In 1922 , Robert Flaherty, considered the first documentary filmmaker, had a huge success with his first feature-length film , Nanook of the North , which followed the lives of an Inuit family on Hudson Bay at the northern reaches of Quebec. Post- Nanook , Flaherty was signed to a contract by Paramount, which was eager to see a repeat of Nanook ’s box office, and handed, essentially, a blank check.So Flaherty set his sights on an equally isolated, far-flung location: Samoa, in the South Pacific, then a mandate of New Zealand, and part of the British Empire. He’d been influenced partially by Robert Louis Stevenson, who’d lived there in the early 1890s and wrote In the South Sea s. Then in his early 40s, Flaherty spent from 1923 to 1924 on the island of Savai’i, shooting film for what would become Moana , which translates as “the sea.” Moana is also the name of the young man who comes of age over the course of the film.Because Moana was so unorthodox in its dreamy tone, its relative lack of plot, and frankness in both showing nudity and suggesting sexuality, however, it didn’t achieve wide circulation when it was released in 1926, and it eventually dropped from public view. Unlike Nanook and Flaherty’s later classics, Man of Aran and The Louisiana Story , which was nominated for an Oscar in 1948, Moana has been little seen.“ God knows what Paramount expected. It was just poorly released. They tried to shift it into a love story of the South Seas, which it is, but not a conventional one,” said Bruce Posner, a film preservationist and curator who has recently overseen a digital restoration of Moana , which played this week at the New York Film Festival.On Monday , Posner, a Cornish resident, will introduce the restored Moana at the Loew Auditorium in the Black Family Visual Arts Center at Dartmouth College as part of the Ciné Salon film series, which he programs , and which is normally held at the Howe Library. All Ciné Salon screenings are free-of-charge to the public. This screening of Moana is co-sponsored by the Howe Library and the college’s Department of Film & Media Studies.Flaherty was part poet, part ethnographer and part cinematographic genius with an instinctive sense for what would be visually and emotionally dramatic, and which rites and customs were important to preserve on film. Even in the 1920s the cultures he documented were already seeing significant change as influences seeped in from the industrial world.“He was studying the cultures and havingpeople re-enact practices that they had given up over time,” said Kent Jones, director of the New York Film Festival, in a phone interview.Flaherty didn’t document action in the sense of picking up a camera and shooting, unmediated, whatever he saw through the lens. Rather, he chose locals whom he thought would be good on camera, and persuaded them to play scenes that he knew he wanted to get on film, such as the snaring of a wild boar, men paddling an outrigger into a rough sea, a young boy shimmying up the seemingly endless trunk of a coconut tree, scenes of courtship between Moana and his screen sweetheart or the ritualistic tattooing of Moana, marking his passage into manhood. The Flahertys thought of the subjects in their films as actors, who happened to be reenacting events and rites of significance.Some have called what Flaherty did “docufiction,” a clumsy hybrid term that manages to elide both Flaherty’s dedication to filming remote cultures and the artistry with which he did so. Over the years, his reputation and methodology have been questioned as people debate whether he was an ethnographer who closely collaborated with the cultures he filmed, or a colonialist who was overly manipulative in directing the action. Although Posner said he understands why scholars argue these points, he’s not as interested.What makes Moana last, he said, is that “it’s extremely engaging and moving. That’s Flaherty’s great contribution. ... To me, it’s pure cinema.”And although Flaherty did put some of his subjects at risk in filming, he took as many risks himself, hauling extremely heavy, cumbersome cameras into hard-to-reach locations in difficult conditions. He developed his film in a cave on Savai’i, no easy task. And he poisoned himself inadvertently by drinking water from the cave that contained silver nitrate which had washed off the film stock, said Posner. The silver nitrate also caused troubling spots to form on the negative.“Taking those cameras and all that film with you to Polynesia or the Arctic Circle, that’s a committment to the practice of art that goes beyond the industrial,” said Jones.