Does 'Rapa Nui' Take Artistic License Too Far?
Movies: Some experts fear Hollywood's depiction of historical events will merely distort facts. Kevin Costner's film about Easter Island is set to open Sept. 9.
- WILLIAM R. LONG,
TIMES STAFF WRITER
Los Angeles Times Friday August 26, 1994
Home Edition - Calendar, Page 21
EASTER ISLAND, Chile--Hollywood has well-known ways of teasing reality into movie magic, winking at factual accuracy. In a new film about Easter Island, that imaginative tradition meshes with a pattern of myth and fantasy already overshadowing the blurry past of this remote Pacific outpost.
Some archaeologists, trying to piece together an accurate picture of the island's cultural heritage, are unhappy over what Hollywood has done. More distortion, especially in a slick and sensational motion picture, tramples on the all-too-fragile truth of Easter Island, they complain.
The movie in question is "Rapa Nui," co-produced by Kevin Costner and Barrie Osborne and to be released by Warner Bros. on Sept. 9. It was directed by Kevin Reynolds and stars Sandrine Holt, Jason Scott Lee and Esai Morales.
Rapa Nui is the native name for Easter Island, a Chilean possession on the far-flung southeastern edge of Polynesia. In broad terms, the movie tells a story of love and war in a society that flourished here during a past era of glory, then collapsed in violent upheaval in the 17th Century, before Europeans discovered the isolated island.
There are scenes showing some of Easter Island's famous statues of volcanic stone, huge monoliths with elongated faces, proudly jutting chins and truncated torsos. There are sweeping vistas of the island's grassy hills and meadows, its wave-battered coast. And there are crowds of Rapa Nui natives, hired by the movie makers to appear in the film wearing scanty costumes that someone has imagined early inhabitants wore.
The screenplay of "Rapa Nui" revolves around forbidden love between a young man and woman belonging to rival tribes, known in Rapa Nui legend as the "Long Ears" and the "Short Ears." The two tribes fight a final, bloody battle near the end of the movie at a place called "Poike Ditch."
The battle of Poike Ditch is part of Rapa Nui legend, but much of the island lore has been invented or twisted over the centuries by imaginative storytellers, researchers say. While it is true that some people in Rapa Nui wore ornamental plugs that distended their earlobes, archaeological study has made it clear that those "long ears" were not the mark of a separate tribe but rather were found throughout the island, perhaps as an indicator of social or political rank.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Norwegian author Thor Heyerdahl popularized a notion that the Long Ears were descendants of invaders from the South American Andes who came to Rapa Nui and established a superior culture that was responsible for great architectural works and the island's great monolithic statues, called moais. The Short Ears were said to be of Polynesian descent, with a lesser cultural heritage.
Such theories, which have been discredited by numerous archeological studies, are often criticized for making it seem that the richness of Rapa Nui's ancestral culture was an import from South America rather than the fruit of the island's real Polynesian roots. It has taken years to filter out contamination of the truth and of Rapa Nui's pride in an authentically Polynesian cultural identity, some anthropologists and archaeologists say.
And now, Hollywood's movie threatens to muddy the waters again, says Jo Anne Van Tilburg, a research associate at UCLA's Institute of Archeology.
"At this vulnerable juncture in their history, the islanders are again grappling with fictional tales about their past, this time created by Hollywood," Van Tilburg wrote last year in the U.S. magazine Archeology. In a guest column, she pointed out flaws in the "Long Ears" versus "Short Ears" legend, and she questioned whether the great battle at the end of the movie has any veracity.
"Excavations by the University of Chile of the so-called Poike Ditch have failed to come up with the charcoal and bone to prove that such a legendary battle actually took place," she wrote.
Jose Miguel Ramirez, an archaeologist who manages the 16,000-acre national park on Easter Island, takes Van Tilburg's side against the movie's content, which he calls "a disaster."
He said "Rapa Nui" mixes elements from different periods of the past as if they belonged in the same time and introduces "elements that have nothing to do with the island's culture," such as clothing styles and native Maoris from New Zealand.
"Like Hollywood movies about North American Indians, it is going to establish a version of history that is false," Ramirez said in an interview. "Unfortunately, what it is going to do is establish a caricature around the world of what the Rapa Nui culture was."
Lilian Gonzalez, an anthropologist with the University of Chile's Institute for Easter Island Studies, does not deny the distortions in the movie, but she does argue that it has redeeming value.
For example, Gonzalez said, it can serve as a dramatic warning against the kind of ecological destruction that took place on Rapa Nui, where archaeologists say native forests were razed and soils depleted, possibly contributing to hunger and turmoil. "What is interesting is the realization of what happened and what can happen in the world," she said.
"Anyone who sees the movie is going to disagree with many things," she added. "But it is a movie, not a historical document."
During several months of shooting on Easter Island last year, the movie makers used hundreds of natives as extras. Gonzalez said the experience reinforced their appreciation of their heritage, including traditional handicrafts and methods for preparing food that have all but faded away.
"They sensed the value of their culture, and their own value," the anthropologist said. "That was a vaccination of identity, an injection of community spirit."
Claudio Cristino, an archaeologist with the Institute for Easter Island Studies, was employed by the movie company as a consultant. Apparently, however, the movie makers either didn't consult Cristino or didn't heed his advice on some things. The dialogue, for example: "What they say and don't say, seemed pretty bad to me, not typical of Polynesia, very Hollywood," Cristino said.
"Obviously, from the first moment, I realized that this was fiction," he said. "It compresses 500 or 600 years into one hour and a half. But you have to admit that it is a fiction based on some things that probably did happen."
