FILM 3720 - International Film: Pacific Cinema

5 credit hours
After the critical and commercial successes of Whale Rider, Boy, The Dead Lands and The Orator the filmmaking of the Pacific has become an exciting new area of filmmaking and 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 novelists like Albert Wendt (The Birth and Death of the Miracle Man) and Epeli Hau’ofa (Tales of the Tikongs), to artists like Shigeyuki Kihara and filmmakers like Lee Tamahori (Once Were Warriors ,1994), Chris Graham (Samoan Wedding, 2006) and Sima Urale (Velvet Dreams, 1993) 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 colonialism (German, French, Australian, New Zealand) in the Pacific, as well as to Western cinematic representations of the Pacific, from Moana (Robert Flaherty, 1926), White Shadows of the South Seas (WS Van Dyke, 1928), Tabu (Murnau/Flaherty, 1931) 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 Polynesian, Melanesian and Micronesian film, TV and new media productions from the Pacific (as well as coproductions with New Zealand and Australia). Films may include Thousand Ropes (Tusi Tamasese, 2017), Naming Number Two (Toa Fraser, 2006), Coconut TV (http://www.thecoconet.tv),Tanna (Martin Butler, Bentley Dean, 2015) and others. Meets International requirement for Film majors and minors; elective for Film majors. IC.