Amateur Movie Makers (Dec 1926-Dec 1927)

are not superior is also fallacious. The public in the United States has become so accustomed to conventional film patterns that in my estimation the purest camera effects must be gotten among settings and peoples entirely different from our own. The subject matter there is s u f f iciently strange to be impressive and new, even if the camera is handled purely and simply." Ethnological uses are what Mr. Flaherty suggests. On the surface this is a statement which sounds as interesting as a post-graduate course for high school spinsters. Yet the charm and beauty of the first results of his theory, "Moana" and "Nanook" belie their formal label. There is about him and his work an unconscious "feel" for the camera which brings glory to the simplest of subjects. He believes "that there is a grace and dignity, a culture and refinement in many peoples, now being hounded out of existence by industrialism and science, that only the camera can capture and interpret. Certain types in Mexico, Labrador, South America and Asia, are being degenerated by the white man's liquor and cotton underwear. These peoples are, in their natural living and unconscious culture, sometimes more complete esthetes than we, in our smelly automobiles and airless tenements can ever be. A PORTRAIT OF MOANA ACTION IN THE SOUTH SEAS "I propose to go, sometime soon, with as much sympathy as I possess to present these people through the camera from their own point of view. Pedagogues who speak about the educational effects of moving pictures should be made to remember the stupidity of films where all Chinese are villians, all Americans heroes, all Mexicans thieves, and all Negroes cowards." Mr. Flaherty also joins with those who believe an intelligent use of moving pictures will promote world peace. And to prove his point he recalled an incident which reveals this power, although, paradoxically in this instance, it was used in behalf of war. The French, desiring to mobilize Moroccan troops, found that certain tribes with traditional enemities would not serve together. Some keen mind then conceived the plan of showing the opposing tribes motion pictures of their supposed enemies in their every day life. Although averse at first to even watching the pictures, and although cries of alarm met the first scenes of their foes projected on the screen, the outcome of this film demonstration was the destruction of the fancied barriers between the tribes, and they consented to serve together. It was in "Moana of the South Seas" that he did his most unhampered work. He did not approach the theme of life in the tropics with the ignorant attitude which most Westerners adopt at the mention of a grass skirt, and therefore, he succeeded in truly representing "the finest remnants of the Polynesian race, in all its mild gentility and aris tocratic living." Samoa, the haven of Robert Louis Stevenson, Gauguin and Frederick O'Brien, meant to him a place which, by its very geographical position, must yield him grace and romance, quite apart from anything he had ever read or seen before. Since he considers the camera as a super-eye, superior to painting and literature in its detection of significant detail, he was not disappointed. Frances Hubbard Flaherty, his wife, and their three children lived for two years among the Samoans on the island of Savai'i, in the village of Safune. She, too, was an amateur, yet her work became fine enough to be invaluable. A lava cave sacred to the natives and untouched by them, furnished the necessary icy water and blackness for developing the films. Nature gave them a setting of luxurious green and riotous color, the like of which could be found in no Hollywood studio. He needed only to move his natives like gentle chess figures on this idyllic background to secure the effects which have made Moana immortal. And its acclaim "s heard, not only in the United States, but in the whole of England, France and Ger (Continued on page 44) SAMOAN SUNSHINE Eight