When I wrote a few months ago that I intended to continue writing after I began my new career as a special education teacher, I was grossly underestimating how much time outside the classroom I’d have to devote to teaching. I’ve spent much of the last two months planning lessons and completing sundry other paperwork. I find all this fascinating, though time-consuming. (There’s also the Chicago teachers’ strike, which is still going on as I write this and which has proved almost as time-consuming as teaching.) As a result I’ve thought less about movies than I have in years, if not decades. I’m confident that someday I’ll strike a proper balance between teaching and writing, but for now I think I need to cut out some of the latter to hone my skills in the former. This will be my last regular contribution to the Reader for a while.
Tabu The last film of F.W. Murnau (1931), probably the greatest of all silent directors (he didn’t live long enough to make sound films, dying in an auto accident only a few days after work on the synchronized musical score for this masterpiece was completed). Filmed entirely in the South Seas in 1929 with a nonprofessional cast and gorgeous cinematography by Floyd Crosby, this began as a collaboration with documentarist Robert Flaherty, who still shares credit for the story, though clearly the German romanticism of Murnau predominates, above all in the heroic poses of the islanders and the fateful diagonals in the compositions. The simple plot is an erotic love story involving a young woman who becomes sexually taboo when she is selected by an elder to replace a sacred maiden who has just died; an additional theme is the corrupting power of “civilization.” The exquisite tragic ending—conceived musically and rhythmically as a gradually decelerating diminuendo—is one of the pinnacles of silent cinema. —Jonathan Rosenbaum
