Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931)

USA, 86 minutes

Director: F.W. Murnau

Writers: F.W. Murnau, Robert J. Flaherty, Edgar G. Ulmer

Photography: Floyd Crosby

Music: Violeta Dinescu, Hugo Riesenfeld, W. Franke Harling, Milan Order

Editor: Arthur A. Brooks

Cast: Matahi, Anne Chevalier, Bill Bambridge, Hitu, Ah Fong, Jules, Mehao

It would probably be more accurate to give this picture a subtitle like A Story of Star-Crossed Love. “The South Seas” is merely the setting. The story feels much more rooted in Western or even Hollywood preoccupations, a boy-meets-girl romance in a world too cruel for love. Will it ever change? But Robert Flaherty is also on hand as producer, cowriter, and general exotic documentary influence. He directed Nanook of the North in 1922, an important movie in film history several ways, and he brings a sense of sideshow authenticity to this picture, nearly all of which was shot in the South Pacific. It is duly noted, in the opening credits, that “only native-born South Sea islanders appear in this picture with a few half-castes and Chinese.” Wikipedia calls Tabu “docufiction.”

OK, fair enough. The location and native cast bring a lot of interesting texture to a somewhat ho-hum love story, thwarted by rank native superstition and barbarism. Matahi plays “The Boy,” a skilled young fisherman and diver full of high spirits. He feels like one model for the Tarzan movies that would start in 1932 with Johnny Weissmuller. French-Polynesian Anne Chevalier plays Reri, “The Girl.” They are deeply, passionately in love. Life is good and they are full of happiness. Then Reri is declared a sacred maiden by native elders, subject to the “tabu”: “man must not touch her or cast upon her the eye of desire.” It’s quite a predicament. Stop me if you’ve heard this before.

Nosferatu (1922)

Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, Germany, 81 minutes
Director: F.W. Murnau
Writers: Henrik Galeen, Bram Stoker
Photography: Fritz Arno Wagner, Gunther Krampf
Cast: Max Schreck, Gustav von Wangenheim, Greta Schroeder, Alexander Granach, Max Nemetz, Wolfgang Heinz

I'm going to blame the Universal monster movie franchise for my stubborn confusion in thinking that Bram Stoker's novel Dracula came before Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein. Actually, Stoker's vampire tale was published in 1897 and Frankenstein in 1818. Among other things, that means this silent movie version by German director F.W. Murnau—more or less officially the first Dracula movie—came only 25 years after the novel, which is comparable today to a movie based on Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, say, or Donna Tartt's's The Secret History. Dracula had been around awhile, but still might have felt new in 1922. Frankenstein was over 100 years old by that point.

I'm also holding Universal accountable (with Hammer not far behind) for treating the Count Dracula less as a loathsome monster of the night and more in the direction of a Playboy Mansion leisured gentleman, a popular conception of vampires that evolved into George Hamilton in 1979's Love at First Bite and may be extended to include Jim Jarmusch's Adam and Eve in 2013's Only Lovers Left Alive. Note how the word "love" occurs in both titles. Let the Right One In, from 2008, is another recent example. In these pictures the vampire often works as surreptitious seducer (or practical black marketeer, in the Jarmusch, making surreptitious contacts directly with hospitals for blood). But nothing like that is happening in Nosferatu. This Count is not discreetly sucking blood in sexy make-out sessions but is more like the earthworms crawling in the dirt that you spade up when it's time to go fishing. In fact, Nosferatu plays up that aspect of Stoker's novel—Dracula's affinity not just with bats but with other nocturnal vermin and disgusting insects, and especially the way he travels in boxes ("coffins") filled with dirt. It's not the coffins, folks, it's the dirt. Nosferatu even one-ups Stoker by making it plague-infested dirt, complete with swarming rats.

Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)

USA, 94 minutes, silent
Director: F.W. Murnau
Writers: Hermann Sudermann, Carl Mayer, Katherine Hilliker, H.H. Caldwell
Photography: Charles Rosher, Karl Struss
Music: Willy Schmidt-Gentner, R.H. Bassett, Carli Elinor, Emo Rapee, Hugo Riesenfeld
Editor: Harold D. Schuster
Cast: George O'Brien, Janet Gaynor, Margaret Livingston

There's a throwaway line in The Social Network that I haven't been able to get out of my head since the last time I saw it. In full-blown triumphalist mode, Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker exults that everybody used to live in the country and then they moved to the city. Now they're moving to the Internet.

To the degree that The Social Network is about everybody moving to the Internet—a debatable point (but, at the very least, a movie somebody should probably make)—then to that degree the silent film classic Sunrise is about everybody moving from the country to the city.