Abstract
In 1944, Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr., president of the New York Zoological Society, organized a team of writers and cartographers from a number of prominent universities and learned societies to complete a book that would enable Americans to “know more about the Pacific.” “Our soldiers and sailors who are there today,” it was noted, “will be succeeded by untold numbers of American people busying themselves in the ways of peace.”1 An introductory essay for the book was written by Osborn’s colleague at the Zoological Society, Charles William “Will” Beebe. Ornithologist, naturalist, oceanographer, and inventor of the bathyscope, Beebe wrote several works dealing with his South Pacific scientific experiences.2 Directed specifically at the “Men of the Armed Services,” Beebe’s introduction began as follows:
Well you’re in the Pacific! … [W]hat do you think of the island you’re on? Oh you don’t know much about it! Don’t worry. One thing that you have in common is keen curiosity about strange peoples, animals, lands, and oceans, and the grand thing about this is that it has nothing to do with rank, sex, or where you came from.3
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Notes
Henry Fairfield Osborn, The Pacific World: Its Vast Distances, Its Lands and the Life upon Them, and Its Peoples (New York: W.W. Norton, 1944), Foreword.
See Carol Grant Gould, The Remarkable Life of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004).
X. Theodore Barber, “The Roots of Travel Cinema: John L. Stoddard, E. Burton Holmes, and the Nineteenth-Century Illustrated Travel Lecture”, Film History 5, (1993): 68.
Alison Griffiths, “‘To the World We Show’: Early Travelogues as Filmed Ethnography”, Film History 11, (1999): 282. By examining the South Seas in natural and ethnographic terms, and explaining them to their audiences using accessible scientific language, National Geographic and Nature had played important roles in stimulating popular interest in the South Seas.
Andrew Pike and Ross Cooper, Australian Film, 1900–1977: A Guide to Feature Film Production (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), 57.
See Kerry Howe, The Quest for Origins: Who First Discovered and Settled the Pacific Islands? (Auckland: Penguin Books, 2003), 46.
J. MacMillan Brown, Maori and Polynesian: Their Origins, History and Culture (London: Hutchinson and Co, 1907), 96.
Patricia Johnston, “Advertising Paradise: Hawaii in Arts, Anthropology, and Commercial Photography”, in Colonialist Photography: Imag(in)ing Race and Place, ed. Eleanor M. Hight and Gary David Sampson (New York: Routledge, 2002), 212.
John W. Burton and Caitlin W. Thompson, “Nanook and the Kirwinians: Deception, Authenticity, and the Birth of Modern Ethnographic Representation”, Film History 14, (2002): 74.
Richard Barsam, The Vision of Robert Flaherty: The Artist as Myth and Filmmaker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 16.
Frances Hubbard Flaherty, “Setting up House and Shop in Samoa. The Struggle to Find Screen Material in the Lyric Beauty of Polynesian Life”, Asia (August 1925): 639–711.
See Lewis Jacobs, The Documentary Tradition, from Nanook to Woodstock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1995), 25.
Cited in Paul Rotha, Robert J. Flaherty: A Biography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 68–69.
Rudy Behlmer, ed., Memo from David O. Selznick (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 15.
Mark A. Vieira, Irving Thalberg: Boy Wonder to Producer Prince (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 84.
Priscilla Peña Ovalle, Dance and the Hollywood Latina: Race, Sex, and Stardom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 1–2, 7.
Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 253.
Jeffrey Geiger, Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the U.S. Imperial Imagination (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 228.
Ray Greene, “Sorry Sarong Number. Murnau’s 1931”, Village View, May 15–21, 1992.
Susan Courtney, Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 127.
For a critique of the film and Del Rio’s role, see Joanne Hershfield, The Invention of Dolores del Rio (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 29.
Started as a mail order company in 1926, by 1929 the Book-of-the-Month Club had over 110,000 members. See Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 261.
Michael Sturma, South Sea Maidens: Western Fantasy and Sexual Politics in the South Pacific (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 52.
Greg Dening, Mr. Bligh’s Bad Language: Passion, Power, and Theater on the Bounty (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 350.
Jay Jorgensen, Edith Head: The Fifty-Year Career of Hollywood’s Greatest Costume Designer (Philadelphia: Running Press, 2010), 48.
Olga Martin, Hollywood’s Movie Commandments: A Handbook for Motion Picture Writers and Reviewers (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1937), 178.
Tom Brislin, “Exotics, Erotics, and Coconuts: Stereotypes of Pacific Islanders”, in Images That Injure: Pictorial Stereotypes in the Media, ed. Paul Martin Lester and Susan Dente Ross (Wesport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 106.
Vasey, “Foreign Parts: Hollywood’s Global Distribution and the Representation of Ethnicity”, in Movie Censorship and American Culture, 2nd ed., ed. Francis G. Couvares (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), 223.
Ellen Christine Scott, “Race and the Struggle for Cinematic Meaning: Film Production Censorship, and African American Reception, 1940–1960”, PhD Diss, Harvard University, 2007, 437.
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© 2012 Sean Brawley and Chris Dixon
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Brawley, S., Dixon, C. (2012). Through Hollywood’s Lens: Prewar Visions of the South Pacific. In: Hollywood’s South Seas and the Pacific War. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137090676_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137090676_2
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