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Maata Horomona (also known as Maata Gillies; 1893 – 1939) was a New Zealand haka performer and film actress.
In 1909, she was part of a troupe of traditional Māori dancers who performed for several months in New York, creating an interest in their culture. In 1912, she starred in three films shot by Gaston Méliès in New Zealand: Loved by a Maori Chieftess, Hinemoa and How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride. These films, all released in 1913 only in the United States and considered lost, were the first fiction films shot in New Zealand. Maata Horomona was also the first non-Caucasian race actress, in 1913, to have her portrait published in the Motion Picture Story Magazine
Maata Horomona's brief career illustrated several aspects of the New Zealand and international perception of Māori culture: the tension between the enduring stereotype of the beautiful, humble and easygoing Vahine (young woman from Tahiti), on the one hand, and the assimilation of the Māori and the disappearance of their traditional culture, on the other. It also witnessed the emergence of themes underlying the portrayal of Māori in cinema, divided between the legendary representation of a mythical Eden, the problems linked to integration between the descendants of settlers and indigenous people in New Zealand, and the tourist exploitation of Māori exoticism to promote the country.
Bennett was a New Zealand Anglican priest with Irish-Māori heritage. He played a significant role in the late nineteenth century in promoting Māori culture through Western-style theatrical shows. Hailing from the same village as Horomana, the future bishop of the Anglican Diocese of Waiapu,. Bennett organized performances depicting Māori traditions and the Hinemoa legend. These shows, featuring choirs, tableaux vivants, and dance, were led by Māori troupes, notably the Rotorua Maori Entertainers. Marianne Schultz notes that these theatrical presentations reflected a convergence of Bennett's advocacy for the political assimilation of the Māori, the intentional tourist development in Rotorua by the New Zealand government, and societal changes marked by interracial marriages and pakeha settlement in traditionally Māori-inhabited areas..
This convergence was particularly evident when, in 1908, an American military fleet led by Admiral Sperry paid an official visit to Rotorua to attend the inauguration of the thermal baths run by Arthur Stanley Wohlmann. On this occasion, the government agency for the promotion of tourism created in 1901 organized, with Bennett's help, a Māori reception for the American admiral and the two hundred officers accompanying him, featuring haka and poï performances, whose coverage in the American press led the directors of the Hippodrome theater, New York's largest stage, to invite a troupe of Māori dancers to perform there the following year..
Maata Horomona was part of the troupe of 27 men and 16 women who embarked on a 9-month tour in July 1909. The choice of members was the subject of conflicting considerations between the New Zealand intermediaries, including Bennett, and the American organizers: while the New Zealanders favored legitimacy and technical skills, the Americans had racial stereotypes in mind, notably that of the vahiné (young woman from Tahiti), wanted the arrival of "tanned beauties" to "titillate" the New York spectators and were ultimately disappointed that the troupe included only "two or three" young girls,. among them Maata Horonoma.
The show staged at the Hippodrome was a great success, even if it was based on a misunderstanding: the New Zealanders thought they were being appreciated out of an interest in their culture, while the American public came to see a variation on a type of entertainment popular since the 19th century, the representation of an exotic form of savagery, attended in particular by anthropologists from the American Museum of Natural History.. However, this preconception was contradicted by the cultural level of the Māori: not only did they speak perfect English and demonstrated a mastery of Western manners, but the women in the troupe voted in their homelands, while American were still fighting for a similar right. The American press embroidered on these paradoxes without altering the stereotypes of the cannibal and the vahiné:.
Leaving San Francisco in July 1912, he made his first stop in Tahiti in August, where he stayed for around ten days and shot several films. He was "very disappointed that the natives were already too civilized to serve easily in the views", and was struck both by the women's morals, which he found "more than a little loose", and by the Tahitians' enthusiasm for Westerns.. Méliès and his team arrived in New Zealand on October 12, 1912, where they stayed for a month before leaving for Australia.. Even before their arrival, the New Zealand press anticipated that he would be filming native dances "in appropriate landscapes", or even more precisely, that after a week in Wellington he would travel to Rotorua, "where local color was as abundant as it was easy to obtain", to shoot scenes inspired by the Mokoia Island and the , "no doubt" with the participation of Māori and against a backdrop of geysers.
