Abstract
This paper discusses the role of the border of the island as a complex aesthetic zone in the journals of early European and American navigators in the South Seas (such as George Robertson, James Cook, Benjamin Morrell and Charles Wilkes) and in 1920s/1930s American films set on tropical islands. The fascination of the early explorers’ descriptions of islands as viewed from the water, across a distance that is physical as much as cultural, resides in the entanglement of perception, expectation and imagination that marks these journeys as both intense and profoundly uncertain visual experiences. In the 1920s, US-American representations of tropical islands gained new currency as American tourists trooped to the South Seas. As I argue, the strong visuality of the early accounts is one of the reasons why cinema could so readily pick up on them. In films like White Shadows in the South Seas (1929) and The Hurricane (1937), the imaginative transformation in the gaze from the water is associated with the camera as it explores the island in lateral tracking shots. These films cast a critical look on contemporary Western enthusiasm for ‘exotic’ cultures and locations in which they nevertheless participate. Resonating with contemporary anthropological and documentary film practices, emphasizing authentic representation of native cultures (Malinowski and Flaherty, respectively), they nevertheless point to the camera’s own crossing of the island’s border as an act of appropriation. This appropriation becomes explicit in King Kong (1933) as, armed with cameras and guns, the diegetic film crew violently crosses the borders of/on the island. Significantly, it is only after Kong’s death at the highest point of another island (Manhattan) and at another border, now between land and sky, that he fascinates the masses as an aesthetic spectacle. The film, then, meditates on the relations between border crossing, death and the production of aesthetics.
Highlights
I will end by discussing three important films which centre around imaginary tropical islands: White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), The Hurricane (1937) and, King Kong (1933)
The disillusioning experience of approaching a Pacific island is thematized even more directly in Charles Wilkes‟s account of the United States Exploring Expedition commanded by him (1838-1842), the first large-scale US voyage of discovery and scientific exploration to the South Seas and the Southern Ocean: The landing on a coral island effectually does away with all the preconceived notions of its beauty, and any previous ideas formed in its favor are immediately put to flight
The analysis of the poetics of the Pacific island as viewed from a distance in the British and American explorers‟ journals has demonstrated two things: in different ways, they all foreground an intense visuality in their construction of the island as an imaginary space and are as it were, cinematic avant la lettre
Summary
I will end by discussing three important films which centre around imaginary tropical islands: White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), The Hurricane (1937) and, King Kong (1933).
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