Moana

After Nanook of the North, Flaherty turned his camera from the Arctic to the South Seas. The film is set in a village in Samoa: fishing, gathering taro, working coconut, dancing, and at the end a tattooing ceremony marking a young man's passage into adulthood. The narrative builds no plot; it follows the order of daily work and shows each movement at length. The film has a place in history in two separate ways. First, John Grierson used the word documentary in English for the first time in a piece written about it in 1926. Second, how much of what we see actually happened that day is contested. Flaherty handed out roles to villagers, invented family relationships and revived for the camera customs no longer practised by then; the hand-tapped tattooing at the close had already been abandoned in 1926. Among Samoans there are two views of the film: those who value it for recording a vanishing custom, and those who read it as a construction of the colonial gaze.