The enduring popularity of Polynesia in western literature, art, and film attests to the pleasures that Pacific islands have, over the centuries, afforded the consuming gaze of the west--connoting solitude, release from cares, and, more recently, self-renewal away from urbanized modern life. Facing the Pacific is the first study to offer a detailed look at the United States' intense engagement with the myth of the South Seas just after the First World War, when, at home, a popular vogue for all things Polynesian seemed to echo the expansion of U.S. imperialist activities abroad. Jeffrey Geiger looks at a variety of texts that helped to invent a vision of Polynesia for U.S. audiences, focusing on a group of writers and filmmakers whose mutual fascination with the South Pacific drew them together--and would eventually drive some of them apart. Key figures discussed in this volume are Frederick O'Brien, author of the bestseller White Shadows in the South Seas; filmmaker Robert Flaherty and his wife, Frances Hubbard Flaherty, who collaborated on Moana; director W.S. Van Dyke, who worked with Robert Flaherty on MGM's adaptation of White Shadows; and Expressionist director F.W. Murnau, whose last film, Tabu, was co-directed with Flaherty.

The garden and the wilderness : tropes of order and disorder --Idylls and ruins : Frederick O'Brien in the Marquesas -- Searching for Moana : Frances Hubbard and Robert J. Flaherty in Samoa -- The front and back of paradise : W.S. Van Dyke and MGM in Tahiti -- The homoerotic exotic : from C.W. Stoddard to Tabu.

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