The New Zealand government, keen to develop foreign tourism and aware of the project's potential spin-offs, lent its support.. Walter Blow, head of the government tourism agency in Rotorua, whom Méliès found "perfect",. put him in touch with a local specialist in Maori culture, James Cowan, who acted as "general advisor and interpreter" and also contributed to the scripts. Cowan recommended that Méliès shoot in Whakarewarewa, a reconstructed Maori village in the valley of the same name near Ohinemutu, and put him in touch with Reverend Bennett, whom Méliès described as "a pastor, half-Maori blood, who hasda great influence on his fellows and lead a troupe of Maoris sic who did all sorts of exercises". Encouraged by Bennett's efficiency and the intelligence of the Maori actors the latter helped him direct, Méliès, who had just fired his director Bertram Bracken and Bracken's wife, actress Mildred Bracken, as well as actress Betty-Irène Tracy and actors William Ehfe, Sam Weil and Henry Stanley, readily adapted to this new situation and decided to give a prominent place to local actors.. Méliès later wrote from Java to his son: New Zealand filmmaker Rudall Hayward, whose uncle had negotiated with Méliès an unsuccessful project to distribute the latter's films in New Zealand,. maintained that before making Maata Horonoma the star of his New Zealand fictions, Méliès first tried out his young wife Hortense, previously burnished with cocoa..
On the contrary, Méliès, who had now assumed the role of de facto director, was delighted with his Maori actors, especially Maata Horomona, who was his "vedette", writing:
At the end of the shoot, Maata and the "Maori chief" presented Méliès with a few gifts: a carved gourd, a mat, a spear and a "Maori skirt". For his part, Méliès gave his star his photographic portrait and the sum of 2 pounds (just under 400 2022 dollars)..
After the departure of Méliès, Maata Horomona stopped making films. She married a Maori, Tureriao Gillies, gave him several children.One of his sons, Bom Gillies, is known as the last survivor of the Maori Battalion. and died in 1939 in Rotorua.
Maata Horomona's presence in this magazine's celebrity gallery was doubly paradoxical. On the one hand, she was a very little-known actress at the time – so much so that the magazine saw fit to specify that she was "really an actress" – having only appeared in a very small number of short films, each of which sold around ten copies; on the other hand, she was a Maori actress, at a time when non-Caucasian roles were generally played by Caucasian actors wearing masks. In fact, Maata Horomona enjoyed the singular honor of being the first non-Caucasian actress to be included in Motion Picture Story Magazine's gallery of personalities.
This apparent paradox can be explained by the way the magazine operated. It enjoyed the support of the Motion Pictures Patent Company, the cartel headed by Thomas Edison and to which Gaston Méliès' American Star Film Company belonged, on condition that it only promoted production companies that were members.. The actors featured in this way were not selected by the newspaper on the basis of their popularity, but the choice was made by the producers, who paid $200 a month for a guaranteed number of articles and photographs..
As David Pfluger observed, Maata Horomona's inclusion in Motion Picture Story Magazine's gallery of famous actors, surprising as it may seem at first glance, was "neither arbitrary nor unthinkable". It illustrated the American public's interest in the Māori as an exotic race, but also the stereotypes associated with them, in particular the one, particularly attractive to the magazine's male readers, of the humble, submissive exotic beauty.
According to Martin Blythe, the first films shot in New Zealand fell into two successive and distinct categories: first, "imperial romances" in Maori country ( Maoriland) shot by English, French and American directors from 1910 to 1920, then "national romances", shot by New Zealand directors from 1920: "the first were set in an eternity outside time, employing a Romeo-and-Juliet-style narrative plot in which true love triumphed over tribal conflict; the second were historically situated, playing with the notion of métissage to help construct a national identity".. Imperial romances took an ethnographic approach, depicting the land of the Māori as a paradise before the fall; national romances took a historical approach, recounting the quest for a utopia after the fall, that of New Zealand as the land of the Māori. According to Blythe, the stories of Hinemoa or Te Ponga, with their noble savages and beautiful vahines, ending in inter-tribal marriages, were perfect examples of imperial romances, as attested by the fact that the Hinemoa legend was – after Méliès – the subject of several silent films..
For their part, Alistair Fox, Barry Keith Grant and Hilary Radner, while considering that Hinemoa and How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride, drawn from Maori legends, fitted into the first of Blythe's two categories, pointed out that the same was not true of Loved by a Maori Chieftess, where the relationship between the "English trapper" and the beautiful Māori princess fitted into the second. Its screenplay was clearly designed to satisfy the public's taste for melodrama and the exotic, but also reflected the desire of the white settlers to be accepted by the natives and, consequently, the importance of James Cowan's contribution..
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