Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) [Masters of Cinema #66] [Re-UP]

In 1929, F.W. Murnau (Nosferatu, Faust, Sunrise), one of the greatest of all film directors, invited leading documentarist Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Man of Aran) to collaborate on a film to be be shot on location in Tahiti, a Polynesian idyll in which Murnau imagined a cast of island actors would provide a new form of authentic drama and offer rare insight into their “primitive” culture. The result of their collaboration was Tabu, a film that depicts the details of indigenous island life to tell a mythical tale that is rich in the universal themes of desire and loss.

Subtitled a “Story of the South Seas”, Tabu concerns a Tahitian fisherman (played by an islander, Matahi) and his love for a young woman (played by fellow islander Reri, who went on to star on Broadway) whose body has been consecrated to the gods, rendering her tabu as far as mortal men are concerned. The lovers flee their island and its restrictive traditions, but will their love prevail in the “civilised” world?

This Oscar-winning film (the Academy Award went to cinematographer Floyd Crosby) is both poetic and simple in tone. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present – completely uncensored and fully restored – this landmark film of rare exoticism and magical beauty, described by critic Lotte Eisner in 1931 as “the apogee of the art of the silent film”.

Once Rousseau had taught disenchantment with civilisation, sophisticated Europeans came increasingly to look on ‘primitive’ peoples and their values not just as curiosities but as bearers of deep truth about humanity. Science followed on the heels of sentiment and for a hundred years anthropologists fed lore of the remote into our culture. Chronologically Tabu falls midway between two classic books of the genre, The Golden Bough by JG Frazer and La Pensée sauvage by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and connects the two in its themes of the sacred virgin, ritual prohibition, and profanation. We are no longer able to gaze upon the pre-industrial world as these adventurers did. The questioning of relations between Europe and the post-colonial world made anthropology a self-conscious enterprise by the 1980s; ethnographers shunned the South Seas and stayed closer to home. Enjoying the exotic may still be fun today, but it feels like a shallow activity. And the shrinking of the world has made us more aware of our similarities with people in remote cultures and less likely to see the differences as deep.

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Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) [Masters of Cinema #66] [Re-UP]

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So Tabu is a souvenir of another world. It is not the Polynesian islands that are remote now, but the age of old-fashioned amateur anthropology. And yet, while it might be possible to get exercised about objectification and exoticization in the film if one tried, it is hard to see anything demeaning in its portrayal of the Tahitians. We can’t know whether the scenes the non-professional cast enact seemed to them authentic representations of their world, but the energy and grace with which they get stuck in are entirely disarming. For better or worse, the emotions which drive the film are not alien but recognisably those of Western stories of tragic young love. Matahi and Reri (supposedly the characters were simply named after the actors) are touchingly expressive as the lovers under the shadow of taboo.

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Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931) [Masters of Cinema #66] [Re-UP]

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The film is said to be much more Murnau’s work than producer Robert J. Flaherty’s, but to me it resembles the latter’s Nanook more than the former’s Nosferatu. Distinctively German, perhaps, is the robust enthusiasm for fresh air and nudity: Murnau is not particularly scrupulous about observing the convention that naked breasts should be concealed by a lei or flowing locks. I suppose there must sometimes have been an element of sexual tourism in viewings of this film, but I found it minimally prurient. There seemed to be a certain harmless relish in the depiction of muscular male divers in their trunks, but perhaps that was just me.

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The plot is nothing inspired, but it flows easily enough from one bravura set-piece to another. Particularly memorable are: the opening scene of mixed bathing high jinks by a waterfall; the whole village (even a toddler and his pet pig) canoeing out to meet a visiting ship; the East-meets-West scene at the port, where bare feet, working shoes, and high heels mingle on the dance floor, while champagne is drunk (fatefully) from bowls; and the unforgettable night swim with which the film concludes. Floyd Crosby certainly earned his Oscar for cinematography: I’d say this is what makes the film.

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Tabu is one of the last great silent films; this kind of innocent romanticism, non-verbal characterisation, and unhurried delight in the visual were perhaps harder to carry off once film narrative shackled itself to dialogue.

Electric Sheep

After Murnau's unhappy experience with the Hollywood studio system, he and Flaherty formed a joint production company in 1929 and went to Tahiti to make TABU together. Flaherty wanted to do an ethnographic, anthropological study of pearl fishermen, along the lines of his previous documentaries, but Murnau became fascinated with the exotic beauty and primitive superstitions of the South Seas culture and decided to create a narrative film, albeit in a quasi-documentary style with an all-native cast. When the original backers of the film, Colorart Synchrotone, went bankrupt in the stockmarket crash, Murnau financed the production with almost $150,000 of his own money, and he and Flaherty parted company. Although Flaherty is credited as co-writer and co-producer, TABU is essentially a Murnau film, as confirmed by Flaherty's brother, who was the film's associate producer.

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Murnau stayed on and spent eight months shooting the film on the islands of Bora-Bora and Takapota, and all the hallmarks of his style and themes are in evidence, such as the overwhelmingly sensual imagery, the concept of purity and redemption as symbolized by nature (especially water), the supreme power of love, and the despoiling of beauty and innocence by a corrupt "civilization." The film is as stylized and poetic as any of Murnau's, but in a naturalistic context, as opposed to the virtuoso soundstage artifice of his previous films. The Oscar-winning cinematography by Floyd Crosby, who later shot HIGH NOON (1952), and most of Roger Corman's Edgar Allan Poe films, is magnificent, filled with shimmering, luminescent images that evoke both paradise and paradise lost. Tragically, Murnau was killed in a car accident the night he finished editing the film, just days before its premiere. Ironically, TABU went on to become his biggest commercial success and would have given him the financial independence he had always craved.

TV Guide

Special Features:
- New Murnau-Stiftung/Luciano Berriatúa 75th anniversary restoration of the pre-Paramount, longer Murnau-approved version of the film, with uncensored scenes and titlecards for the first time
- Full-length commentary track by R. Dixon Smith and Brad Stevens
- 15-minute German documentary about Tabu by Luciano Berriatúa

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