(Bruce Posner, the film's restorer, commented: "God knows what Paramount expected. 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. 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. Those devices have led to Flaherty's films sometimes being categorized as " docufiction". 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 to be generously compensated. 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. In Nanook and Man of Aran, it included setting up anachronistic hunting sequences. He also, as in the other films, on occasion set up scenes in which exotic earlier practices were re-enacted as if still current. He followed his usual procedure of "casting" locals whom he considered potentially photogenic performers into "roles", including creating fictitious family relationships.
Īs 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. The silver nitrate also caused spots to form on the negative. 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. Flaherty developed his film as he went along, in a cave on Savai'i. 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. 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. Flaherty reportedly arrived with 16 tons of filmmaking equipment. 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. They arrived in Samoa in April 1923 and stayed until December 1924, with the film being completed in December 1925. Flaherty and their three daughters in Samoa for more than a year. In making the film, Flaherty lived with his wife and collaborator Frances H. The name of the lead male character, Moana, means 'deep sea, deep water' in the Samoan language. Moana was filmed in Samoa (then under the Western Samoa Trust Territory) in the villages of Safune district on the island of Savai'i.