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The Journal of Pacific History, Vol. 45, No. 1, June 2010

The Influence of Fiction andCinematic Excess on the Factual

Pacific Documentary and Act of War

SARINA PEARSON

CINEMATIC IMAGERY HAS PLAYED A CENTRAL ROLE IN HISTORICAL AND CONTEMPORARY

popular depictions of the Pacific. Apart from highly romantic canonical filmsof the 1920s and 1930s, such as Moana, Tabu and the less critically celebratedWhite Shadows in the South Seas, this imagery has been largely the province of ‘B’movies and television.1 Almost universally dismissed by Pacific scholars andfilm-makers on the basis that popular and critically acclaimed films about or setin Oceania grossly misrepresent the region, these films nevertheless form anintegral part of the mediascape within which factual films by and about Pacificcommunities are located.2 In some cases, the dialectic between Hollywood andcontemporary performance in the Pacific has been strategic and self-conscious,but in a documentary this dialectic can be problematic and consequentlyoverlooked.3 This paper examines how the critically acclaimed, anti-colonial,pro-self-determination factual film Act of War: Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation

(1993) can be seen to reflect the influence of Hollywood in its discursivepractices.4 In addition to exploring the effects of irony, which has emerged as anidentifiable aspect of contemporary Pacific popular culture, this analysis drawsupon Thompson’s description of cinematic excess and Nichols’ elaboration ofdocumentary excess, to examine why despite Act of War’s unambiguous critiqueof colonialism, there are moments at which it ‘uncannily’ appears to reproduce

1Moana: Romance of a Golden Age (1926), 85 min., dir. Robert J. Flaherty, prod. Robert J. Flaherty; Tabu

(1931), 84 min., dir. F.W. Murnau, prod. F.W. Murnau; White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), 88 min, dir.

W.S. Van Dyke, prod. Hunt Stromberg and Irving Thalberg.2Rob Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific: from South Pacific to Bamboo Ridge (Durham 2000), 125–89. For

a definition of mediascape, see Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: cultural dimensions of globalization

(Minneapolis 1996), 35.3 The New Zealand Samoan animated comedy series bro’Town (2004–2009), the theatrical performances of

The Naked Samoans, and Victor Rodger’s play My Name is Gary Cooper are examples of the way Pacific screen

production and theatre make self-conscious and strategic references to Hollywood Cinema.4Kristin Thompson, ‘The concept of cinematic excess’, in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (eds), Film

Theory and Criticism: introductory readings, 5th edn (New York 1999), 490; Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: issues

and concepts in documentary (Bloomington 1991), 141–9.

ISSN 0022-3344 print; 1469-9605 online/10/010105–12; Taylor and Francis

� 2010 The Journal of Pacific History Inc.

DOI: 10.1080/00223344.2010.484174

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much-criticised rhetorical and visual strategies established in earlier popularcinematic tropes of the Pacific.5

Romance and romanticism have effectively dominated visual and discursiverepresentations of Polynesia since the earliest voyages of European discovery.Figured variously as sexual desire and/or an unfettered metropolitan preoccupa-tion with a phantasmic, primitive, prelapsarian past, contemporary critics regardthese regimes of representation as reflecting primarily Eurocentric anxieties,hopes and desires.6 Sensitised to post-colonial critique, many Pacific cinemaaudiences are skilled at deconstructing the romantic pretensions of iconicfilms such as Moana, and the exaggerated melodramatic expressionism of Tabu.7

They deftly dismiss mid-century movies such as Blue Hawaii (1961) and thespectacular musical South Pacific (1958) as thinly veiled rhetorical constructionswhich assert and reaffirm American proprietorship and dominance in theregion.8 However, when faced with contemporary indigenous factual genres,of which the ‘revisionist’ historical documentary Act of War is a prime example,these audiences seem to be much less able or less willing to engage critically withits romantic rhetorical strategies.9

Audiences appear to regard indigenous Pacific documentary as factual redressrather than as ideologically governed rhetorical overtures in complex ongoingdebates about self-determination, identity, territory and history. The reasonsunderlying this reaction are multifaceted. To a significant degree, this audience’sown politics and sense of sympathy and/or solidarity with disenfranchised Pacificpeoples is potentially at work. They may also wish to circumvent longstandingvexed debates about authority, authenticity and representation in Oceania someof which have been articulated by the exchange between Linnekin and Trask.10

