Hollywood's Hawaii

Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780813587455
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Whether presented as exotic fantasy, a strategic location during World War II, or a site combining postwar leisure with military culture, Hawaii and the South Pacific figure prominently in the U.S. national imagination. Hollywood’s Hawaii is the first full-length study of the film industry’s intense engagement with the Pacific region from 1898 to the present.
 
Delia Malia Caparoso Konzett highlights films that mirror the cultural and political climate of the country over more than a century—from the era of U.S. imperialism on through Jim Crow racial segregation, the attack on Pearl Harbor and WWII, the civil rights movement, the contemporary articulation of consumer and leisure culture, as well as the buildup of the modern military industrial complex. Focusing on important cultural questions pertaining to race, nationhood, and war, Konzett offers a unique view of Hollywood film history produced about the national periphery for mainland U.S. audiences. Hollywood’s Hawaii presents a history of cinema that examines Hawaii and the Pacific and its representations in film in the context of colonialism, war, Orientalism, occupation, military buildup, and entertainment. 
 

1

The South Pacific and Hawaii on Screen

Territorial Expansion and Cinematic Colonialism

It is perhaps no mere coincidence that the end of the Hawaiian Kingdom falls into the same time period when Thomas Edison, a founding figure in the modern invention of cinema, designed and developed the Kinetoscope.1 Around the same time, the anti-monarchist Bayonet Constitution of 1887, imposed upon King Kalakaua and enforced by the US Navy, triggered a transfer of Hawaii’s sovereignty in 1893 with a coup d’état by the US military. Sanford B. Dole, a relative of the Big Five family oligarchy that controlled Hawaii’s economic affairs, led the provisional government that paved the way for Hawaii’s full annexation by the United States in 1898.2 Thomas Edison premiered and exhibited his first film, Fred Ott’s Sneeze, one year after the kingdom’s overthrow in 1894, producing thereafter numerous film shorts depicting daily and mundane events of American life. The advent of cinema coincided with American territorial expansion via military force in the Spanish-American War of 1898, which brought the United States into the possession of Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam, along with its territorial annexation of Hawaii. Edison’s film crew captured and restaged this war in more than sixty film shorts for an American audience that had yet to catch up to the new reality of the country’s overseas imperialism. French philosopher and cultural theorist Paul Virilio, a specialist in military technology and logistics, links the new technology of cinema directly to the birth of modern warfare with its improved abilities of surveillance and battlefield reconnaissance: “Just as the nitrocellulose that went into film stock was also used for the production of explosives, so the artilleryman’s motto was the same as the cameraman’s: lighting reveals everything.”3 The logistics of perception, one can argue, extends beyond the battlefield to the enterprise of colonial and territorial expansion, since it delivers the geological contours, topography, and socioeconomic outlines of new territorial possessions. As we will see, Thomas Edison’s first shorts depicting Hawaii are far from innocent local portrayals of the islands but pursue a strategic goal that parallels US expansionism at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Cinema ushered in the modern era for the United States since it developed a unique art form with a photographic realism unmatched by earlier arts, one that would allow American culture to document, reassure, and replicate itself simply by the act of narrative self-observation in motion pictures. In the context of this new medium of mass entertainment, Miriam Hansen speaks of the simultaneous emergence of a new public sphere with a much wider range of social inclusiveness and participatory democratic access to the medium. For example, this new inclusiveness of cinema extended to the working classes and newly settled immigrants: “The nickelodeons offered easy access and a space apart, an escape from overcrowded tenements and sweatshop labor.”4 Cinema’s introspective national gaze marketed for mass consumption would quickly become the dominant mode of symbolic cultural discourse and in some ways dislocate reality as such. In the much quoted words of Judith Mayne, “movie houses and nickelodeons were the back rooms of the Statue of Liberty.”5 American acculturation and norms would, so to speak, begin in cinema, before they would find their way into the real world.

