God is American
So say the Tanna Islanders

by Laura Lee

For French filmmaker Richard Martin Jordan, shooting on the remote Pacific island of Tanna in the archipelago of Vanuatu had a few challenges.

Tiny Tanna is one of the poorest islands in the South Pacific. The 10,000 inhabitants share one telephone. It is a land where women live apart from men, and some natives still hunt bats with bows. They speak four dialects, and only two French speakers were available on the island to provide interpretation.

“While filming, a hurricane touched the island of Tanna and three or four people died,” Jordan said. “The cameras broke and the village was completely cut off for six days because palm trees blocked the path… One day I was attacked by men from a nearby village. They were jealous. They knew I had helped (another) village financially. They wanted their share. They threatened me with machetes. I barely escaped.”

Yet these were but small inconveniences when placed in the balance with the opportunity to film a documentary about the last surviving “Cargo Cult.”

“I thought that the natives of Tanna deserved some images before disappearing, being forever engulfed in our questionable modernity,” Jordan said.

Jordan first learned of the Cargo Cults, and the John Frum cult depicted in his film, over dinner in Paris. He was immediately inspired to research the topic further. Cargo Cults are “patchwork” religions that sprung up in remote islands when native cultures interacted with Europeans and later Americans.

Melanesians believed that their ancestors would one day come back to life, bearing unimaginable wealth and secure the long-term future of their community. In the late 19th century, when Europeans arrived with sailing ships full of cargo, it seemed to correspond to the existing narrative of the ancestors’ return and the myths grew. Over the years, European sailors and missionaries found their way to the island and attempted to impose Christianity. Tannans who opposed Christian belief created a prophet John Frum who would defend their customs against colonialism and shower then with material blessings in the form of cargo. Then during World War II, the American Navy arrived and used the island as a staging ground for attacks on Japan. Their prophet, John Frum, merged with the Americans.

“Since 1945, the Tannas, have been fascinated by the Americans, whom they see as super-humans with all their material wealth. The Tannas, who have always been striving to obtain wealth, pray for the return of John Frum on their island,” Jordan said. “The Americans treated the natives well, so they naturally turned John Frum into an American, just like the ones they’ve known: a beautiful, big and strong prophet. John Frum’s legend was born out of the symbiosis between the Island’s founding myths, the Christian influence on Tanna and the American arrival in the area.”

Jordan discovered the film’s star his first day on the island. Isaac the One, the cult leader, who claims to be the son of John Frum, is a fabulous story teller. “He inspires respect,” Jordan said. “He is intelligent, determined, convincing. He seems wise. I immediately understood that he’d have the principal role in the movie.”

In interviews in the film, Isaac’s Ipeukel dialect is dotted with such expressions as “three days,” “six o’clock,” and “every time.” It becomes clear that every word related to time is borrowed from English, implying that the native language had little use for such expressions prior to the arrival of the Americans.

“Isaac and his men spend their time ‘doing nothing,’” Jordan said. “Their relation to time doesn’t have anything to do with ours. We have everything except time.”

Isaac told Jordan that his people were “the opposite” of the Europeans. “We are poor, you are rich,” he said. “We have time, you lack it, we don’t work, you work all your life! We eat what we plant, you don’t touch the earth any more, you don’t caress the trees, you don’t look up at the sky anymore! You’re just curious, rich and idle.”

Yet in spite of these differences in pace, Jordan found the Tannas to be quite similar to Westerners who dream that one day their metaphorical ships will come in.

“They compensate their existential and sometimes metaphysical anguish by dreaming of material comfort, the American way of life,” he said. “I thought that a comparison of their mode of living and ours urgently imposed itself. This cult in all its naivete and materialism is practiced with such conviction that it represents to me a real spiritual quest, including all the metaphysical, humanist, universal and timeless components.”

Many of the practices and beliefs of the John Frum cult, including veneration of the U.S. flag and a John Frum day celebration in which the Tannans dress in approximation of U.S. soldiers and march with bamboo rifles, are quirky and odd to Western eyes, but Jordan manages to strike a balance that is both humorous and sympathetic without ever becoming mocking.

“I realized that to decipher this cult with my own cultural norms would be hypocrisy,” Jordan said. “I would have to use humor as one of the best ways to suggest meaning.”

The film has received great feedback on the festival circuit and earned an Award of Excellence in the Accolade competition. Jordan says his next project will be a fictional comedy inspired by the documentary. In the meantime he is waiting for a prophet to come with his Cargo - the budget for his next film.