Whereupon Murnau ceases speaking the language of dreams, & masters the language of cinema for us all.......another one of these final works where by some mysterious series of coincidences the director strips down their formal sensibilities to the most essential parts. No lighting, shadows of grass yes - but it is mostly bodies in composition. Bodies always posing, expressing.

At the same time, it is Murnau's most fatalistic work - therefore his most philosophical. Aquarium meets aquarium - like this film is set in the middle of time, where one social system collides with another.
It is fatalistic because the lovers are doomed from the start - infact
Murnau can be seen as postulating that love can only authentically survive **outside**…

Defina um filme moderno:

um filme mudo de 1931 que, com exceção de alguns efeitos sonoros e alguns planos de ligação (cartas e comunicados que resumem algumas passagens da trama, e que por isso mesmo são brilhantemente elípticos, cf. anos depois Rivette e Oliveira fazendo o mesmo), é construído quase que integralmente como um filme sonoro, alcançando um grau de sofisticação plástica e rítmica que anuncia tanto o realismo do pós-guerra quanto o filme de aventuras marítimas dos cinemas americano e europeu.

Mas tem um outro aspecto ainda mais determinante para que essa modernidade tenha tido uma continuidade (de um lado, digamos mais flahertyano: Walsh, Dwan, Curtiz, Paolella, Sollima) mais profunda e intangível (do outro, mais murnauniano: Renoir, Rossellini, Vidor,…

Paradise.

The gentle rocking of waves. A seismic ripping that washes its crystalline rhythm over the sand. Love and nature dance into each other's embrace on the island of the two lovers' laughter. They are like Adam and Eve. They are surrounded by others but their true Eden is a lone island, united in each other's smiles. Her smile, his smile – they
swim in unison in the waters of purity. But – a waterfall approaches, its mouth gaping below, awaiting to caress the lovers with its tenebrous hands. How long before their fruit of love turns sour?

Paradise Lost.

The fruit took up the form of love. Their sin – being in love. Their island of Eden – washed…

"The virgin sacred to our gods has passed away, and I decree that from your island shall come her successor. One I have chosen for her beauty, for her virtue, for her royal blood."

On the idyllic island paradise of Bora Bora, a young man, Matahi, and a young woman, Reri, fall in love. Then, a messenger arrives, bearing the news that a sacred virgin has died before she could be sacrificed to the gods, and Reri has been given the honor to succeed her ...

Tabu: A Story of the South Seas is a drama film directed by F. W. Murnau, and written by Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty. It won the Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

This was…

How the hell do you go from an ethnographic documentary showing an island paradise, men and women wooing each other, joyous prolonged tribalistic dancing, and men rowing boats with the tunes of Smetana to such a menacing and deranged tale of pure misery and paranoia? Murnau’s latter films in his life seem to deal strongly with societal and cultural friction. Even though Robert J. Flaherty (of Nanook of the North fame) tried to initiate the film as a likeminded documentary capturing an indigenous people, Murnau's intense passion and cynicism breaks through at full-force.

It must be noted that the film's photographic beauty is a treat to feast on, especially with the palm tree canopies casting such gorgeous spectacles of light…

This is an exploitative tale in which Murnau and co. deploy a barrel of exoticised stereotypes in order to freshen up a traditional Romeo and Juliet style narrative. It is, of course, excellent that there is no Black Face here. Letting people play themselves and represent their own culture is hugely important; it is just that this reality is used only to support a stereotypical unreality.

Diversity and representation behind the camera, and in the most influential roles in film production, is of paramount importance. This comes across as the uniformed forcing a viewpoint onto a culture, which undoes a lot of the potential good.

However, the universal love story here is lovely. It is nice to see familiar stories…

There's so much movement and wonderfully orchestrated chaos in this. So much dancing and swimming and running and rowing. The movie whips and spins and lives. Human bodies, strong and quick, in motion, in repose, composed against a tropical coastal world. Murnau was already pretty punk rock for straight up stealing Bram Stocker's Dracula and making it, well, much more German, flying in the face of copyright law, but this, his last film, is even more pure punk rock solely for its bold grasp at authenticity through and through.

Last year I discovered this Hawaiian writer, Ian MacMillan, in a small bookshop on the big island. (I know that doesn't sound like a Hawaiian name. He was a transplant, but…

imagination and society, law and action, murnau's unchained camera broken free of the studio set and composing high tragedy within the bodies of these people who belong to a particular native culture and yet also belong to a universal story of desire sabotaged at the basic level of language and accumulation. tabu restages the moment where at the most fundamental unit of any relation, the embrace of lovers, we see the imposition of order, where virginity is made sacred and affection made blasphemous, so that the sacred may exist above and beyond the community and keep them safe within its auspices, the symbolic dimension overlapping the physical fact of love -- in essence, the power granted to individuals is broken…