This reversal of cause and effect in which cinematic reality would appear to have preceded reality also applies to the perception of modern Hawaii, which can be roughly dated to the end of its monarchy and the rise of cinema. The perception of this remote and newly acquired territory by a wider mass audience on the mainland occurred predominantly through the illusion of cinema.6 Not surprisingly, the earliest existing film footage of Hawaii dates to its annexation in 1898 and was shot by James H. White and W. Bleckyrden of the Edison Manufacturing Company on their trip to the Philippines, which entailed a stopover in the harbor of Honolulu. From this point on, Hawaii would slowly insert itself into the national imaginary on the US mainland via the dissemination of cinema, reaching its culmination during World War II and the attack on Pearl Harbor. Paralleling its development of increasing significance in the national imaginary, one can also see an evolution as the cinematic depiction of Hawaii traversed various film genres. After Hawaii and the Pacific’s initial portrayals within the scope of realism and mundane actualities, a second stage of idealization shaped its cinematic expression around fantasy and romance with an emphasis on the exotic, primitive, and mythical Hawaii and the South Seas. Increased realism in the late 1930s with a focus on modern Hawaii gave way to the World War II combat genre, highlighting geopolitical concerns and Hawaii’s multicultural society. Eventually low mimetic forms such as comedy highlighting mass tourism and leisure (e.g., Elvis Presley as the returning soldier in Blue Hawaii) emerged in the postwar era.

This lapse from exotic fantasy into war and postwar realism would also confront American viewers increasingly with troubling questions pertaining to race, territory, and democracy that had been buried and repressed in the initial depiction of Hawaii and the Pacific’s exotic islands. In fact, the escapist fantasies found in films depicting Hawaii and the Pacific in the 1920s and 1930s should not be disconnected from war film altogether, as they tacitly continued an act of war and territorial annexation—namely completing Hawaii’s annexation from 1898—through an imperialist visual assimilation of Hawaii as a Pacific outpost for the US Navy into the cultural and cinematic imaginary of the United States. As Miriam Hansen points out, the “universal-language metaphor,” implying that cinema’s visual language could communicate across cultural, linguistic, and national divides, “had harbored totalitarian and imperialist tendencies to begin with.”7 From an economic point of view, one could also argue that the selling of imperialist fantasies via cinematic illusions of Hawaii and the adjoining South Pacific proved just as lucrative as the actual economic exploitation of Hawaii. This study, concerned with the representation of Hawaii and the South Pacific in US cinema, will pay specific attention to this secondary symbolic structure through which Hawaii and the South Pacific are disseminated, traded, and eventually incorporated into the national imaginary. In the modern era, cinema superseded the mostly written accounts of US forays into the Pacific in the nineteenth century (e.g., novellas by Herman Melville; letters and essays by Mark Twain; travelogues and seafaring journals) since now, as a twentieth-century mass medium, it reached a much wider audience and was no longer restricted to a smaller audience composed of educated and elite readers.

Hawaii: A Territorial Acquisition in Film

The development of cinema or the photoplay as a theatrical form of visual entertainment projected onto a screen for a seated audience is generally attributed to the Lumière brothers, who premiered their cinématographe in 1895 as a combined camera, printer, and on-screen projector. Edison’s Kinetoscope, a more individualized viewing or peeping box, was quickly adapted and updated to accommodate the more collectively engaging medium of screen projection and used for the first time in its American version as the Vitascope projector in 1896. As Charles Musser notes in The Emergence of Cinema, “In late April 1896 the vitascope was showing films in only one American theater, Koster & Bial’s Music Hall in New York City, but the subsequent diffusion was remarkable. By May 1897, only one year later, several hundred projectors were in use across the country. Honolulu had its first picture show in early February 1897.”8 This rapid transition to public screenings across the United States and its territories would eventually prove crucial for the dissemination of cinema as a powerful mass medium. It is remarkable to note that Honolulu was already included early on in the distribution of this new technology, one year prior to Hawaii’s official annexation. This new national imaginary carried via the medium of cinema was extended to the outer borders of the newly emerging American empire and played a crucial role in its consolidation. The inclusion of Honolulu serves a further purpose than the mere extension of cinema’s US markets, making use of the imperialist annexation of Hawaii’s territory. America’s latest technology was meant to be marketed worldwide, and Honolulu can in this sense be understood as one of the nation’s significant gateways to the world.

