| Publication |
2011.
|
| Summary/Abstract |
In an attempt to surpass the genre of travelogue, three Americans-Merian C. Cooper,
Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison-traveled to southwestern Iran to
film the biannual migration of the Bakhtiari tribes and their flocks from winter to
summer pastures. In Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life (1925), Schoedsack's exquisite
framing of long shots captured the vast movement of an estimated 50,000 people and
500,000 animals in desert caravans, grassy plains, icy river crossings and snowy
mountain vistas. The technical requirements of Grass alone suggest its importance in
early ethnographic and documentary film, but problematic elements, such as its flimsily
contrived storyline and melodramatic and essentializing intertitles, have presented
problems for its perceived importance in ethnographic film history and as a
representation of Iran. In 1976, Anthony Howarth (with consulting anthropologist
David M. Brooks and narrator James Mason) filmed People of the Wind, again
following the Bakhtiari tribes along their migration, and employed cinematography
emphasizing the great color and sounds of the movement of people en masse. This
paper uses theoretical frameworks from visual anthropology and film theory to
complicate the reading of these films, first by placing Grass within the context of the
intentions and ideological imperatives of its filmmakers. This paper complicates the
reading of both films, arguing that despite the fifty years of filmmaking between them,
Grass and People of the Wind are actually limited in quite similar ways.
|