love is death
by Douglas Messerli
F.
W. Murnau and Robert J. Flaherty (screenplay), Edgar G. Ulmer (uncredited writer), F. W. Murnau (director) Tabu: A Story of the South Seas / 1931
Watching
the great German-American director F. W. Murnau’s last film yesterday, I
suddenly perceived that—despite its exotic locale of Bora Bora and the fact
that numerous film critics note time and again just how different this film,
with its use of natural scenery and real-life constructions, is from his highly
stylized and theatricalized pairings of costumes and sets of films such as Nosferatu, Faust, and Sunrise—shares
his basic German sensibility so evident in someone like Wagner: love is death.
For Murnau—an outsider homosexual, forced to
leave Germany because of the strict laws against his sexuality—his
predilections for handsome young men, in fact, were dangerous. Shortly after
filming Tabu and before its
theatrical release, the director died in a fiery car crash driven by a young
Filipino, chosen, so the story goes, because of his beauty more than his
driving skills. Some legends have it that Murnau died while committing fellatio
on his young charge. Love was certainly death for Murnau himself.
But so too, at least spiritually
speaking, is it in almost all his films. In Nosferatu,
for example, Orlok, clearly attracted by the handsome Hutter, spares him to
stalk, instead, Hutter’s wife Ellen, who gives up her life to keep the monster
near her until a beam of sunlight turns him to dust; Gretchen, similarly, must
give up her life for the sexual debauchery of Faust; although the protagonists
of Sunrise both survive, they both
first symbolically die, as the husband plots his wife’s death and, ironically,
when he abandons his plans, seemingly drowns.
Yes, Tabu
in its use of natural space and amateur Tahitian actors (Matahi and Anne
Chevalier) as the young lovers, The Boy and The Girl, is superficially
different from these earlier works, but underlying these cinematic shifts is a
similar story. The film, much like Nosferatu descends upon the neck of Hutter, spends
much of its early frames in homoerotic voyeurism of the young native boys at
play, the directors’ camera almost languishing over the shirtless and
semi-pantless Matahi as he spears fish, before wetting all the male characters
down in the surges of the surrounding sea and slides in the flow of a nearby
waterfall, the focus particularly attending to their wet buttocks. It may be
some of the most sensuously sexual filmmaking outside of the porn industry. It
is no surprise that Robert J. Flaherty, more interested in anthropologic
specificity, would come to abandon this project.
Yet Murnau knows his audiences, and soon
steers his story into an intense romance between Matahi and a naive girl, Reri,
who is as beautifully feminine and Matahi is masculine. The arrival of
outsiders, carrying the aged warrior Hitu, destroys their joyful innocence,
however, as the old man accepts the young virgin to replace the now-dead
ceremonial figure as a bride in Tabu, a kind of goddess that demands she is
free of all touching, longing, and lustful gazes—precisely what she and her
young man have just enjoyed.
The ceremonial dances performed for her leaving them represent, perhaps, some of the steamiest dancing ever brought to the wide screen, as the young bare-chested maidens surround Reri while oggling the young men in grass skirts provocatively swaying their hips. Even in his complete despair, Matahi cannot resist joining the other boys, drawing the new goddess into an intense dance that might be seen to break the Tabu even before she departs.
Time passes as the two fall ever deeper
in love, but we perceive the consequences of their illegal rapture. Reri
receives a message from Hitu, demanding that she leave the island and return to
him within three days. When the couple attempt to book passage on another ship
that might save their lives, they discover themselves to be deeply in debt that
they cannot afford to travel. If this is a safer place, it is far less
“civilized” than their original paradise.

In short, even if this film might be
recognized as a transformative shift that might have occurred in Murnau’s great
filmmaking, it remains, at least structurally, apiece with his previous works—all
films that, as Alexandre Astruc has described as a “fatality hidden behind the
most harmless elements of the frame.” Even the paradisiacal sunlit world of
Bora Bora contains dark shadows that sever the lover from the object of his or
her love. It is almost as if Murnau, at a time when he might have most enjoyed the
fruits of his brilliant career, foresaw that love—or at least sex—would
inevitably lead to self-destruction.
Los Angeles, December
19, 2012
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