Mythe et colonies dans l’Allemagne de Weimar

Abstract

Contemporary postcolonial scholars, whose approaches focus on the perception of the Other using a counter-gaze from the ‘peripheries’ towards the ‘centre’, are not alone in having endeavoured to deconstruct colonial thought. In his last film Tabu, eine Geschichte aus der Südsee (1931), Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau denounced the destruction of non-European cultures (Polynesian in that case) under the influence of the political, economic and cultural European interventionism. He also highlighted the inclination of ‘culturenatures’ (Donna Haraway) to generate their own destruction. All attempts at emancipation, including the young pearl diver Matahi’s forbidden love for the beautiful girl, come up against the immutable taboo dictated by the priest Hitu, who represents Tradition (and murders Matahi), and are doomed to end in death. Halfway between documentary and expressionistic fiction, Tabu is a brilliant depiction of the rejection of Western modernity and meditation on the idea of a return to the origins – a particularly resonant work, especially given the political context of Germany in the 1930s.

Keywords

• Murnau
• cinema
• Polynesia
• modernity
• tradition