¹ Schoedsack Ernest in an interview with Kevin Brownlow, cited in Bahman, Maghsoudlou, Grass: Untold Stories (Costa Mesa, 2009), 265Google Scholar.

² A Milestone Films Press Kit announcing its 2000 release of the digitally restored DVD of People of the Wind offers written recollections from three of the filmmakers suggesting conflicting narratives as to their relationships to Grass. Director Anthony Howarth recalls his first migration that sparked the idea for POTW: “Quite early on in the journey I realized that I had found a remarkable subject for a film (at that time I hadn't even heard of the film Grass, made in 1925).” Yet Shusha Guppy, credited for the film's music and responsible for introducing Howarth to the Bakhtiari and translating for him and his team, recalled a different scenario on that first expedition: “Before leaving, I arranged for Anthony Howarth, whom I did not know before, to see Grass, so as to get an idea of what to expect. During the trip, I had the idea that after nearly five decades, one could make a new film, which would have colour and sound, and music, and incorporate all the changes that had taken place since 1924 when the original documentary was made.” Co-producer and scriptwriter David Koff suggests otherwise: “We knew about Grass, but deliberately didn't view it. It was not our intention to ‘follow up’ on Grass fifty years later. It was primarily the opportunity provided by the first journey [by Howarth the previous year] and the prospect of having Shusha's assistance the following year to gain access to what was obviously great potential cinema.” See Milestone Press Kit, “People of the Wind: The Chronicle of a Nomadic Chief,” available online at http://www.milestonefilms.com/pdf/PeopleOfWindPK.pdf.

³ Originally titled, Bakhtiari: A Persian Odyssey. See Naficy, Hamid, “Nonfiction Fiction: Documentaries on Iran”, Iranian Studies, 12, no. 3/4 (1979): 217–238CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴ My thanks to Pedram Khosronejad for sharing copies of the late Brooks' unpublished research on the Bakhtiari, from which we can assess the nature and amount of anthropological material available to Howarth and his crew.

⁵ Harrison, Marguerite, There's Always Tomorrow: The Story of a Checkered Life (New York, 1935), 648Google Scholar.

⁶ According to Bahman Maghsoudlou (Grass, 152), Cooper had seen Nanook of the North at the Capitol Theater in New York in the summer of 1922 while Schoedsack had seen it in Paris.

⁷ In an interview between Cooper and Rudy Behlmer, Cooper recalls that the three were told, “the Bakhtiari were much wilder than the Kurds, much more primitive, and particularly the Baba Ahmadi tribe … nobody had ever made that crossing.” So, according to Cooper, “we decided to try it. We thought it would be better for pictures, more fun.” Merian C. Cooper, interviewing Rudy Behlmer, 1965. Available on Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life. Dirs. Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, Marguerite Harrison, 1925. DVD. Milestone Films, 1999.

⁸ Critically, the film garnished positive reviews, but critics were also keen to point out the incomplete nature of the film. Reviewers bemoaned the lack of a family perspective or a complete classical narrative. Critics also found fault with the intertitles, as being wise-cracking and overly cute. Brownlow, Kevin, The War, the West, and the Wilderness (New York, 1979), 538Google Scholar. For a full-text of several reviews, see Maghsoudlou, Grass, 269–279.

⁹ Schoedsack, Ernest B., “Grass: The Making of an Epic”, American Cinematographer (February 1983):40-44, 109-114Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Cooper, interview with Behlmer.

¹¹ Cooper, interview with Behlmer. According to Harrison: “[Cooper] and I often disagreed when working together. Merian's turn of mind was essentially dramatic. He was forever striving for startling climaxes and sharp contrasts, while I looked for truth and preferred under-emphasis to over-emphasis. … With Merian, the human element was negligible except in so far as it was needed for our picture” (Harrison, There's Always Tomorrow, 572).

¹² Harrison, There's Always Tomorrow, 648.

¹³ Harrison, There's Always Tomorrow, 648. Cooper and Schoedsack had originally cut the film, and had written some of the titles: “What made editing tough,” said Cooper, “was that we knew we had just half a picture. But cut it we did, with our own hands. We put it together with mediocre titles” (Maghsoudlou, Grass, 254). Later, when Famous Players-Lasky bought the film, Terry Ramsaye worked on the editing and titles and, according to Maghsoudlou, Cooper and Schoedsack were “not happy with Ramsaye's work at all, feeling he had saddled the picture with absurdly theatrical intertitles, but they decided not to challenge Paramount and Lasky” (258).

