Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925)

Put it on a postcard

Directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack

Produced by Paramount Pictures 

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life is a great movie. 
 
I feel like I need to get that out of the way up front.  See, it's a silent documentary.  It's hard enough to get people interested in documentaries.  Add the word "silent" and you may as well be spraying mace in their face while dropping a safe on their foot.  But there is a great argument against that line of thinking.  And that argument is: Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life. 
 
The film is about Bakhtiari tribe in then-Persia (northern Iran today) as they make one of their twice-a-year migrations over a harsh wilderness to find grazing fields for the livestock. They migration includes over fifty thousand people and a half a million animals.
 
Within the last century, during a time when my grandparents were alive, during a time when people were driving cars and going to the movies, there was a tribe in the Middle East that would spend a month and a half migrating to greener pastures.  They would cross a raging river either by swimming or by floating on make-shift rafts made buoyant by inflated goat skins.  They would ascend vertical cliffs hundreds of feet high.  They would cross a snow covered mountain in bare feet.  They did all of this while carrying and dragging goats and cows.  And then they would reach their pasture land.  Not all would survive.  And a few short months later they would travel back by the same route all over again.

As a viewer, you sit there in amazement at what these people go through.  Perhaps most shocking of all is how matter-of-fact the whole affair is treated.  This is their life.  There is no moaning or groaning about how hard they have it.  They simply set out to accomplish the tasks that need to be accomplished.  The men dig trenches in the snow.  The women carry babies in baskets on their backs.  It's the way things are.

During the migration, the documentary filmmakers stay back and use title cards to either set the stage or point out details viewers might otherwise miss.  They will tell helpfully tell you to look for the woman carrying a calf on her back as she scales a mountain in the center of the frame.  The title cards substitute for voiceover or special effects that would focus your attention in the frame.

The filmmakers have a knack for knowing exactly where to point the camera.  The imagery throughout the documentary is picturesque and they take full advantage of the sprawling landscape their subjects provide them. They manage to convey both sheer scale of the endeavor and the individual travails of members of the tribe. 

The small black dots? Animals being swept down river.

There are moments that stick with me.  Calves and goats being swept down river by crushing currents.  The tribe placing a calf on a raft in the hopes that the mother will swim across after it.  The men of the tribe shedding what little footwear they have to dig a path through the snow for the rest of the barefoot tribe.   

The migration itself is the latter half of the film and by far the better part.  The first half deals with the documentary crew's travel from Angora (modern day Ankara) to the tribe.  They encounter everything from sandstorms to the local police force.  There are aspects that were interesting but you feel the filmmakers' presence more in this half. 
 
Some of the moments in the early going feel staged.  There are kids shown standing in a market who run off-camera.  Then the scene cuts to (presumably) those same children running across the path of our documentary crew.  It feels like someone is yelling "action!". 
 
We are introduced to a local constabulary and witness a "policeman's ball" that takes place at night.  We know it's night because of a blue tint on the film, but doesn't that mean it was filmed during the day and tinted?  I don't know enough about camera technologies for filming at night in the middle of the desert in the 1920s, but it seems unlikely the events transpired exactly as advertised. 
 
Even then, we get moments that tell us something we didn't know before.  For me, it's a shot of a baby on a cradle with no sides who is tied to the base of the bed.  I had never consider where a baby might sleep in a desert tribal setting. Or the scene of a hunter clutching a kite-like device with eye holes cut through it.  The mechanism is colored to camouflage him against the rocks.  How would a hunter sneak up on prey in this environment?  Again, not something you think about.
 
Grass is not a good documentary for its time; it's a good documentary for any era.  As I casually commute to work in my Honda tomorrow, the harsh life of people half a world away will be first and foremost in my mind. And that's thanks to the visuals and storytelling of Cooper and Schoedsack.
 
**** out of *****
 
NOTE: In a bizarre coincidence, Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, the directors and stars of Grass, would direct King Kong eight years later.  Kong of course features animation by Willis O'Brien who played a major role in The Lost World, the previous 1925 film we reviewed.