The collaboration between Murnau and documentarian Robert Flaherty is a melodramatic and exotic fiction passed off as reality for Western audiences.
Back in 1931, the world was a much smaller place for most people – if not exactly monocultural, then certainly not the global village it is now. This meant that not only were there entire nations that were still relatively isolated culturally from the rest of the world but also that these nations and their populations were the source of much fascination for Western cinema audiences. From Mondo movies to serious anthropological studies, ethnographic documentaries and feature films were all the rage up until the 1970s (and arguably beyond) as people sought out stories of exotic peoples and places that they had no likelihood of ever visiting or encountering. The often idealised and infantalised nature of these stories offered a welcome escape from the worries of ‘Western civilisation’ while also allowing the viewer to bask in the superiority of their own culture.
The master of these films in the 1920s was Robert Flaherty, who pioneered the docufiction genre with films like Nanook of the North and Moana. These were essentially documentaries, but documentaries with staged, controlled scenes to help tell a story. His modern-day progeny are the likes of Made in Chelsea and Jersey Shore, guaranteeing that Flaherty will spend the rest of time spinning in his grave.
Moana, a tale of love in the exotic South Seas Islands, would lead to his collaboration with Nosferatu director F.W. Murnau on Tabu – the pair wrote the story, but Murnau directed most of the film (much to Flaherty’s dismay), which effectively takes the exotica of Moana and grafts it onto a melodramatic boy-meets-girl tragedy. It would be Murnau’s last film – he died in a car crash a week before its premiere.
Set on Bora Bora, Tabu tells the story of Matahi and Reri, a young couple whose burgeoning love affair is brought to a crashing halt when the ageing Hitu – an emissary from the island of Fanuma – arrives, via a Western sailing ship, at the island on a mission to find a new sacred maiden for his island. Reri is the girl chosen, destined to remain pure and untouched – “man must not touch her or cast upon her the eye of desire”, as the laws say, under penalty of death. She is ‘tabu’.
The young couple cannot accept this, and Matahi steals her away from the ship and the pair head for a French colony, where the old religions no longer hold sway. He finds work as a pearl diver, but runs up huge debts during a celebration and so cannot afford tickets out when they are discovered – firstly by the local policeman, who is bribed with a pearl, then by the determined Hitu, who appears out of nowhere like an avenging angel. His only option is to dive for pearls in a forbidden area, where a shark has already killed one man; but unknown to him, Reri has already agreed to return with Hitu in order to save Matahi’s life…
Seen today, Tabu no longer has the novel exotic charms that once thrilled audiences, but instead feels like a story that explores the end of an era of innocence for the South Sea Islands. The story deals explicitly with that – the fact that while some islands remain unspoiled, others are increasingly Westernised, while the clash of cultures between the fleeing couple and the more commercial, mercenary people of the island they hide out in will ultimately lead to their downfall. As a drama, the film is only partially successful – it’s often too sentimentalised and simplistic to really work and seen today, the somewhat idealised and paternal view of the Islanders might feel insultingly racist and condescending for many viewers. It’s certainly a very Western ideal of South Sea Island life and because of that, the film is always going to be too problematic for some, despite its age. But if you can look past that, there is much to admire in this: Murnau ensures that, despite the fairly weak narrative, there is always something interesting going on, with his carefully framed visuals, the interesting, authentic-looking cast (an opening title card announces that “only native-born South Sea islanders appear in this picture with a few half-castes and Chinese”) and the mix of drama and pseudo-documentary footage ensures that the film, however clichéd the story might be, never becomes dull. It stretches the definition of ‘documentary’ to breaking point – it’s closer to social realism set in a culture and world that the viewers of the time would find exotic and alien. Seen now, it feels like a record – however manufactured and crafted by outsiders that it might be – of a world that is no longer with us.
It also looks extraordinarily beautiful. You might expect the island paradise of the early scenes on Bora Bora to look less impressive in black and white, but that’s not the case, thanks to Floyd Crosby’s excellent cinematography – and the early scenes with the Islanders frolicking and falling in love have a definite ‘Garden of Eden’ feel about them. It’s daring stuff for the time too – the restored version features the bare-breasted scenes that had to be removed from the film in the era of the production code and it possibly features cinema’s first shark attack scene.
While Tabu is less interesting and more clearly dramatised than Flaherty’s own documentaries, it’s nevertheless a very entertaining and intriguing mix of docufiction and narrative drama that, while not quite the grand tragedy it wants to be, is certainly worthy of investigation.
DAVID FLINT
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