Audiences may be reluctant to scrutinise potentially problematic cinematicinstances where indigenous politics and Hollywood appear to coincide becauseof personal or professional politics, but generic and cinematic factors may alsoplay a part.11

Most documentary films seek to contain, control and channel meaning.Audiences are informed and persuaded by how effectively documentaries ‘render

5 ‘Uncanny’ is used here in a loosely Freudian sense, drawing primarily upon its ability to describe uncertain

states that seem to slip between meaning and its negation, that are simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, and

which invoke feelings of confusion and unease.; Nicholas Royle The Uncanny (Manchester 2003), 1, 15, 16;Robin Lydenberg, ‘Freud’s Uncanny Narratives’, PMLA, 112 (1997), 1076.

6 Jeffrey Geiger, Facing the Pacific: Polynesia and the US imperial imagination (Honolulu 2007).7Moana; Tabu.8Blue Hawaii (1961) 102 min., dir. Norman Taurog, prod. Hal Wallis; South Pacific (1958), 157 min., dir.

Joshua Logan, prod. Buddy Adler.9 I base part of this claim on having observed undergraduate students in a class I teach at the University of

Auckland titled ‘South Seas on Screen’; Act of War: overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation (1993), 58 min., dir. Puhipau

and Joan Lander, prod. Na Maka O Ka Aina.10 Jocelyn Linnekin, ‘Text bites and the R word: the politics of representing scholarship’, in David Hanlon

and Geoffrey M. White (eds), Voyaging Through the Contemporary Pacific (Honolulu 2000), 268–73; Haunani-Kay

Trask, ‘Natives and anthropologists: the colonial struggle’, in David Hanlon and Geoffrey M. White (eds),Voyaging Through the Contemporary Pacific (Honolulu 2000), 255–63.

11Act of War.

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authentic versions of reality . . . presented from a particular point of view . . . .While there can be no absolute claim to truth and reality — in part at least dueto reality’s inherent inaccessibility in unmediated form — documentary worksby positing its essential (indexical) connection with reality.’12 This is generallytrue of documentary practice in Oceania. The prevailing critical paradigmin post-colonial Pacific cinema historically juxtaposes Hollywood fictionalnarratives in contradistinction to indigenous documentary.13 Narrative fictionalfilms are regarded as openly imaginative expressions of hegemonic, imperial andcolonial interests, while indigenously produced factual films are consideredcounter-hegemonic and often characterised as rhetorically conservative.14

Nichols describes conventionally realist and rhetorically conservative strategiesas ‘discourses of sobriety’.15 These strategies feature relatively ‘transparent’ audioand visual techniques. The overarching aesthetic purports to deliver the audienceas unmediated an experience of events as possible; ultimately gauging adocumentary’s success by its ability to draw attention to its primary ‘issue’ ratherthan to itself.16 Sober discourses not only persuade audiences of the legitimacyand authenticity of a documentary’s historical and political claims, but theyconform to the instrumental requirements of public broadcasting, whichprivileges the educative aspects of factual film-making.17

Documentaries inevitably fail to control and channel all aspects ofsignification. Thompson suggests ‘every film contains a struggle of unifyingand disunifying structures, so every stylistic element may serve at once tocontribute to the narrative and to distract our perception from it’.18 In fictionalfilm, excess lies outside the narrative, whereas in documentary Nichols arguesthat excess ‘is that which stands beyond the reach of both narrative andexposition’.19 In this formulation, excess is described as a kind of ‘noise’ thatexceeds what counts as ‘information’ within a given analytic scheme. One orderof excess in documentary is history itself. ‘As the referent of documentary, historyis what always stands outside the text . . . . Always referred to but never captured,history as excess rebukes those laws set to contain it; it contests, qualifies, resistsand refuses them.’20 Photographic and cinematic images potentially constituteanother type of excess. This is excess of a different order, not history itself but

12Astrid Boger, People’s Lives, Public Images: the New Deal documentary aesthetic (Tubingen 2001), 25.13Vilsoni Hereniko, ‘Representations of Pacific Islanders in film and video’ (1999) Documentary Box. 14:

