The pioneering filmmaker Robert J. Flaherty, who made his name with “Nanook of the North” (1922) and collaborated with F. W. Murnau on the haunting 1931 “Tabu,” was an undeniable master of cinema.
But in recent years, his name has also become a flash point in controversies about representation and authenticity in so-called documentary filmmaking. A recent digital restoration of “Moana With Sound,” a 1980 update of a 1926 “docufiction” film that Flaherty made with his wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, could add potentially dizzying dimensions to this debate.
The Flahertys spent two years with their children on the South Sea island of Savaii to make their film for Paramount, and a note at the beginning of this version tells of Frances’s regret that the silent film could not include the songs of the Samoan natives depicted in the film. To this end, Monica Flaherty, the filmmakers’ daughter, traveled back to the territory in 1975, with the cinéma-vérité practitioner Richard Leacock, and recorded a soundtrack. A soundtrack not just of songs, but also of dialogue and effects — of crashing waves, spouting blowholes and more. In synchronization with the original film, it works better than it ought to have a right to, although there’s an occasional redundancy between the audio dialogue and the film’s now-very-quaint intertitles.
Titled “Moana: A Romance of the South Seas,” the original film is more focused on the labors of a small village — coconut shredding, spear fishing, the rather dispiriting (to contemporary eyes) harvesting of tortoiseshell from a live turtle — than on its ostensible narrative, involving the courtship of the young man of the title and a “maiden” named Faangase, and a particular manhood ritual endured by Moana. The imagery, in scenes that always unfold slowly, is truly startling, particularly given that the film is almost 90 years old. Matters of fact and fiction aside, sights like the undulating, near-transparent sea, where the village men pursue their catches, are ultimately their own justification here.
“Moana With Sound” is not rated. In Samoan with English-language intertitles. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes.