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2. Idylls and Ruins: Frederick O'Brien in the Marquesas
- University of Hawai'i Press
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74 2 Idylls and Ruins Frederick O’Brien in the Marquesas We were going to the glamorous South Seas to film the life of the Polynesian as he had lived it in his islands before the white man came with his strange God, his strange manners, his strange and wonderful commodities. But Polynesia covers leagues and leagues of ocean, from Hawaii to New Zealand and Easter Island to Samoa. . . .Where in Polynesia could we find a people whose spirit was still strong? The answer we had from Frederick O’Brien. —Frances Flaherty,“Setting Up House and Shop” S hortly after the unexpected success of Nanook of the North, Robert and Frances Flaherty met with Frederick O’Brien at the Coffee House Club near Times Square with the painter George Biddle, who had lived in Tahiti, and the singer Grace Moore. According to Flaherty, as they were discussing ideas for his next film, O’Brien insisted he should go to the “exact opposite” of Nanook’s frozen climate—the South Pacific. O’Brien suggested Safune, on Savai‘i in Western Samoa, where Flaherty would ultimately end up living with his family for nearly two years, filming Moana. Flaherty recalled some time later O’Brien’s saying, “I know what appeals to you more than anything else is the racial differences. . . . There [in Safune] the white man has had the least influence.”1 O’Brien’s advice echoed Flaherty’s purist intentions. If Pacific cultures were“dying”as a result of western interference, the Flahertys were seeking a“strong”and unspoiled cultural mise-en-scène to match the heroics documented in Nanook. Mixing the pleasures of exotic escape with the urgency of ethnological salvage, O’Brien told Flaherty he would be just in time to “catch” some of the beautiful Samoan culture before it passed entirely away.2 O’Brien had spent several months in Samoa the previous year, traveling and researching what would become his third, and ultimately last, published book, Atolls of the Sun. In June 1921, towards the end of their brief but intense love affair, he wrote to Jack London’s widow, Charmian (Kittredge) London,“I am now living at Safune, Savai‘i, and your chart will show you where it is. It is the most beautiful Idylls and Ruins 75 village I have seen in the South Seas, with a river so big that I row up it in a boat to the bathing place.”3 O’Brien goes on to say that he is living with a friend and intends to stay “a month or several months” while writing a book about Samoa— one that never materialized (Atolls of the Sun ended up focusing on the Tuamotu [Paumotu] Archipelago).4 Two years later, the Flahertys arrived in Safune with a Paramount Studios expense account, taking a house “three-hundred and fifty yards from the sea”—the same house in which O’Brien had stayed. Frances’s opinion of Safune was less enthusiastic than O’Brien’s:“I cannot say that Safune turned out to be the most picturesque spot in the whole of the South Seas. Probably all of a hundred houses—thatched roofs, and curtains of woven coconut leaf to be let down in case of storms—stretched along the sandy beach.”5 Before looking at the Flahertys’ experiences in Samoa, however, it is worth considering why a filmmaker such as Flaherty, coming off a substantial box-office success, would so confidently trust the advice of a travel author that he would journey thousands of miles with his wife and three children, with thousands of dollars worth of film equipment and no planned scenario, to an unseen filming location in the middle of the Pacific. The answer lies partly in their recently established friendship and partly in the prominence that O’Brien enjoyed in the 1920s, a status that may be difficult to fathom given his obscurity now. But in the early 1920s, few would have disputed the claim made by the San Francisco Call and Post that O’Brien’s books were “more successful than almost any other travel books of our time.”6 His first, White Shadows in the South Seas, had an enormous impact on the reading public, setting in motion a wave of popular interest in South Pacific– themed material that would last more than a decade. It also established him as a serious and sought-after writer: “Editors are clamoring on...