18–20 http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/14/box14–3-e.html accessed 15 November 2008. In addition to the

dichotomy between Hollywood fiction and indigenous documentary, indigenous fictional narrative has been

explored as ‘fourth cinema’, see Jennifer Gauthier, ‘Lest others speak for us: the neglected roots and uncertain

future of Maori cinema in New Zealand,’ in Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart (eds), Global Indigenous Media:

cultures, poetics and politics (Durham, NC 2008), 58–73.14 Sarina Pearson, ‘Lookin’ S.Pacific: moving imagery in Aotearoa New Zealand and Hawai‘i’, PhD thesis,

University of Auckland (Auckland 2001).15 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: issues and concepts in documentary, 3.16 Ibid., 173.17 Pearson, ‘Lookin’ S.Pacific’, 296.18 Thompson, ‘The Concept of Cinematic Excess’, 490.19Nichols, Representing Reality, 142.20 Ibid.

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rather the history of mediation, the residual meanings, desires and valuesattached to the photographic and cinematic archive of a particular region.Transcending polysemy and intertexuality, although these dynamics certainlycontinue to operate, the excessive meaning associated with images and tropespreviously invoked in Hollywood films complicate the politics of the 1993documentary Act of War.

Act of War systematically chronicles events leading up to the annexation of theHawai‘ian Islands by the United States at the end of the 19th century. Althoughhistorically speaking the film begins before the arrival of Captain Cook, it focusesprimarily upon the days and weeks in early 1893 when American private businessinterests planned and carried out a coup d’etat, imprisoning Queen Lili‘uokalani,and subsequently dismantling the Hawai‘ian Kingdom. The film explicitlycontests and revises prevailing accounts that legitimise American politicalinterference in the sovereign governmental affairs of the Hawai‘ian Kingdom,arguing that illegitimate and illegal interference heretofore glossed as constitu-tional ‘reform’, but effectively ‘an act of war,’ paved the way for America toannex and then eventually incorporate the island nation.

This documentary presents a Hawai‘ian historical analysis of the eventsleading up to the overthrow. It deconstructs American economic and militaryambitions in the region, explaining how American politicians conceived ofHawai‘i as a crucial link in expanding their sphere of influence into the Pacific.Aided and abetted by the avarice of plantation owners, many of whom weredescendants of Calvinist missionaries, the documentary outlines how Americanexpansionist agendas were incrementally advanced through political duplicityand legislative aggression. This American imperialist narrative is paralleledby the progressive marginalisation of indigenous Hawai‘ians. Their vulnerabilityto foreign usurpation is depicted as a consequence of cumulative events fromthe earliest voyages of European discovery, which brought devastating disease,to the effects of ideological and cultural dispossession by missionaries, toprogressive economic and political disenfranchisement by haole and foreigninterests.21 Queen Lili‘uokalani is represented as an enlightened and sympatheticleader whose desire to restore constitutional power to the monarchy provokedAmerican business interests to call in the US Marines and take power. DespitePresident Cleveland’s recognition that the regime change of 1893 was unlawful,his views were officially reversed. The USA consolidated its influence overHawai‘i through annexation in 1898. The documentary explains QueenLili‘uokalani’s failure to respond to the overthrow with military force asprincipled, reflecting her belief that Hawai‘ian resistance would effectivelylegitimate American intervention and that Americans would be swift to respond,jeopardising the welfare of her subjects.

For the most part, Act of War’s rhetorical and cinematic strategies conform tothe conventions of the realist documentary. It privileges forms of visible evidencesuch as archival photographs and historical publications. Voice-over actors

21 ‘Haole’ is used here to describe Hawai‘ian citizens and/or residents of Euro-American ancestry.

