Moana was filmed in
Samoa (then under the
Western Samoa Trust Territory) in the villages of
Safune district on the island of
Savai'i. The name of the lead male character,
Moana, means 'deep sea, deep water' in the
Samoan language. In making the film, Flaherty lived with his wife and collaborator
Frances H. Flaherty and their three daughters in Samoa for more than a year. They arrived in Samoa in April 1923 and stayed until December 1924, with the film being completed in December 1925. Hoping that Flaherty could repeat the success of
Nanook,
Paramount Pictures sent him to Samoa to capture the traditional life of the
Polynesians on film. Flaherty reportedly arrived with 16 tons of filmmaking equipment. This included both a regular movie camera and a
Prizma color camera, as Flaherty hoped to film some footage in that color process, but the Prizmacolor camera malfunctioned.
Moana is thought to be the first feature film made with
panchromatic black-and-white film rather than the
orthochromatic film commonly used at the time in Hollywood feature films. Flaherty developed his film as he went along, in a cave on Savai'i. In the process, he inadvertently poisoned himself and required treatment after he drank water from the cave that contained
silver nitrate, which washed off the film stock. The silver nitrate also caused spots to form on the negative. As in the earlier
Nanook (and his later film,
Man of Aran), Flaherty went well beyond recording the life of the people of Samoa as it happened. He followed his usual procedure of "casting" locals whom he considered potentially photogenic performers into "roles", including creating fictitious family relationships. He also, as in the other films, on occasion set up scenes in which exotic earlier practices were re-enacted as if still current. In
Nanook and
Man of Aran, it included setting up anachronistic hunting sequences. In
Moana, at a time when Samoans were typically wearing modern Western-style clothing under the influence of Christian missionaries, Flaherty persuaded his performers to don traditional
tapa cloth costumes (made from the bark of the
paper mulberry tree, in a process shown in some detail in the film); the "maidens" went
topless. He also staged a coming-into-manhood ritual in which the young male lead underwent a painful traditional
Samoan tattoo, for which the young man required a generous compensation. Those devices have led to Flaherty's films sometimes being categorized as "
docufiction". Still, it emerged that living off the land and the ocean in Samoa was comparatively easy, leaving limited scope for Flaherty to draw on his favored theme of "Man against Nature" as he had in
Nanook and was to again in
Man of Aran. Thus, although the film was visually stunning and drew critical praise at the time, it lacked the raw drama of
Nanook, which may have contributed to its failure at the box office. (Bruce Posner, the film's restorer, commented: "God knows what Paramount expected. It was just poorly released. They tried to shift it into a love story of the South Seas, which it is, but not a conventional one.") ==Reception==