Walter Tanner - Silent Era

Silent Era

Tanner’s decisions were not without controversy in either era. One example in the silent era concerned the New Zealand feature film The Te Kooti Trail (1927), a re-enactment of the war fought in the Bay of Plenty between Māori Chief Te Kooti and British forces in 1869. New Zealand director Rudall Hayward intended to premier it on 11 November 1927. Conscious of the need to forestall adverse Māori reaction to the film, the government decided to consult Māori and asked Ringatu Māori from Whakatane to attend a private screening on the day intended for the premiere. The next day, Tanner refused to approve the film until changes were made to two intertitles, one that referred to Te Kooti “resorting to faked miracles”, the other referring to Te Kooti’s lieutenant Peka McLean as “torture master” and “stage manager of miracles”. The subsequent “storm of publicity” surrounding the film ensured it played to full houses when it premiered a few days later at the Strand Theatre in Auckland on 17 November 1927.. Tanner wrote a conciliatory letter to Hayward in 1928 calling the whole affair “a case of pure misunderstanding”.

Western Samoa was governed by New Zealand under a League of Nations Trusteeship from 1914 until independence in 1962. As such, New Zealand censorship law also extended to films intended for exhibition in Samoa. Because New Zealand legislation provided that no film could be approved which "in the opinion of the censor, depicts any matter that is against public order and decency, or the exhibition of which for any other reason is, in the opinion of the censor, undesirable in the public interest", Tanner had broad discretion to consider matters that, in his view, were uniquely relevant to Samoa. He wrote in 1929 however, that film censoring in Samoa “should certainly be done at Apia” by those sensitive to local colonial conditions: “One of the principal concerns in Samoa is to see that the white man is not brought into contempt by the exhibition of films which would tend to lessen the respect of the natives for the white man, which is so essential. From the motives of safety this is necessary in a territory where the natives heavily outnumber the whites. Even a picture with the famous dog Rin Tin Tin would be questionable as the dog frequently fights and overcomes the villain — a white man".