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narrate historical documents written by prominent figures such as historianSamuel Kamakau, Captain Cook, Calvinist missionaries, Queen Lili‘uokalaniand American politicians, effectively imparting these figures with a sense ofmotivation, character and emotional gravitas. Act of War anchors itself inthe historical world, presenting a tightly controlled chronology of events thatsubstantiate the documentary’s explicitly stated position. It presents thischronology featuring four prominent Hawai‘ian sovereignty activists, academicsHaunani-Kay Trask, Lilikala Kame‘eleihiwa and Jonathan Osorio, as well asmedical doctor Kekuni Blaisdell, each clearly identified by their professionalcredentials and institutional affiliations. These experts narrate historical events,occasionally editorialising, and consistently directing sound and image to secureand stabilise the documentary’s central argument. As events accelerate towardsthe overthrow, the documentary-makers deploy expressionistic re-enactmentsfeaturing fragmented, emotionally evocative moments such as the Queenplaying her piano and soldiers guarding the palace grounds, however, theseare contained and controlled by relatively continuous voice-over narration.The cumulative effects of this representational strategy are that the revisionisthistory presented to the audience is established as a collectively understood andconsensually established account, not to be easily dismissed as individual opinionor fringe interpretation.

The apparent reproduction of Hollywood romanticism that arises in Act of

War, denied though this may be by audiences such as those described previously,is partly the result of a structural shift in the documentary’s narrative strategyand partly due to excessive elements in the mise-en-scene. Structurally, thedocumentary consists roughly of three parts: a prologue, the main body and anepilogue. The prologue and epilogue feature an omniscient, authoritative femalevoice, which viewers come to recognise as ‘belonging’ to Queen Lili‘uokalaniwhen this voice is later linked with her image. Despite its sober subject matterand its predominantly sober discursive approach, Act of War opens with anexplicit acknowledgement of Hollywood. The popular song Blue Hawaii providesthe score for an extended sequence in the prologue that cuts between iconictourist imagery and elemental images of Hawai‘i. Here tourists are represented asundignified and out of place, lying prone and exposed on the crowded expansesof Waikiki Beach. In stark contrast, the sequence cuts to a shadowy sentryof traditionally dressed figures, possibly ancestral custodians who stand atattention amidst primordial mists, attesting to the historical and continuedpresence of indigenous Hawai‘ians. As the sequence progresses, their status asdispossessed and disenfranchised is emphasised by verite footage documentingrecurring native protest on Sand Island, at the Iolani Palace and at WaimanaloBeach Park. This prologue effectively presents two mutually exclusive butinterconnected representations of Hawai‘i. One Hawai‘i, which exists in theEuro-American popular imaginary, is represented by the documentary ascommercialised, alienated and illegitimate. The other, less widely acknowledgedHawai‘i is represented through indigeneity and tradition; a Hawai‘i that hasbeen increasingly under threat since the turn of the 19th century. The lyrics of

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Blue Hawaii not only underscore the dissonance between the two representationsof Hawai‘i but also indict Western hegemony through the grim irony constructedby directly juxtaposing lyrics of moonlight nights and romance against scenesof violent protest and indigenous distress.

The song Blue Hawaii, carries with it particular reference to the films withwhich it has been associated historically, evocatively mobilising Hawai‘i as a safeand exotic leisure tourist destination in the American popular imagination.Written by Robin and Rainger, Blue Hawaii was a commercial success, breakinginto the top ten charts and described by Wood as ‘one of the most importantcultural productions that incited the Hawai‘ian fad of the 1930s and after’.22

The song, initially popularised by Bing Crosby, featured no less than three timesin the 1937 film Waikiki Wedding where Crosby plays Tony Martin, marketingagent for the Imperial Pineapple Company.23 The narrative, replete with afemale protagonist in search of romantic adventure, stolen pearls, native intrigueand the obligatory menacing volcano that can only be satiated by ritual sacrifice,fuses well-established tropes of Hawai‘i as a libidinal, racialised space withemerging depictions that stressed foreign commercial administration andmanagement.

