Pacific Film and Media Sample Advanced Undergraduate Syllabus Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994) © Fine Line Features _______________________________________________________________________________________ After the critical and commercial successes of Whale Rider, The Piano, Sweetie and My Brilliant Career the filmmaking of the Pacific has gained international recognition in the art house circuit and mainstream Hollywood production. Since the seventies, indigenous cultural renaissance across a range of the arts from novels like Albert Wendt’s The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man and Epeli Hau’ofa’s Tales of the Tikongs, to films like Lee Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors (1994), Chris Graham’s Samoan Wedding (2006) and Tusi Tamasese’s The Orator (2012) from Aotearoa (New Zealand), and Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Tracy Moffat’s Night Cries (1990) from Australia, began to challenge Western representations of the Pacific. In the first half of this course you will be introduced to the history of American and other settler (German, French, Australian, New Zealand) colonialism in the Pacific, as well as to cinematic representations of the Pacific, from Moana (Robert Flaherty, 1926), White Shadows of the South Seas (WS Van Dyke, 1928), Tabu (Murnau/Flaherty, 1931), Return to Paradise (1953, Mark Robson), to South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958). In the second half of the class, bifurcated by the Second World War (Thin Red Line), we will consider film, TV and new media and some literature from the Pacific basin, which engage or rework settler representations of the Pacific, from Velvet Dreams (Sima Urale, 1993) to Nice Colored Girls (Tracy Moffat,1988), Naming Number Two (Toa Fraser, 2006), Coconet (http://www.thecoconet.tv), and others. _______________________________________________________________________________________ The readings for this class are heavy. You are expected to keep up with them and respond to issues posted on blackboard in your weekly journal entries (due in class each week). Required Texts: 1) Susanne Williams Milcairns. Native Strangers: Beachcombers, Renegades and Castaways in the South Seas. Auckland: Penguin, NZ or Global, 2008. 2) Sean Mellon, Kolokesa Mahina-Tuai and Damon Salesa, eds. Tangata o Le Moana: New Zealand and the People of the Pacific. Wellington: Te Papa, 2012. 3) Herman Melville. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. NY: Penguin Classic Edition. 1996. 4) Epeli Hau’ofa. Tales of the Tikongs. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994. 5) I.C. Campbell. A History of the Pacific Islands. Los Angeles: UC Press, 1990 or other edition. 6) Pdf articles listed as BB on Blackboard Recommended Texts Peter Brunt, Nicholas Thomas, Sean Mellon et al. (eds) Art In Oceania: A New History. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2012 Jeffrey Geiger. Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the US Imperial Imagination. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008. Sean Mellon and Pandora Fulimalo Pereira (eds.) (2002), Pacific Art Niu Sila: The Pacific Dimension of Contemporary New Zealand Arts. Wellington: Te Papa Press Course Requirements Class Participation 20%; Journal 30%; class presentation 25%; term paper 25% Journal Entries (30%) Each week you will be required to write a journal entry on the readings and/or screenings and to respond to specific questions I raise in class beginning with week 2. I will collect the journals at different points during the semester and give you grades on your entries. I will post the questions each week on Blackboard. Length 1 page. Class Presentations (25%): The last week of class you will prepare a 20 minute presentation on a film or other text (book, photography, internet etc) of your own choice. You will be expected to engage with the readings & lectures/discussion of the course and connect them to your topic. You will prepare a handout with photocopies to distribute to the class, with an outline of your topic, bibliographies and recommended further readings, for the class. Term Paper: Topics to be announced later _______________________________________________________________________________________ I INTRODUCTION: PACIFIC KITSCH Screenings: Selections South Pacific (Joshua Logan, 1958, US) Readings: South Seas Adventure-Cinerama” (BB); Sven Kirsten, The Book of Tiki (selections, BB); Campbell chaps 1 and 2 Additional Readings Readings: Rob Wilson “Bloody Mary Meets Lois-Anne Yamamaka: Imagining Hawaiian Locality from South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge and Beyond”; Tiki Website http://tikimodern.com; Jim Lovensheimer, South Pacific: Paradise Rewritten. