The Surrealists were not alone among modernists in their fascination with the primitive, but for them, it was not a matter of form but decidedly of content: the exotic represented the antithesis of Western rationalism, materialism and Christianity, "...a place where love was pure desire..." (S. Kovács). That place was not to be found using a map but, rather, the imagination. Moana, Robert Flaherty's ethnographic documentary about life and customs in Samoa, was "an intensely lyrical poem on the theme of the last paradise" (Herman Weinberg). The result of Flaherty's two years spent among the inhabitants of the island of Savai'i, the film pursues the inner meaning of such everyday activities as hunting and feasting, and of rituals, including tattooing and dancing. In its seeming artlessness it emulates Flaherty's observation that the Samoans "are excellent actors, quite simply because they don't act and it is the natural things done unconsciously that count the most on the screen." This is not far from the Surrealists' romantic construct of the primitive as being closer to the unconscious. For them, the film and its locale were one: Moana was "one of the most beautiful dreams we could have made" (Robert Desnos).