Halfway through . . . Waikiki Wedding . . . it is revealed to the audience that Crosbyis stage-managing every Hawai‘ian act. Those Hawai‘ian behaviours, which inprevious films had been represented as existing autonomously, appear again inWaikiki Wedding only because Crosby, the businessman foreigner, is paying Nativesto dance, sing, feast, worship.24

Indigeneity therefore is characterised purely as a resource for Americans tomanage in the service of tourist desires.25 To add insult to considerable injury,Waikiki Wedding repeats the longstanding Hollywood practice of hiringnon-Hawai‘ian actors to play Hawai‘ian roles, casting a young AnthonyQuinn as the enigmatic Kimo.26

The song Blue Hawaii rose to prominence again in 1961, this time starringElvis Presley in a film bearing the same name.27 Released two years after Hawai‘ibecame the 50th state of the USA, this incarnation of Blue Hawaii, like Waikiki

Wedding, re-presents American foreign administration, management and controlunder the guise of tourism.28 Serving largely as a travelogue that sets the stage forpost-war mass tourism, the narrative of Blue Hawaii is apparently unencumberedby residual anxieties about legitimacy. At odds with his racist and social-climbingmother, played by Angela Lansbury, Elvis’ character Chadwick Gates effortlessly

22Houston Wood, Displacing Natives: the rhetorical production of Hawai‘i (Lanham MD 1999), 118.23Waikiki Wedding (1937), 89 min., dir. Frank Tuttle, prod. Arthur Hornblow.24Wood, Displacing Natives, 117.25 Indigeneity is cast into question here because the behaviours constructed in the film as indigenous do not

appear to be grounded in historical reality.26 Early films such asMoana and Tabu cast indigenous actors; however, many popular Hollywood films such

as White Shadows in the South Seas and Hurricane cast Mexican Americans, Raquel Torres and Dolores Del Rio,

respectively; Michael Sturma, South Seas Maidens (Westport Connecticut 2002), 128.27Blue Hawaii.28 Ibid.; Waikiki Wedding.

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fuses ‘native’ leisure, sexuality, sensuality and performance with white privilege.With Elvis as guide, the film unfolds precisely like a tourist itinerary;unambiguously consolidating Hawai‘i as an exotic, but ultimately domesticatedand thoroughly managed tourist experience.

The prevalence, persistence and particular tourist character of Blue Hawaii asan iconic signifier in imagining Hawai‘i is summed up by Wilson, who writes,

whatever its troubled . . . history of colonization and conversion cum plantationsettlement, Hawai‘i nowadays flips over into the stereotypical moviescape I will trope. . . as the Elvis-dreamy image of ‘Blue Hawaii’: a garden of the South Pacific . . .filmed in these azure islands but scripted and produced (conceptualized, narrated,and banked on) to . . . serve the interests . . . of Hollywood, Tokyo, Melbourne andNew York.29

In Act of War, Blue Hawaii is mobilised as a means of creating unsettlingdissonance between popular Hollywood representations of Hawai‘i as a benign,victimless, leisure-filled, American tourist mecca and images of native oppression.The film-makers strategically deploy the song and its second-order cinematicsignification as ironic counterpoint to the documentary’s political objectives.In this respect, the documentary effectively ‘plays’ with popular imagery,showing as well as telling its audience the incommensurability of popularimaginings with indigenous experience. This type of strategically anti-colonialirony is manifest in other instances of Pacific performance and screen productionsuch as in Samoan performances at the Polynesian Cultural Centre (PCC) andin the television documentary Velvet Dreams.

In Balme’s analysis of Samoan and Tongan live performances for tourists atthe PCC, he examines how performers play with their audience’s stereotypicalassumptions. He argues that native agency among some Pacific communitiesis expressed not simply by reflecting a distorted image of colonial authority backto itself, but rather by openly mocking colonial imaginings and assumptionsabout Pacific subjects.30 Elaborating upon Bhabha’s notion of colonial mimicry,Balme refers to the form of double articulation practised by these performers asreverse mimicry. ‘This ironic use of parody depends on the performer’s awarenessof European and Euro-American projections.’31 Effectively, what is madeavailable for subversion is not the stereotype itself but the recognition of thestereotype’s currency. Samoan performers at the PCC anticipate and utilise theiraudience’s stereotypical expectations to subvert these expectations, potentiallyweakening the power relations that undergird them.

Although the projections at work in the Polynesian Cultural Centreperformances point to the dynamics of irony and subversion in Pacificperformance, they do not necessarily cite Hollywood. The television documen-tary Velvet Dreams, however, does explicitly reference and subvert the genericconventions of film noir in order to problematise popular representations of

29Wilson, Reimagining the American Pacific, 133.30 Christopher Balme, Pacific Performances: theatricality and cross cultural encounter in the South Seas (Basingstoke

2007), 177–86.31 Ibid., 182.

