Tabu is a South Seas film in the Moana tradition. It went into production with the very proudest and most classical story the world's drama has ever evolved. A boy and a girl love each other—the gods sanctify the girl and make her tabu -the boy breaks the tabu -the gods destroy him. In one version or another it is the story which made Socrates and the Greek Tragedies and Corneille and Racine. If you remember the futile academics of your youth, it was as each dramatist solved the problem: for the gods or against the gods: for society and against the personal or for the personal and against society: that he was allowed by the professors to carry the banner of classicism or romanticism.
I myself was schooled by Calvinism to the classical version and have bee? content to see the gods obliterate the little tabu-breakers: the Antigones and Hippolytuses and Horaces. And who would not be who has heard an audience at the Comedie Frangaise roar their welcome to the ‘qu,il mouruf of Horace itself? Unfortunately, the Mumau-Flaherty work is not to be ranked with Corneille. To defy the gods is a terrible thing, and they have failed to make it terrible. The standard is there for everyone to see.
One should, I suppose, be grateful for South Sea settings and Polynesian maidens and the sterling rhythms of the hula-hula. The photography, when it is not fussy and finicky and too dam'beautiful by half, is the wonderful photography which says what it wants to say. The Polynesian bodies when they are not overposed are the decent god-like bodies Moana taught us to expect. The hula-hula dance I found at first a trifle exhibitionist, lacking by a hairbreadth in spontaneity and, therefore, in purity. It was not the dance of Moana- But it stays in the head. There is a moment in it when the youths and maidens glide into the ring of villagers which must be as great a split second as there is in all cinema. And more than that. In the middle of the ceremonial the boy moves to the girl he is losing. Their faces light up as they infect the dance suddenly with their happiness. The danger infects it and the beat of the dance gathers and increases about them. This is true dance, for it is drama.
I must say less of the efforts of the director to pursue the lovers to their fate. The thunder and lightning, which the original dramatic proposition calls for, is seriously absent. The film fuddles. Murnau leaves a long and arduous sub-title to describe the escape to another island across ‘a raging Pacific’. This is a mistake from which the film never recovers. You may not in cinema mention a raging Pacific in a footnote.
When retribution comes, it comes clumsily by way of dance halls and drink and some episodic pearl diving. I cannot myself swear to the sequence of events: I could not follow it through the heel-tapping of guitar and accordion numbers. I can only record that high tragedy in this case is not the steamroller affair it used to be. There is no little red flag marching ahead of it. It lacks the note of the inevitable.
There is, on the whole, relief when the messenger of the gods drops off a schooner (its name is Moand) and beats Tahiti and civilization to the job of destroying the protagonists. When heroes get muddled and forget to be heroes, destruction, is obviously the best thing for them. The quicker the better.
You will gather that Tabu is not quite a masterpiece. The drowning of the boy in the last sequence is good: the old messenger of the gods is a grand tragic figure at all points, indeed the only protagonist worthy of buskins; there is, too, some considerable dramatic value in the notion of Fate striking and missing in the shark sequence. With the last part of the dance, they belong to that larger world of cinema which one hardly ever glimpses in the commercial movies. They are worth collecting. And you must see Tabu,if only to realize how very great and pure a film Moana was.
It is difficult, of course, to tease out from the final account the individual contributions of Flaherty and Murnau. My own opinion is, that all the good things come from Flaherty and all the bad ones from Murnau. They were the wrong people to work together. Flaherty is a naturalist director, with an eye only for the spontaneities and the decencies, and a mind only for stories that go to the heart of things. Murnau was a studio product, a manipulator of artificial effects, a manager of exaggeration, introspective, perverse: an artist who never smelt an honest wind in his life. Flaherty was an explorer in the South Seas; Murnau was at worst a tripper, at best an exploiter. Tabu must have been a dogfight!
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