Tabu: A Story of the South Seas · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A man swims after a boat he will never reach. The schooner pulls for open water, Hitu's pale sail holding its line, and Matahi cuts through the swell behind it, closing, almost — until the rope is let go, the sail steadies, and the small dark head sinks back into the waste of the sea. Murnau cuts between the swimmer and the boat, swimmer and boat, the oldest grammar of suspense there is. It is the grammar of the cavalry arriving in time. Only here nothing arrives. The cross-cutting that American cinema invented to rescue the heroine at the last second has been turned, in the closing minutes of the last silent film by one of the movies' supreme image-makers, into a machine for drowning.

That reversal is the whole film, and Deleuze gives us the tools to feel its weight.

Start with where Tabu sits. This is a movement-image through and through — a world where, as Deleuze put it, characters perceive a situation and act to change it, and the cut serves the chain of action. More precisely it is the action-image in its large form: a global situation closes around the lovers and presses until it forces a decisive act. Deleuze diagrammed this as situation→action→situation, the milieu modifying the man and the man, in turn, trying to modify the milieu. Tabu even labels its halves for you. "Paradise" is the open situation, communal life and courtship staged in long luminous takes. "Paradise Lost" is the situation transformed, the world shut.

What does the transforming is the taboo itself, and the taboo is a beautiful case of what Deleuze called the encompasser — the milieu that does not merely surround the characters but actively calls an action out of them. Reri is consecrated as a sacred maiden, declared tabu, untouchable on pain of death. Nothing visible changes about her. Yet the entire field of the possible contracts. This is the encompasser working as it should: a single decree reorganizes every space in the film, the lagoon, the village, the reef, into either permitted or forbidden ground.

And here Deleuze sharpens something you can see but might not name. The force that rules Tabu never appears as an object you could point at. The gods, the custom, the sentence of death — these live in what Deleuze called the absolute out-of-field, a beyond the frame that can't be located in any adjacent room or offscreen space. You can open a door onto the next hut. You cannot open a door onto the taboo. Murnau gives that unlocatable power a body anyway, and his solution is pure German Expressionism: Hitu, the old warrior, enters the bright world as encroaching shadow, a dark silhouette darkening the sunlit frame. This is the non-organic life Deleuze traced through expressionist cinema — light and shadow as a moral gradient, things and figures charged with a force that isn't psychological but fated. The debt is exact. Murnau had made the shadow a predatory intrusion in Nosferatu; in Tabu Hitu's silhouette is Count Orlok's, repurposed as the agent of custom and death.

So the film runs as a binomial, force against force, love against law — the engine of the action-image. But watch what Murnau does to that engine. He runs it toward exhaustion. From "Paradise" to "Paradise Lost" the imagery cools and encloses, the tempo tightens, and the whole drifts down a line of slope, Deleuze's term for an irreversible descent toward ruin. The Eden of the first half is no innocent backdrop. It is closer to what Deleuze called an originary world, a savage substratum of drives and sacred prohibition lying beneath the social surface — and when the lovers flee to the French colonial settlement where Matahi dives for pearls, that derived milieu of money and trade is shown to rest on the same fatal ground. Fatalism and cash finish what the gods began.

This is why the ending matters beyond its beauty. The large form promises that a decisive act can answer the situation. Matahi acts — he steals, he dives, he swims. None of it resolves anything. Deleuze located, right around 1948, a crisis of the action-image: the moment the sensory-motor link goes slack, when characters can no longer react adequately to what they perceive, and watching begins to replace doing. Tabu arrives seventeen years early and stages that crisis as content. The last-minute rescue that built American organic montage is held up and emptied out. The hand that should haul the swimmer in lets the rope go.

Place it in the discourse and the achievement comes clear. Tabu draws Flaherty's staged-documentary method straight from Nanook and Moana — real islanders re-enacting their world on actual location — and folds it into the wordless, image-first melodrama Murnau had perfected in Sunrise and the unchained camera of The Last Laugh. Two instincts that had collided and broken apart on White Shadows in the South Seas are here fused: Flaherty's patient observation of bodies, divers and dancers caught whole in real space, inside Murnau's shaped tragic arc. The nonprofessional faces carry the drama by presence alone, a qualisign of unaffected feeling that needs no intertitle. A pure cinema of pictures, made at the precise instant sound was killing it.

Murnau died on a California road a week before the premiere. The film he left behind is a movement-image at the height of its powers, already sensing the slope down which all that confidence would slide. Watch the swimmer again. He is doing everything the old cinema asked of a hero. The sea has simply stopped answering.