Now the full-length movie is freely avaialble on the internet
Still travelling - mentally, of course - I watched last night once again "In A Savage Land" and enjoyed every one of the 106 minutes of it. It's a stunning and visually breathtaking movie filmed on location in New Guinea's Trobriand Islands.
Watching this movie was like opening the cover of an adventure book and being immediately transported to another world. Although there were shades of Malinowski and "Sex and Repression in Savage Society", the story line, a kind of English Patient in the South Pacific, didn't really engage me; it's the superb cinematography that at times feels as though I was watching a candid documentary on a wild and exotic remote island where the mud and the heat and the smells are as real as the leaves that cover my lawn down here in not-so-tropical New South Wales.
And what about those haunting closing lines? "You look back on a life. What do you hold? What do you take with you into death? .... The thing I'll remember on the day I die is the smell of a pearl shell, freshly opened. Yes, that's what I'll take with me into the dark."
P.S. Read Malinowski's "Argonauts Of The Western Pacific" here.
P.P.S. Watch "Tales from the Jungle", which examines his work, here.
