Moana

Robert J. Flaherty’s follow-up to Nanook of the North shifts from the Arctic to the South Seas, portraying Samoan village life with a painterly eye. Blending ethnographic detail with a romanticized “Gauguin idyll,” the film celebrates daily rituals, communal traditions, and the passage into adulthood, suffused with what Flaherty called “pride of beauty, pride of strength.”

• south seas
• indigenous
• coconut
• tattooing
• samoa
• polynesia
• rite of passage
• polynesian
• oceania
• 1920s
• manhood
• ethnographic film
• tattoo art
• dance ritual
• native
• marriage rite
• docufiction
• indigenous tribes
• polynesian island