Moving Picture World (Jan-Mar 1913)

THE MOVING PICTURE WORLD 553 Melies in New Zealand The first visit of a motion picture company to this part of the Antipodes; full of interesting material. By Dore Hoft'm'an. JUST prior to the visit of the Melies Company to the Island of Borneo, this globe-trotting motion picture company, which is making a tour of the world, sojourned for a number of weeks in New Zealand. Most of this time was spent in the Maori, or native section of the islands of New Zealand, for the reason that the past and present life of the Maori tribes is entirely a virgin field for the motion picture camera. One of the principal ideas of Mr. Gaston Melies, in making liis tour of the world, is to record in motion pictures the lives of strange people in the remote nooks and corners of the earth. Conventional European pictures may be taken in almost any large city along the beaten path that circles the globe, but there are millions of people living far from the world's highways, concerning whose mode of life, either past or present, the knowledge we have is practically nil. There is a two-fold object in the purpose of Mr. Melies in visiting out-of-the-way countries. One reason is to furnish something new in the way of entertainment, and the other is that each picture taken shall possess a certain amount of educational value. The Maori of New Zealand is an interesting creature. There are many people who have not the remotest idea of what a Maori is and, it is said, a majority of the Europeans living in New Zealand know little more about them than the fact that they are a semi-savage tribe inhabiting the northern island of New Zealand, where they keep to thernselves as much as possible. Some of them adopt the white man's ways when they go to live in the white man's cities. To use a plain English, the Maori are nothing more or less than reformed cannibals. Before the white man came they occupied the entire islands of New Zealand and every blessed one of them was very fond of man-meat. Their history is one of the most horribly interesting parts of the study of ethnology. Hundreds of j-ears before Columbus discovered America, it is believed that cannibal fishermen. from the Fiji Islands were blown by storms far from their homes and eventually drifted upon the shores of various small islands that dot the Southern Seas. The population of these islands, including New Zealand, having begun in this way, developed in a wilder state than it ever had been in the early history of these brown-skinned castaways. They brought with them many customs and manners of the islands from whence they had drifted, together with most of the legendary circumstance which guides the daily life of all Polynesian people. These old, savage legends were augmented by new legends which developed as the generations succeeded each other, so that each island gradually came to have its own legends in addition to those that were brought to it. The whole history of the Maoris down to the time New Zealand was taken by the English, about 1840, is one of blood-curdling savagery. The entire country was divided into tribal possessions and these tribes were constantly at war. Cannibalism they brought with them from other lands and it continued until nearly 1870. There are numbers of old men among the Maori tribes today who have feasted upon man-meat in days gone by. Since the white man brought cattle and sheep to the islands, cannibalism has practically vanished, though many of the old men declare that there is nothing sweeter than well potted man-meat. "It tastes like roast pork," said one of the old chiefs to Mr. Melies, "only much sweeter." Said the same old fellow, "The last fight I was in, as a government scout, I saw the beach strewn with the bodies of revolutionary Maoris and as I saw them lying there, I am ashamed to say that I felt tlie old longing for a taste of man-meat come upon me, and 1 wished that I might have some of them roasting in my oven. But I remembered that I am now a Christian and must not eat the flesh of my brother, which restriction I sometimes think is the greatest drawback to the Christian religion." All male prisoners of war were killed and roasted and their meat preserved in calabashes or gourds for future use; the female captives were kept as slaves. For a Maori to wander away from his tribal home within the lines of another tribe, meant certain death. These tribal hostilities in many cases dated back for generations and had their origin in absurdly trifling events. One war which involved the Mr. Gaston Melies and His Company of Maori Actors. Scene Taken in New Zealand.