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Filmography
Hula Girls: Imagining Paradise (2005)
1 hour documentary for SBS, ARTE, AVRO and Beyond Distribution
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The hula girl is one of the most potent and sexually alluring images in popular culture today and has been for centuries.
Award-winning documentary maker Trevor Graham in Hula Girls: Imagining Paradise asks why this popular rendering has maintained such a grip on the Western imagination. He charts the history of the image and the changes each succeeding generation has imposed on its representation. He uses 100s of images - from early 18th Century illustrations to Gauguin's famous island paintings, as well as footage from famous and not so famous Hollywood films. There are snippets of the Sarong Girl herself, Dorothy Lamour and the titillating and adventurous Dolores Del Rio not to mention a bare-chested, but still coyly modest, Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian in one of the five adaptations of The Mutiny On the Bounty.
Narrated by Kerry Armstrong Hula Girls: Imagining Paradise takes as its starting point the records of the first Western encounters with the beautiful Polynesian women of the Pacific. French explorer Bougainville relates in his journal his meeting with the Polynesian women who shed their clothes in welcome and when he returns to Paris he publishes an account that is widely read and causes a sensation. So the Western image of Polynesian women and the island paradise is born into the popular imagination.
Captain Bligh's inflammatory account of the mutiny on the Bounty also lays the blame for the mutiny at the feet, (or more precisely the hips) of Polynesian women -- and the myth of paradise and the seductive hula girls bedevilling men is perpetuated.
The beauty of the islands and sexual freedom of the women becomes deeply entrenched in the Western imagination and finds expression in the popular culture of the day. Graham explores the way in which Western cultural expression transformed the Polynesian spiritual 'hula' dance into a Western male fantasy that has stuck.
When French artist Gauguin visits the islands in the late 19th Century, in search of the beautiful Polynesian woman, he finds a missionary outpost and the women in shapeless sacks but he does his bit to uphold the dreamy ideal in his paintings and later Hollywood follows suit.
By the start of the 20th Century, the spiritual basis of the dance is almost impossible to find, but the popular imagination will not let go of the sexy hula girl. Early Hollywood uses the image and the south sea paradise to produce films with erotic dance sequences and to circumvent stringent censorship regarding nudity. Filmmakers find the Polynesian princess a great way to explore inter-race relations without offending the conservative middle class and finally the image is used to advertise the new American State of Hawaii as a paradise travel destination.
Graham draws on the expertise of Auckland anthropologist Ann Salmond who gives lively accounts of the early Western encounters with Polynesian women. Art historian Stephen Eisenman parallels Gauguin's paintings with the photographed reality of the time, while film historian Ed Rampell's extensive knowledge of the use of the hula girl in films of the 20th Century uncovers some great treasures.
Katerina Teaiwa, Associate Professor of Pacific Studies in Honolulu is brutally honest about the trade in the hula illusion and the paradise economy. Collector Joe O'Neill shows off a shop full of hula memorabilia that owes more to the actress Dorothy Lamour than it does to any Polynesian reality while the music we believe comes from the south seas is shown to be largely another Hollywood construct.
Hula Girls: Imagining Paradise is a deliciously compelling look under the lei.
Awards:
The New South Wales Premiers Award, Audio/Visual History 2005.