[Review] Tanna single work   review  
Issue Details: First known date: 2017... 2017 [Review] Tanna
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Tanna is not an ethnographic documentary. It is rather a cinematic work of art, which is to say that it is an independent film made outside Hollywood for Pacific audiences and other interested viewers. At the same time, I think it is one of those rare movies that succeeds as both (like The Fast Runner or Smoke Signals, or perhaps, The Dead Lands). The story it tells of two young people, and their love which runs afoul of collective norms and values, is of course a story that echoes one we all know. But Tanna is set in a rural corner of contemporary Vanuatu, of all places. And its actors, who are villagers dressed in nothing more than raffia skirts and penis sheaths, speak in their vernacular. So the obstacles that block their love are of a Melanesian kind rather than of the sort that fair Verona might impose. Thus Tanna's imagery is not at all strange to any of us who have done fieldwork in the region.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Oceania vol. 87 no. 1 March 2017 12248626 2017 periodical issue 2017 pg. 110
Last amended 17 Nov 2017 07:39:59
110 [Review] Tannasmall AustLit logo Oceania
Subjects:
  • Tanna Martin Butler , John Collee , Bentley Dean , 2015 single work film/TV
Newspapers:
    Powered by Trove
    X