A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (F.W. Murnau, 1931)


Cast: Matahi, Anne Chevalier, Bill Bambridge, Hitu. Screenplay: F.W. Murnau, Robert J. Flaherty. Cinematography: Floyd Crosby. Film editing: Arthur A. Brooks. 

Humankind is its own serpent in the garden. If you expect F.W. Murnau's Tabu: A Story of the South Seas to be yet another fable about innocence spoiled by civilization, you're wrong. For Murnau, the fault lies in humans themselves, in their insistence on proscribing natural and instinctive behavior. The taboo that precipitates the crisis in the filn is not imposed by the colonizing Europeans, although we see the consequences of the clash between their value system and that of the islanders well enough, but in the tribal imperative that prevents Matahi and Reri from consummating their love. Reri is chosen to become the tribe's sacred virgin, an honor she doesn't want, so she flees with Matahi and is pursued by the tribal elder, Hitu, who is tasked with putting the lovers to death. On the French-colonized island where they land, they encounter a culture they don't understand, particularly its attitude toward money, a foreign concept that will be their undoing. But the valorizing of virginity produces the central taboo of the film. Much has been made of the "gay gaze" in the film: the camera's lingering on beautiful male bodies, which is attributed to Murnau's own gayness. But if Tabu is in any way a product of Murnau's sexual orientation, it's in the emphasis on the central theme: the proscription of desire. In Murnau's case it was the desire for others of his own sex, so the virginity taboo is a metaphor for the rejection of queerness that Murnau encountered in his own life. 

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