¹⁴ Naficy rightly suggests that the ethnocentrism of the intertitles goes beyond entertainment value and reveals Cooper's ethnocentrism: “While the visuals by and large document, authenticate, and celebrate the reality, bravery, stamina, and resourcefulness of the tribe, the intertitles are often ethnocentric, Orientalist, narratively manipulative, and overly dramatic. … That the intertitles in the next Cooper–Schoedsack documentary, Chang (1927), and the captions for the numerous stills of the migration in Cooper's book about Grass suffer from similar problems underscores Cooper's ethnocentric view of non-Western people.” Naficy, Hamid, “Lured by the East: Ethnographic Expedition Films About Nomadic Tribes—The Case of Grass (1925)”, in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Ruoff, Jeffery (Durham, 2006), 128–129Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Peter Crawford has argued that pastoral nomadism, as found among the Bakhtiari tribes, is particularly well suited to depiction through classical narrative, as migration in itself holds such a structure in its initial lack of pasture (beginning), moving quest for pasture (middle), and final attainment of pasture (end). The fact that Cooper et al. did not see this very “natural drama” as sufficient narrative structure for the film also speaks to the deterministic ideology at work in their making of Grass. Crawford, Peter Ian, “Grass: The Visual Narrativity of Pastoral Nomadism,” in Ethnographic Film Aesthetics and Narrative Traditions, ed. Crawford, Peter and Simonsen, Jan (Aarhus, Norway, 1992).Google Scholar

¹⁶ According to Schoedsack: “We worked on the thing and then I understand some people at Paramount started playing around and took a lot of footage that I'd thrown out and padded it back in and spoiled some of the action in the mountain” (Maghsoudlou, Grass, 255).

¹⁷ “To my dying day,” said Cooper, “I regret that we did not go back and complete Grass” (Brownlow, The War, 527).

¹⁸ Schoedsack interview with Brownlow, cited in Maghsoudlou (Grass, 254). Beyond a perceived need for family and narrative structure, Schoedsack refers here to lighting difficulties, about which he elaborated: “It caused us some suffering … trying to get some good photography against the early morning blinding sun with those black costumes—usually against a white rock background. And there were many spectacular things that took place in almost complete darkness, such as hauling animals up over cliffs by sheer manpower” (Schoedsack, “Grass,” 110).

¹⁹ Cooper, Merian, Grass (New York, 1925), 151Google Scholar. Cooper asks, rather dramatically: “Who and what are these people among whom we have come to live? I know they are one of the great mysteries of the East, and I know little more” (143).

²⁰ Maghsoudlou, Grass, 154, 195–197; Naficy, “Lured by the East,” 123–124.

²¹ Financing was a constant concern in the making of Grass. According to varying reports, Harrison put up either half or all of the $10,000 budget, which only covered the expenses of filming. Post-production was financed thanks to money made from Cooper's book about the film, a lecture tour, an hour-long radio program, and his articles in the New York Times and Asia Magazine, which also bought several of Schoedsack's photo stills. Schoedsack also contributed to post-production with funds earned as cinematographer for the New York Zoological Society (Maghsoudlou, Grass, 162, 247–256).

²² For the contextualizing function of long shots in ethnographic photography, see JrCollier, John,. and Collier, Malcolm, Visual Anthropology: Photography as a Research Method (Albuquerque, 1986).Google Scholar

²³ People of the Wind, DVD Press Kit, Milestone Films, 2003.

²⁴ People of the Wind, DVD Press Kit.

²⁵ People of the Wind, DVD Press Kit. It should be noted that the Disappearing World series was created and aired by Grenada Television, not the BBC. Incidentally, the series was incredibly popular and, though only created in 1970, by 1975 reportedly had a viewing audience of over 9 million in the UK. Such popularity for TV documentaries clearly influenced the filmmakers' vision for their film's audience. See Hugh Brody, “FILM: The Vanishing World; Anthropology Can Play an Important Role in film-making…,” The Independent (UK), 1 July 2005, Features Section, first edition, 10–11.

²⁶ Nichols, Peter, “A Sheep-and-Goat Drive Across the Iranian West”, New York Times, 26 March 2000, section 2, New York edition, 22Google Scholar.

²⁷ People of the Wind, DVD Press Kit.

²⁸ Schoedsack revealed the reason behind the lack of close-ups in Grass: “There was so much we had to leave out … Didn't have the film. I wanted to go out and do close-ups of dirty feet or something and we just didn't have the time or the film” (Schoedsack interview with Brownlow, cited in Maghsoudlou, Grass, 232).

²⁹ People of the Wind, DVD Press Kit.

³⁰ People of the Wind, DVD Press Kit.

³¹ Indeed, Naficy has argued that both Harrison and the Bakhtiari are “excluded from the process of signification; they are objectified and looked at,” albeit differently. He claims the tribespeople are objectified in three ways: “first as the subject of Harrison's regard, then as the subject of the camera's gaze, and finally with their muteness, since the intertitles rarely quote any actual native dialogue” (Naficy, “Lured by the East,” 131).

³² People of the Wind, DVD Press Kit.

³³ Mason had previously narrated The London Nobody Knows (1967) and The Year of the Wildebeest (1975), as well as several television specials. Both People of the Wind and his next documentary narration Homage to Chagall: The Colors of Love (1977) were nominated for Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature.

³⁴ Naficy, Hamid, “Keynote Address I” (presented at Visual Representations of Iran Conference, University of St. Andrews, 13 June 2008)Google Scholar.

³⁵ People of the Wind, DVD, directed by Anthony Howarth (1976; Milestone Film & Video, 2000). Significantly, Grass includes at least two re-enacted scenes, both depicting events that preceded the travelers' meeting the Bakhtiari. See Naficy, “Lured by the East,” 122–123.

³⁶ In this context, maal refers to Jafar Qoli's camp, including his property, family, animals, etc.

³⁷ Harrison, There's Always Tomorrow, 648.

³⁸ Naficy, “Keynote Address I.”