As Richard Abel notes in his Encyclopedia of Early Cinema, Hawaii was in a vanguard position in the global expansion of its industry, particularly pertaining to the South Pacific: “Moving pictures also prospered on other islands in the Pacific, and again Hawaii was in the vanguard. As early as 1908 there were five nickelodeons in Honolulu, and five or six more on other islands of the group by the following year. In 1915 Photoplay reported that there were no fewer than 35 moving picture theaters in Honolulu alone. . . . Generally the audience who attended Hawaiian shows were mixed—American (white), Hawaiian, Chinese, Japanese.”9 In contrast to later mystifications and clichés of Hawaii as a leisurely island paradise, the United States pursued clearly pragmatic economic goals in its newly annexed territory. In line with this market expansionist ideology, Edison’s company and their offshoots produced film footage of the Spanish-American War in 1898 and also documentary shorts of daily life in Hawaii as early as 1898. Much like those of the Lumière brothers, Edison’s recordings produced actualities, slices of mundane reality, to be consumed by audiences as mirror images of themselves and their modernizing nations.

Edison Manufacturing Company produced the earliest example of Hawaii on film with its cameramen James H. White and W. Bleckyrden. The recently restored film short, titled Kanakas Diving for Money, no. 2 (June 22, 1898), shows a number of Hawaiian boys and young adults diving for money thrown from a boat or pier on which a stationary camera is filming their activity.10 The image, with its deep focus, is thoroughly structured into distinct planes of foreground (young divers), middle ground (an outrigger canoe slowly traversing the screen), background (a large merchant ship on a dock), and remote background (multiple large merchant vessels lining the horizon). This screen image evokes hardly an island paradise but rather a busy commercial harbor. Even leisurely activities such as diving involve the pursuit of money and are placed into the foreground. The middle ground, which shows Hawaii’s traditional outrigger canoe, is fully encircled and framed by commercial activities.

This subject was reshot in 1901 by Robert Bonine in the film short Boys Diving, Honolulu,11 displaying again young Hawaiian boys diving for coins. A former cameraman for Edison Studios, Bonine would deliver further film footage of Hawaii in 1902 while working for Edison’s competitor American Mutoscope and Biograph Company. This company, founded by Edison’s former coworker William Kennedy Dixon, challenged Edison’s Vitascope projection technology and would eventually win out as the dominant film company, signing America’s film pioneer D. W. Griffith in 1908. American Mutoscope and Biograph Company not only surpassed the quality of Vitascope but also was linked to subsidiaries of the British Mutoscope Company, ensuring wider global distribution.

Along with Boys Diving, Honolulu, Bonine shot two shorts in 1901 documenting the harvesting of sugar cane that emphasize a commercially exploitative use of Hawaii’s islands. Cutting Sugar Cane (1902),12 a short of approximately twenty-five seconds, opens with a wide shot of a Hawaiian cane field populated with multiple workers who look to be of Filipino descent given their darker skin complexions. Near the center of the frame in the middle ground, a foreman (possibly white) on a white horse is shown pointing and directing workers who occupy the foreground. The foreman turns in a circle and eventually disappears into the field in the remote background. His riding trajectory measures out the large enterprise of harvesting that the audience witnesses, revealing further workers in the background. In the foreground, a similarly busy and industrious atmosphere prevails with workers loading the harvested cane onto a horse carriage seen on the right side of the frame with another white horse behind it. The entire frame is densely populated and highly kinetic, depicting an ambience of industriousness and tireless work. Cinematically, the filmmaker displays excellent skills in the use of deep space composition with the structuring of the fore-, middle-, and background that highlights a mobile kinetic frame as well as off-screen space, which extends the busy activity beyond the screen with workers moving in and out of the frame.

