| Grass | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Merian C. Cooper (uncredited) Ernest B. Schoedsack (uncredited) |
| Produced by | Merian C. Cooper (uncredited) Ernest B. Schoedsack (uncredited) |
| Written by | Terry Ramsaye |
| Starring | Merian C. Cooper Ernest B. Schoedsack Marguerite Harrison Haidar Khan |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
| Release date(s) | March 20, 1925 |
| Running time | 71 min |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | Silent film English intertitles |
| IMDb profile | |
Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life is a 1925 silent documentary film which follows a branch of the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia (today Iran) as they and their herds make their seasonal journey to better pastures. It is considered one of the earliest ethnographic documentary films. The film is Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison's documentation of their journey from Angora (modern-day Ankara, Turkey) to the Bakhtiari lands of western Iran, in what is now the western part of Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari Province and the eastern part of Khuzestan. They then follow Haidar Khan as he leads 50,000 of his people and countless animals on a harrowing trek across the Karun River and over Zard Kuh, the highest peak in the Zagros Mountains. In filming the journey, Cooper, Schoedsack, and Harrison became the first Westerners to make the migration with the Bakhtiari. The film highlights the extreme hardships faced by nomadic peoples, as well as the bravery and ingenuity of the Bakhtiari. At the same time, the film is also a reflection of the context out of which it emerged, that of Hollywood in the 1920s. Having heard about the first (commonly assumed) ethnographic documentary Nanook of the North's success, Cooper and Schoedsack set out for their own real life adventure. Like the Nanook, the central concern of Grass is to present primordial human struggle with harsh environments. The filmmakers attempt to document "timeless" and "ancient" human struggles, still observable in this part of the oriental world. The film has an engaging but deeply Orientalist tone in presenting the Bakhtiari as unchanging and archaic. The documentary presents the filmmakers' travel as a narrative of a return to an ancient past: they turn the pages of history backwards until they get to "the very first page". Therefore what they present to the audience in the documentary is not a culture in the present, but a culture of the past!. In fact, they also portray this as their geneaological quest for their so-called Aryan origins of 3000 years ago. The film portrays Anatolian and Iranian peoples as continuously in a struggle for survival: the hunter on the Taurus mountains "does not hunt for sport, he kills for food". Therefore there is no space in these cultures anything outside of such survival strategies. Leisure, entertainment, sport etc belong to the social world of the West. The film also presents the Bakhtiari migration to Iranian highlands as a one-time event, where several environmental difficulties stand in the way of the tribe, who spontaneously finds miraculous spur-of-the-moment solutions to overcome it (barefoot crossing of Zardeh Kuh, goat-skin floats at the river crossing, etc.). However, it is obvious that this trans-human activity was annually repeated and such technologies were developed over long time. It was written by Richard Carver and Terry Ramsaye. The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.
Trivia
- The US Embassador in Tehran who helped the film crew with their mission was killed in Tehran a few weeks after filming was completed.
- The success of Grass and the documentary Chang (1927) propelled Merian Cooper to the top in Hollywood. King Kong (1933) soon followed as a result.
- Marguerite Harrison was a spy of the American government who was a member of military intelligence, and twice arrested by CHEKA/KGB.
- Merian Cooper was also allegedly a spy who spent two years in Lubyanka.