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010; selections, Michener, James A. Tales of the South Pacific, London: Collins and The World is My Home. New York: Random House, 2007. II THE COLONIAL PACIFIC: EXPLORERS AND BEACHCOMBERS Screenings: Selections: Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, Frank Lloyd & 1962, Lewis Milestone, US) Herman Melville, Typee chaps 1-10 Readings: Native Strangers, chap 2 “Accidental Authors” & chap 8 “On the Margins and in Despair”; Campbell chap 3 “Polynesia: the Age of European Discovery & chap 4 “Polynesia: Trade and Social Change”; Martin Sutton “South Pacific the Movie” (BB) Counterpoint Readings; Robert Langdon “Dusky Damsels: Pitcairn Island’s Neglected Matriarchs of the Bounty” (BB); A. Marata Tamaira. “From Full Dusk to Full Tusk: Re-imaging the “Dusky Maiden” through the Visual Arts.” The Contemporary Pacific vol 22 (Spring 2010): 1-35 (BB) III THE LONG PIG: CANNIBALS Screenings: Betty Boop’s Bamboo Isle (1932, Fleischer Bros.); I’ll Be Glad When you’re Dead, You Rascal You (1932, Fleischer Bros.); Cannibal Tours (Dennis O’Rourke, 1988) Readings: Typee, Chaps 11-21 & Chap 32 (Also review chaps 4, (p 27) & chap 6 (pp. 34-35); chap 10 (p 69); Michel de Montaigne “On Cannibals” (BB); Susanne Williams chap 9 “Too Close to Cannibalism” Additional Readings: Paul Lyons “Fear, Perception And The “Seen” Of Cannibalism In Charles Wilkes’ Narrative and Herman Melville’s Typee” (BB); Owen Chase, Shipwreck of the Whaleship Essex 2 IV THE COLONIAL AMERICAN PACIFIC: “ETHNOGRAPHIC” OBSERVERS IN SAMOA Screenings: Moana (Robert Flaherty, 1926, US); selections Moana With Sound (2015) Readings: Geiger chap 3 “Searching for Moana”; Native Strangers chap 10 “Voices from the Beach”; “Frances Hubbard Flaherty “Setting Up House and Shop in Samoa: The Struggle to Find Screen Material in the Lyric Beauty of Polynesian Life.” (Blackboard); FH. Flaherty “A Search for Animal and Sea Sequences: Wherein ‘Natural Drama’ Goes Under and ‘Fa'a Samoa’ Comes out on Top” (BB); Mellon/Salesa "A Pacific Destiny: New Zealand's Overseas Empire" Recommended Home Viewing: Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922); Rain (Lewis Milestone, 1932) Additional Readings: Maitland “ The Two Sided Lens: Photography and the Indigenous People of the South Pacific” and “Thomas Andrew” V COLONIAL PACIFIC II: MARQUESAS AND TAHITI Screenings: White Shadows of The South Seas (W. S. Van Dyke, 1928, US) 85 mins Readings: Chap 2 & 4 Jeffrey Geiger “Idylls and Ruins” & “The Front and Back of Paradise” Selections from WS Van Dyke’s Journal; IC Campbell, chap 5 “Polynesia “Missionaries and Kingdoms” and chap 7 “Melanesia: Sandalwood and Blackbirding” Additional Readings: selections, Robert Louis Stevenson, A Footnote to History Recommended Home Viewing: Rapa Nui (Kevin Reynolds, 1994); The Hurricane (John Ford, 1937, US) VI COLONIAL PACIFIC III : TAHITI Screenings: Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (FW Murnau/R. Flaherty, 1931) 81 mins Readings: Geiger chap 5 “The Homoerotic Exotic”; Campbell chap 8 “Micronesia” & Chap 10 “The Politics Of Annexation” & Chap 11 “After A Century Of Contact”; Mellon/Mclean, Intro and "Barques, Banana Boats and Boeings" VII COLONIAL CONTESTATION: THE NEW ZEALAND WARS Screenings: Utu (Geoff Murphy,1983, NZ); River Queen (Vincent Ward, 2005, NZ) Readings: Laurie Barber chaps 1-4 --selections (BB); Mellon/Mahina-Tuai "FIA: Pacific Islanders in the NZ Armed Forces" Recommended Home Viewing: The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993) VIII POLYNESIAN IDENTITY IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC: AOTEAROA Screenings: Children of the Migration (Lala Rolls, 2004); O Tamaiti/The Children (Sima Urale, 1996); Once Were Warriors (Lee Tamahori, 1994, New Zealand) Readings: Kirsten Thompson “Once Were Warriors: New Zealand's First Indigenous Blockbuster”; selections Laurie Barber “Rediscovering Polynesia”(BB); Mellon/Anae "Overstayers, Dawn Raids and the Polynesian Panthers" Recommended Home Viewing: Whale Rider (Niki Caro, 2002); Mauri [Life Force] (Merata Mita, 1988); Te Rua [The Treasure Box] (Barry Barclay, 1990) NZ. 3 IX WORLD WAR II AND THE PACIFIC: THE SOLOMONS Screening: The Thin Red Line (Terence Malick, 1998) US 170 mins Readings: James Morrison “Review, The Thin Red Line” Film Quarterly (BB); Campbell chap 6 “Pacific Islanders in Transit” Recommended Home Viewing: The Pacific (Tom Hanks, 2010, TV Miniseries) Additional Readings: Lamont Lindstrom and Geoffrey White “Singing History: Island Songs from the Pacific War” from Artistic Heritage in a Changing Pacific, eds. Phillip Dark & Roger Rose. University of Hawaii Press: Honolulu, 1998: 187-196 (BB); Sean Brawley & Chris Dixon, Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War: Searching for Dorothy Lamour. New York: Palgrave, 2012; Angela Wanhalla and Erica Buxton, “Pacific Brides: US Forces and Interracial Marriage During the Pacific War.” Journal of NZ Studies. NS 14 (2013): 138-151. X BEACHCOMBERS AND MISSIONARIES: SAMOA Screening: Return to Paradise (Mark Robson, 1953) US Readings: IC Campbell chap 6 “Polynesia European