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Polynesian women.32 In this documentary an unseen ‘Sam Spade’-like charactersets upon an obsessive quest to find the ‘real woman’ whose topless velvet portraithe sees in a junk shop. Instead of locating the woman, however, he ultimatelylocates an octogenarian artist who painted the portrait. By supplanting thePolynesian female object of obsession with an eccentric old European man, thedocumentary ironically exposes representations of the Pacific and Pacific Islandwomen as Eurocentric projections.33 Smith argues that Velvet Dreams’ imaginativeand playful discursive strategy of using established representational conventionsempowers the director and the audience to find ‘other modes of enunciationwithin the debris of colonial history itself’.34

Notwithstanding Velvet Dreams’ critical success, reflected in Smith’s positivetake on how the film ‘hijacks’ Hollywood to advance post-colonial critique andindigenous creativity, it remains a relatively isolated event. Documentary in thePacific tends to be regarded as a forum where inaccurate and ill-informedrepresentations by Western film-makers can be corrected. As Hereniko hasobserved, ‘In control of their own images and their own stories, particularly inthe genre of the documentary, Pacific Islanders are debunking the stereotypesperpetuated by Hollywood films.’35 Act of War might be a partial exception;however, it opts to use irony in quite limited and contained ways. Documentaryexcess and the audience’s enunciative agency mean that containing irony andHollywood references is potentially problematic.

The prologue to Act of War concludes with scenes from centennial protests heldin 1993, showing Hawai‘ians marching publicly in commemoration of the illegaloverthrow. These scenes culminate with Professor Trask delivering a speechin which she vehemently asserts that Hawai‘ians are not American — that theywill never be American. The prologue then leads into the main body of the film.Scenes of native protest cut to lush, verdant images of tropical landscapes withplots of wetland taro and waterfalls. Framed against leafy green exteriors, thehistorians describe Hawai‘ian life prior to contact. They characterise this life asproductive, communitarian and leisure-filled. As the main body of the filmunfolds it becomes relatively clear that, despite its initial romanticism, thissection is meant to be interpreted as sober, substantive and evidentiary. Theironic play between Hollywood and documentary imagery that featured soprominently in the prologue no longer operates as a patent discursive strategy.However, this shift in rhetorical approach only becomes clear to the audienceseveral minutes into this section of the film. Arguably, they ascertain the changein rhetorical tactic when the film begins to use conventions of historicaldocumentary such as archival footage. Until then, it might be reasonable to

32Velvet Dreams (1998), 96 min., dir. Sima Urale, prod. Vincent Burke and Clifton May.33 Sarina Pearson, ‘Darkness and light: dusky maidens and velvet dreams’, Camera Obscura, 58, 20:1 (2005),

184–207.34 Jo Smith, ‘Postcolonial affirmations: the return of the Dusky Maiden in Sima Urale’s Velvet Dreams’,

Continuum, 22:1 (2008), 87.35 See Hereniko, ‘Representations of Pacific Islanders in film and video’, http://www.yidff.jp/docbox/14/

box14–3-e.html (accessed 11 January 2010).

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assume that audiences are at least partially attuned to reading the documentary’simagery ironically and in relation to Hollywood.

The result is that highly romantic images of pristine and productiveHawai‘ian landscapes can be inadvertently and problematically refractedthrough Hollywood romanticism. The argument here is not about the legitimacyof indigenous romanticism. What is at issue is that Hollywood romanticismbrings with it symbolic and narrative associations that are not easily reconciledwith Act of War’s political project. These associations include narratives about theinevitability of colonial conquest and cultural extinction such as those intimatedby Flaherty’s Moana and Murnau’s Tabu and more explicitly proposed byVan Dyke’s White Shadows in the South Seas.36 The coincidence of indigenousmodes of romanticism mobilised by scholars in the service of a historical accountand Hollywood romanticism is unsettling and uncanny, because it marks afailure in the film’s heretofore rigid separation between indigenous representationand Hollywood. This conflation of indigenous representation and Hollywoodexcess also potentially leaves audiences uncertain about how to deal withwhat appear to be simultaneous expressions of indigenous agency andre-presentations of Hollywood exoticism. This simultaneity is evident in aspectsof the documentary’s mise-en-scene, particularly those associated with landscapeand participants.37

