered from tuberculosis and wrote a famous short novel that is made into a horror film about twice a decade. He died in Samoa and is buried under a tombstone that ends with the words: Home is the sailor, home from sea/ And the hunter from the hill. Who is this writer? What is the book that he wrote that was repeatedly made into a horror film?
3. Emil Nolde, the great German painter who lived for several years in New Guinea, was a devout follower of German National Socialism until Hitler declared his paintings to be unartete or (name the word)?
4. Before making Tabu, Murnau directed City Girl, a story about a Chicago waitress who falls in love with a farmer (who has come to Chicago to sell wheat), marries him, and goes to live on his farm in ____________.
5. Murnau’s co-director on Tabu, Robert Flaherty, is most famous for his 1922 documentary Nanook of the North. What happened to Allakariallak, the Inuit man who played Nanook?
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