Moana
Encyclopedia
Moana is a documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...

, the first docufiction
Docufiction
Docufiction is a neologism which refers to the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction. More precisely, it is a documentary contaminated with fictional elements, in real time, filmed when the events take place, and in which someone - the character - plays his own role in real life...

 in the history of cinema
Film
A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

, directed by Robert J. Flaherty
Robert J. Flaherty
Robert Joseph Flaherty, F.R.G.S. was an American filmmaker who directed and produced the first commercially successful feature length documentary film, Nanook of the North...

, the creator of Nanook of the North
Nanook of the North
Nanook of the North is a 1922 silent documentary film by Robert J. Flaherty. In the tradition of what would later be called salvage ethnography, Flaherty captured the struggles of the Inuk Nanook and his family in the Canadian arctic...

(1922). Moana was filmed in Samoa
Samoa
Samoa , officially the Independent State of Samoa, formerly known as Western Samoa is a country encompassing the western part of the Samoan Islands in the South Pacific Ocean. It became independent from New Zealand in 1962. The two main islands of Samoa are Upolu and one of the biggest islands in...

 in the villages of Safune
Safune
Safune is a traditional village district on the central north coast of Savai'i island in Samoa. It lies within the electoral constituency of Gaga'ifomauga. Safune is the birthplace of Mau leader Olaf Frederick Nelson and the filming location of Moana , one of the first documentaries made in the world...

 on the island of Savai'i
Savai'i
Savaii is the largest and highest island in Samoa and the Samoa Islands chain. It is also the biggest landmass in Polynesia outside Hawaii and New Zealand. The island of Savai'i is also referred to by Samoans as Salafai, a classical Samoan term used in oratory and prose...

. The name of the lead male character, moana means 'ocean' in the Samoan language
Samoan language
Samoan Samoan Samoan (Gagana Sāmoa, is the language of the Samoan Islands, comprising the independent country of Samoa and the United States territory of American Samoa. It is an official language—alongside English—in both jurisdictions. Samoan, a Polynesian language, is the first language for most...

.

In making the film, Flaherty lived with his wife and children in Samoa for more than a year. Flaherty arrived in Samoa in April 1923 and stayed until December 1924, with the film being completed in December 1925.

Along with Flaherty, the Portuguese
Portugal
Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 director José Leitão de Barros
José Leitão de Barros
José Leitão de Barros was a Portuguese film director and playwright.Among his most famous films are Maria do Mar , the second docufiction after ...

 is one of the first filmmakers to explore docufiction
Docufiction
Docufiction is a neologism which refers to the cinematographic combination of documentary and fiction. More precisely, it is a documentary contaminated with fictional elements, in real time, filmed when the events take place, and in which someone - the character - plays his own role in real life...

 and ethnofiction
Ethnofiction
Ethnofiction is a neologism which refers to an ethnographic docufiction sub-genre, a blend of documentary and fiction film in the area of visual anthropology. It is a film style in which the portrayed characters play their own roles as members of an ethnic or social group.Jean Rouch is considered...

 as forms of dramatic narrative: Maria do Mar (1930) is the second one.

Trying to get Flaherty to repeat the success of Nanook, Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures
Paramount Pictures Corporation is an American film production and distribution company, located at 5555 Melrose Avenue in Hollywood. Founded in 1912 and currently owned by media conglomerate Viacom, it is America's oldest existing film studio; it is also the last major film studio still...

 sent Flaherty to Samoa to capture the traditional life of the Polynesians
Polynesians
The Polynesian peoples is a grouping of various ethnic groups that speak Polynesian languages, a branch of the Oceanic languages within the Austronesian languages, and inhabit Polynesia. They number approximately 1,500,000 people...

 on film. Flaherty took both a regular movie camera and a Prizma
Prizma
The Prizma Color system was a technique of color motion picture photography, invented in 1913 by William Van Doren Kelley and Charles Raleigh. Initially, it was a two-color additive color system, similar to its predecessor, Kinemacolor...

color camera, hoping to film some footage in that color process, but the Prizmacolor camera malfunctioned. Moana is thought to be the first feature film made with panchromatic
Panchromatic
Panchromatic film is a type of black-and-white photographic film that is sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light. A panchromatic film therefore produces a realistic reproduction of a scene as it appears to the human eye. Almost all modern photographic film is panchromatic, but some types are...

 black-and-white film, rather than the orthochromatic
Orthochromatic
- Orthochromatic photography :Orthochromatic photography refers to a photographic emulsion that is sensitive to only blue and green light, and thus can be processed with a red safelight. The increased blue sensitivity causes blue objects to appear lighter and red ones darker...

 film commonly used at the time in Hollywood feature films.

However, Flaherty was always one step behind Western influences. When Flaherty arrived in Safune, he found that the missionaries had been there before him, and the native population had already abandoned their traditional clothing for Western styles. Furthermore, the island was a virtual paradise so that unlike Nanook, he could not build on the theme of "Man against Nature" for the storyline of his film. The film showed the young male lead undergoing a traditional Samoan tattoo
Pe'a
The Pe'a is the popular name of the traditional male tattoo of Samoa, which was originally called the malofie, a term used in the Samoan language chiefly vocabulary and 'respect' register .-Description:...

. Therefore, while the film was visually stunning, it failed at the box office, leaving Flaherty to attempt to find other locations more like the treacherous Arctic for his next film. In the book Call it Courage it was known as the God of the Sea.

The word "documentary" was first applied to films of this nature in a review of this movie written by "The Moviegoer", a pen name for John Grierson
John Grierson
John Grierson was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. According to popular myth, in 1926, Grierson coined the term "documentary" to describe a non-fiction film.-Early life:Grierson was born in Deanston, near Doune, Scotland...

 in the New York Sun
New York Sun (historical)
The Sun was a New York newspaper that was published from 1833 until 1950. It was considered a serious paper, like the city's two more successful broadsheets, The New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune...

on 8 February 1926.

External links

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