To momentarily and fleetingly ‘mis-recognise’ exotic and evocative imagesof landscape and indigenous peoples in Act of War as Hollywood exotica is toglimpse a zone of rupture where cinematic and documentary excess operate toproduce ambiguous meaning, where a range of issues regarding identity politics,self-construction and representation threaten to erupt. Complex questionsemerge about whether representations are meant to be read ‘straight’ or‘subversively’. These questions lead to whether or not one’s interpretationidentifies them as politically progressive or regressive. The immediately personaland charged nature of these lines of inquiry might account for the reluctanceoften displayed by audiences of post-colonial Pacific documentary when askedto analyse narrative strategies at work in this genre.

Audiences potentially recognise the inappropriate emergence of stereotypicalHollywood imagery and acknowledge that the textual frame of the documentaryis ambivalent if not openly hostile to this particular stereotypical archive.The ‘excess’ baggage that audiences carry contributes to this temporary, butnevertheless evident, contradiction. A substantial amount of Pacific screen

36Moana; Tabu; White Shadows.37Mise-en-scene is used here in the way that David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson have defined it. They

suggest that visual elements placed in front of the camera such as production design, art direction, sets and

props, wardrobe, makeup and performance constitute mise-en-scene. They distinguish mise-en-scene from aspects of

what they term cinematography, which consist of techniques associated with the camera, such as focus, framingand movement. Despite the fact that most film studies scholars refer to elements of mise-en-scene, there is no easy

consensus on precisely what aspects of film-making it refers to. For example, Gibbs argues that cinematography

and mise-en-scene cannot be conceptualised in mutually exclusive terms. Most agree, however, that mise-en-scene isused to describe visual style in cinema. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: an introduction, 7th edn

(New York 2003), 176–228; John Gibbs, Mise-en-scene, Film Style and Interpretation (London 2002), 54.

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production circulates within an already richly populated (if not politicallycorrect) mediascape. If viewers are ‘actively engaged’ as Smith suggests they are,then the ambiguous effects of excess are not necessarily far-fetched. Without aclear narrative imperative, visually marked separation or means for reincorpora-tion, the excessive elements of the mise-en-scene remain merely troubling.While the film-makers may have intended to confine Hollywood references tothe prologue, their strategic positioning at the beginning of the documentarywhen the film’s terms of reference are being established for the audience, and thesheer ubiquity of Hollywood imagery in collective imaginings of the Pacificsuggest that perhaps such containment cannot be guaranteed. Boger argues that

In spite of documentary’s general emphasis on the factual, the resulting claim toshow things ‘as they are’ is often counteracted and at times undermined by theimpulse to make sure (though layering of information) that meanings are conveyed,connections made, and uncertainties eliminated wherever possible, therebyproducing an excess of signification in spite of all the strategies of containmenttypically associated with objectivity.38

Conflation between authoritative indigenous testimony and Hollywoodstereotype forces audiences to engage in fairly complex interpretive labour.Image potentially undermines rather than empowers the documentary’s statedcritique and threatens to weaken its political objectives. Act of War asserts thatHawai‘ians were devastated by colonial intervention. Foreign commercial,military and political interests dispossessed them. They are seeking formalrecognition and legal redress, and they are active agents in their struggle forself-determination and compensation. However, the audience intuits thatHawai‘ians are unlikely to be all of these things if they simultaneously appearto be the romantic ‘noble savages’ Hollywood repeatedly rehearses. In Act of

War, Hollywood stereotype coincides with, complicates and contradicts imagesof politically engaged indigenous activism. This coincidence is not a ‘correct’reading. The documentary’s rhetorical approach attempts to critique anddestabilise stereotypical regimes of representation. The spectral haunting byHollywood imagery is therefore troubling and consequently uncomfortable.Repressing the cause of such discomfort may render the documentary’s narrativemore coherent, but it fails to negate the uncanny operation of cinematic excess.