Loading Sugar Cane (1902) completes the documentation of the commercial enterprise of harvest sugar cane.13 In this short, the audience is placed into the midst of the loading activity. It opens with local field workers with head covers for protection against heat, carrying bundled cane across several loading planks onto what appears to be a freight vehicle, possibly a train. A foreman occupies the center of the frame, supervising the workers. Suddenly, several white men, distinguished by their business suits and straw hats, walk into the frame from behind the camera and begin assisting the workers. As in the previous shorts, the American empire is shown hard at work and provides viewer identification via the use of off-screen space that connects the reality outside the frame to the one witnessed on-screen. An intimate over-the-shoulder perspective links the viewer directly to the harvest activity. In addition, the footage, with its unusual inclusion of businessmen assisting in the loading, stresses the financial, commercial, and administrative aspects of the American empire. The ultimate subject of the short is not the local workers but the commercial enterprise owned by white businessmen who are actively performing the work of nation and empire building, making proper capitalist use of the recently annexed Hawaiian land. The short moreover depicts the proper racial hierarchy, relegating Asians to the background as an anonymous group of field laborers framed by white individual businessmen in the foreground. This perspective differs sharply from the famous Lumière short Workers Leaving the Factory (1895) that looks more empathetically at the labor force being released into leisure time at the end of their day’s work.

In 1906, Robert Bonine would return to the islands and shoot twenty-six shorts (of which only a few are extant) for Edison Studios. Whereas Bonine’s earlier 1902 footage shows a clear pragmatic economic focus of exploiting Hawaii’s resources, the footage filmed in 1906 relaxes into a broader perspective of the islands and introduces an early version of the imperial ethnographic gaze that separates modern white subjects from premodern nonwhite natives. In a revision of the busy commercial harbor atmosphere seen in Kanakas Diving (1898), Native Canoes (1906) distinguishes between modern and traditional Hawaii. Against a static horizon lined by merchant vessels, the audience now sees multiple outrigger canoes entering the frame from off-screen space, moving toward the foreground and center. The suggestion here is that of an idyllic coexistence between ancient Hawaii, associated with natives, and modern Hawaii, associated with white American colonizers and capitalism.

However, this claim to a peaceful coexistence denies any tensions between the people of Hawaii and US colonizers and when examined reveals itself as a colonial rhetoric of containment. Similarly, Pa-u Riders (1906) displays a ceremonial mass ornament of Hawaiian women horseback riders wearing leis and long traditional skirts (pa’u) flowing majestically in the wind, representing the queen and the princesses of Hawaii’s eight major islands. White spectators can be seen on the side in suits and Victorian fashion, watching this parade reviving ancient traditions with the film emphasizing a nostalgic tone toward the empty exhibition of the now abolished monarchy. In fact, Pa’u parades were revived only in 1900 after the annexation of Hawaii. In Bonine’s short, this shift in history is acknowledged as US cavalry on horseback ride behind the ceremonial riders, suggesting once again a distinction between traditional Hawaii and its new modern identity as an American-administered territory. In addition, the shift marks a clear transition from ritual and ceremonial functions toward exhibition, thereby marketing Hawaii as a fetish for the gaze of white spectators.

The colonial gaze that defines Hawaii, as Kathy Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull point out, takes on a threefold dimension: “The missionaries found a people they define as dark, mysterious, lacking civilization but capable of being domesticated. Entrepreneurs and sugar planters found the people lacking industry, the land uncultivated but a promising venue for profit once an appropriate labor force could be secured. The military saw/sees Hawai’i as strategically important and in need of defense, which imported American soldiers can supply.”14 From these early shorts it appears that the main emphasis...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The American Empire in the South Pacific and Its Representation in Hollywood Cinema, 1898–Present
• Chapter 1. The South Pacific and Hawaii on Screen: Territorial Expansion and Cinematic Colonialism
• Chapter 2. World War II Hawaii: Orientalism and the American Century
• Chapter 3. Postwar Hawaii and the Birth of the Military-Industrial Complex
• Chapter 4. Conclusion: The New Cultural Amnesia in Contemporary Cinema and Television
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author