A village set, intended to replicate an early community, was archeologically "pretty good," according to Cristino. So was the clothing shown, he said, adding, "Of course, some license was taken."
Before the movie company came, many islanders criticized plans for the filming, warning of possible damage to archeological sites and disruption of the society. But Cristino and others now say that very little harm was done.
Two statues were scratched, Cristino said, but "it is no more damage than what is done by 5,000 tourists a year."
He and others predict that the movie will be a boon to tourism, Easter Island's main source of livelihood. "From what we've seen, it won't be a great movie," he said, but "elements such as the photography of scenery, the people and a vision of how this was in the past--that will be interesting."
The filming last year brought a minor bonanza in itself, said anthropologist Gonzalez. "It was an injection of money for Easter Island," she said. "Many people were able to finish their houses or their hotels, buy a vehicle," she said.
Ramirez, the park manager, said the movie company contracted three islanders for a total of nearly $120,000 to take care of cleanup work after the shooting and donated $70,000 to the cash-strapped park.
Besides money, the movie gave Easter Island plenty of fodder for its gossip mill. Five or six island women reportedly married movie crew members and left the island with them, and several other women left but later returned.
Australians in the crew are said to have encouraged two pay strikes by Easter Island extras. The Americans paid up and the shooting continued.
When the shooting was over, the Maori actors from New Zealand were leaving one night on a commercial flight to Tahiti. As the story is told now, they had been partying enthusiastically and one or more of them was late for the plane, which was about to leave. To keep it from taking off without them, 10 or 15 of the actors occupied the airport apron in front of the plane.
Co-producer Osborne was there, and Chilean authorities blamed him for the incident. The Interior Ministry ordered his expulsion from the country, prohibiting his return.
But Jacobo Hei, the native governor of Easter Island, said he hoped to persuade authorities to allow Osborne to come back. According to Hei, a grand premiere for "Rapa Nui" on Easter Island in late September was being planned with the presence of Osborne and a charter planeload of other people from Hollywood. "I'm interested in that man coming and showing the movie," Hei said. "I think he will be able to get in without problems."
Copyright, The Times Mirror Company; Los Angeles Times, 1994.
COUNTERPUNCH
'Rapa Nui' Misuses Its Literary License
By JO ANNE VAN TILBURG,
Jo Anne Van Tilburg, Ph.D., is a Research Associate of the UCLA Institute of Archeology. She has conducted research seasonally on Rapa Nui.Los Angeles Times
Monday September 26, 1994
Home Edition
Calendar, Page 3
In his recent review of Kevin Reynold's unfortunate film "Rapa Nui," critic Kenneth Turan is rightfully amused by the "goofy" dialogue and "giddy South Seas" fantasy quality of this "throwback to Cinemascope epics of a simpler time" (" 'Rapa Nui' Presents a Fantasy Island of a Simpler Past," Calendar, Sept. 9).
The extremely small audience of which I was part hooted and jeered, not only at the cliched dialogue but at the transparently phony melodrama. In fact, I thought New Zealand actor Eru Potaka-Dewes as the silly ariki mau was hilariously funny, and some of his scenes with George Henare (the evil priest) approached the unintended level of Three Stooges comedy. I concur with Turan in his negative view of the film, but write to take issue with him on two points.
First, I think his willingness to view some of the footage as "good fun in a Saturday-matinee way" is generous but inappropriate and uniformed. The footage he is most impressed with portrays the ancient tangata manu or "birdman" rite. This profoundly sacred ritual ordeal is totally misread by director-writer Reynolds, who treats it as a crassly undertaken, viciously competitive "ironman" contest. While dramatic and daringly filmed, this ridiculous sequence betrays a profound ignorance of Polynesian ritual and Rapa Nui belief.
Second, Turan fails to note the pseudo-documentary disguise this film wears. At the beginning we are told, in a voice-over thick with dramatic import, of the Polynesian settlement of Rapa Nui. At the end, a tagline states unequivocally that "archeological evidence" proves that Pitcairn, lying some 1,400 kilometers westward, was settled from Rapa Nui. This is a patent falsehood that cannot go unchallenged.
Pitcarin Island was once inhabited and then abandoned by Polynesians, as were several other Pacific islands. There is virtually no hard evidence of any kind to demonstrate that Pitcairn or any other East Polynesian island was settled from Rapa Nui. While we may rationalize away, if we choose, the "artistic license" this film's creators have taken with Rapa Nui history ("Does 'Rapa Nui' Take Artistic License Too Far?," Calendar, Aug. 26), such deliberate distortion of scientific fact (or ignorance of its existence) is totally indefensible.
Much ink has been spilled in the concerned scientific community about this film's huge negative impact on the island's natural and cultural environment. In some ways, all of the turmoil would have been bearable if a good film had resulted, a film that did justice to the sacrifices made and gave honor to the past. Rapa Nui, which is an especially artistic culture, had a right to expect more.
Rapa Nui has always inspired artists, writers, adventurers and scientists. Thor Heyerdahl sailed the Kon-Tiki on a wave of publicity into the imagination of two generations of travelers. No less a talent than Robert Frost wrote a poem about one of the monolithic statues. But the island, because of its incredible megalithic accomplishments and dramatic isolation, also has been the reluctant center of fantastic speculation, bad research and pseudoscience. This film not only contains most of the discredited and discarded myths once advanced about the island, but some of the newer unreasonable and unproven speculations as well.
It is but the latest in a long and lamentable history of drivel written about Rapa Nui.
