ABSTRACT
This chapter claims that the poetic and (non-)narrative form of island representations in Hollywood films from the 1920s and 1930s speaks to contemporary anthropological fantasies of place-bound and static premodern cultures, fantasies that are themselves a product of specifically modern visual regimes and spatial orders. Structurally, the geo- and ethnographic descriptions of Pacific islands and islanders in the journals of Banks and others have the same status as the island vistas at the beginning of It Happened One Night: they are static, and they are separated from the narrative itself. This resemblance is a symptom of the persistence of a representational tradition in the Western cultural imaginary, and of its pervasive presence in 1920s and 1930s America. The first American film to show a Pacific island was Sailor in Philippines, a short film produced by Kalem in 1908.