Despite momentary rupture, Act of War’s political objectives do not appearto have been fatally undermined. Its overall relationship to subversive irony andplay is far less clear and much less consistent than performances at the PCC orin Velvet Dreams.39 For many if not most audiences, Act of War ultimately

38 Boger, People’s Lives, Public Images, 25.39When describing different styles of performance from one island group to another, Balme notes that ‘The

contrast between Samoans and Tongans on the one hand, and Hawaiians and Maori on the other signals an

important aspect of cultural differentiation within the monolithic conceptualization of Polynesian culture.Both Maori and Hawai‘ians are Fourth World cultures, i.e. indigenous cultures submerged in a majority

colonizing culture. . . . [their] cultural forms [may] be regarded as too fragile for subjection to the rambunctious

processes of self-irony and play that Tongans and Samoans practice.’ Christopher Balme, ‘Staging the Pacific:framing authenticity in performances for tourists at the Polynesian Cultural Centre,’ Theatre Journal, 50:1

(1998), 64.

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functions more or less unproblematically as a sober, revisionist history.Its efficacy as revisionist history is validated to a significant extent by its abilityto influence real-world political outcomes. Gaines has observed that manypolitical advocacy documentaries attempt to engender an affective and embodiedconnection with their audiences. These documentaries hope to use cinema’smimetic power to persuade audiences, who are in most cases far removed fromthe events represented, that they too have witnessed political injustice and thatthey should consequently act upon their sense of outrage.40 Act of War’scompelling depiction of historical events from a Hawai‘ian point of view isdirected specifically at the case for political redress. In 1993, on the centenaryof the overthrow, Act of War was broadcast on the American Public TelevisionSystem (PBS). In the same year the US Government passed a joint resolutionacknowledging the illegal annexation of Hawai‘i.41 Hawai‘ians received a formalapology from then President Clinton. Current versions of the documentaryinclude a coda which informs audiences of this development.

The overall message of Act of War remains largely unchallenged. This analysishas not sought to undermine the political objectives of the documentary or toengage in a critique that questions its authenticity or authority. It has attemptedto account for the fleeting, uncanny occurrences of Hollywood romanticismin the documentary. Act of War’s reference to Blue Hawaii signifies to its audiencea particular interpretive frame. An unmarked discursive shift and the presenceof visual excess strongly reminiscent of stereotypical Hollywood representationsof the Pacific, lends the beginning of the documentary’s mid-section anambiguous and contradictory quality. Audiences are potentially uncertain asto whether or not the ironic frame in the documentary’s prologue continuesto operate. By its very nature excess is unruly, unstable and unpredictable.The utility of this analysis for film-makers is probably limited. They are unlikelyto be able to resolve the effects of excess by deploying either resolutely sober orincreasingly elaborated and sophisticated imaginative representational strategies.This analysis might, however, be potentially useful in terms of recognising howexcess accounts for moments in which Hollywood’s fictional archives seem tocoincide with factual narratives to produce disconcerting effects. Moments ofrupture such as this one in Act of War potentially reveal how Hollywoodmythmaking and contemporary indigenous screen production are intimatelylinked consciously and unconsciously.

ABSTRACT

Many popular Hollywood films about Oceania or set in the Pacific have been criticised anddismissed by Pacific scholars and film-makers as grossly misrepresentative of the region.

40 Jane M Gaines, ‘Political mimesis’, in Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (eds), Collecting Visible Evidence

(Minneapolis 1999), 90.41 The Apology Resolution, formally designated as United States Public Law 103–150 is a US Public Law

that apologises for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1893. The full text of the resolution can be

found at http://www.hawaii-nation.org/publawall.html.

INFLUENCE OF FICTION AND CINEMATIC EXCESS 115

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Nevertheless, both critically acclaimed and populist films form an integral part of the mediascapewithin which more contemporary factual films by and about Pacific communities are situated.

In many cases the dialectic between Hollywood and contemporary performance in the Pacific is

strategic and self-conscious; however, in documentary formats, this dialectic can be problematicand consequently overlooked or repressed. Drawing upon the operations of irony in contemporary

Pacific screen production, Thompson’s description of cinematic excess and Nichols’s elaboration

of documentary excess, this paper examines how the critically acclaimed, anti-colonial,pro-self-determination factual film Act of War: Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation reflects the return

of repressed Hollywood imagery in its discursive practices.

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