General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

Grass (1925 film)

Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life is a 1925 American silent black-and-white documentary film directed by Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, with the journalist Marguerite Harrison, that follows the seasonal migration of the Bakhtiari tribe of Persia (present-day Iran) across rivers and mountains to summer pasture¹. It was the first feature film by Cooper and Schoedsack, the team later known for King Kong (1933)².

Key fact	Detail
Full title	Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life; alternate title Grass; the epic of a lost tribe³
Directors	Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, joined by journalist Marguerite Harrison¹
Subject	The yearly migration of the Bakhtiari tribe of southern Persia through the mountains to summer pastures for their herds⁴
Scale of the trek	About 50,000 tribesmen leading 500,000 animals on a 48-day journey across deserts, rivers, and mountains⁵
Release	New York opening 30 March 1925; released by Famous Players-Lasky Corp., which bought the rights in January 1925³
Format	Silent, black and white, 7 reels of 6,000 feet, English intertitles; restored version runs 71 minutes³^•⁶
Budget	$10,000, half financed by Harrison and half borrowed by Cooper from family members³

Spoilers

Plot

Persia, early 1920s. The Bakhtiari tribes gather for the annual migration to summer pasture, striking tents, rebuilding them, assembling flocks, and forming caravans that wind across the desert plains. Haidar Khan, chief of the Baba Athmade tribe, leads the columns on horseback. The expedition of Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Schoedsack, and Marguerite Harrison travels inside the procession, and Schoedsack's long shots look down on lines of people and animals stretching for miles, a scale no one had put on film before.¹³ An early intertitle frames the Bakhtiari as heirs to Cyrus and Xerxes, a people unchanged since the Persian Empire.

The first great obstacle is the Karun River, and it gives the film its centerpiece. The crossing of the Karun, with fifty thousand nomads and half a million animals forced through or over a raging river on rafts of lashed wood and inflated goatskins, remains one of the great sequences in documentary cinema. The men swim the icy water for three days, guiding the animals that can swim while the rest are ferried on rafts buoyed by inflated goat skins, wallowing toward a camera held at water level by men standing in the river itself.⁷ The editing builds the crossing into a genuine action sequence: rafts tip, animals bleat and thrash, and the river simply does not care. Reports later filtered back that the crossing was made more difficult at the filmmakers' urging for dramatic effect.¹⁴

Then comes the mountain. The tribe ascends an almost perpendicular slope in bare feet, cutting paths through deep snow with pick axes, only to face the even more towering Zardeh Kuh beyond it.⁷ The film's finest moments are the long shots looking down on the human chain snaking across great snow-covered wastes, alternating with close views of individual climbers, women and children among them, hauling themselves through the passes.¹⁵ Some sequences are clearly staged in the manner of the time, the documentary form having no firm rulebook yet, such as a tribesman bringing down a mountain goat for dinner, but they are no less effective for that.¹⁶

The arrival at the summer pastures is handled with deliberate anticlimax. After intertitles that have spent the whole film inflating the journey into a mythic struggle, the payoff is simply grass: the herds graze, the tents go up, and the expedition packs its camera. A closing card notes that the cycle will begin again next year, an admission that the epic the narration kept building was, for the people living it, routine.

Characters

Haidar Khan, chief of the Baba Athmade tribe of the Bakhtiari, leads the migration on horseback with a tanned, laconic screen presence that one retrospective called movie-star quality; he signed the promotional document released with the film alongside Amir Jang, Prince of the Haktyari.¹⁷^•¹⁸
Marguerite Harrison (as herself) is the expedition's third member, a journalist and former intelligence operative fluent in the region's languages, whose access to the tribe's domestic life accounts for much of the film's footage of tents, children, and daily routine.
Merian C. Cooper (as himself) is the driving force, an American aviator and adventurer who had survived a Soviet prison during the Polish-Soviet War and who both shoots and narrates the expedition's own part in the story.
Ernest B. Schoedsack (as himself) is the cameraman whose long-lens compositions of caravans, river crossings, and snowfields are the film's visual signature.¹³

Interpretations and controversies

The film presents itself as pure observation, but it is closer to a shaped reconstruction. Contemporary critics praised the footage while faulting the contrived storyline and the wise-cracking, overly cute intertitles, which flattened the Bakhtiari into scenery in their own story and cast them as a people unchanged since antiquity.¹³ Marguerite Harrison disliked Ramsaye's intertitles as old-fashioned, though they worked with large audiences.⁷ Reports that the odyssey was made harder at the filmmakers' urging, and later accounts of hired help and logistical assistance the expedition received, complicate the "man against nature" purity the film advertises.¹⁴ Period promotional material also claimed the three Americans were the first foreigners ever to cross the Zardeh Kuh pass and make the forty-eight-day migration with the tribe, a boast best read as showmanship.¹⁹

Sequels, prequels, and universe

Grass launched its makers. The picture's success sent Cooper and Schoedsack to Hollywood, where they made Chang (1927), Rango (1931), King Kong (1933), and Mighty Joe Young (1949).¹⁵ The instinct visible in Grass, pick one overwhelming natural spectacle, put a camera inside it, and let scale do the work, is the direct ancestor of King Kong. A 2001 documentary, People of the Wind, retraced the same Bakhtiari migration and is often discussed alongside it.¹³

The expedition

Cooper and Schoedsack had worked together as a camera crew on Captain Edward Salisbury's failed around-the-world tour of the Wisdom II, and decided they could do better on their own. Nanook of the North had just opened, and they believed they could do for the nomadic Asian tribes what Robert Flaherty had done for the Inuit. Research at the National Geographic led them toward the Kurds, and while searching for funds Cooper found his wartime friend Marguerite Harrison, a journalist for the Baltimore Sun who had twice been captured and imprisoned by the Soviets as a spy. Together the three raised $10,000 and set out with Schoedsack's lightweight Debrie camera and 20,000 feet of 35mm film⁷.

A British official Cooper met in Baghdad told him about the Bakhtiari, who were then preparing to migrate to the high country of their summer quarters. The filmmakers traveled with the Baba Ahmedi tribe of the Bakhtiari nation. According to production notes written by Harry Q. Mills for a 1938 UCLA screening at which Harrison lectured, the tribe's winter quarters lay in the lowlands near the Persian Gulf, and its summer habitat was 350 miles away in mountain valleys near the central Persian plateau³. The journey of the Bakhtiari began on 17 April 1924³.

The migration on film

The film follows roughly 50,000 tribesmen and 500,000 animals on their 48-day trek. The hardest stages shown are the fording of the raging Karun River on rafts buoyed by inflated goatskins, with some animals drowning in the frigid water, and the ascent of an almost perpendicular mountain in bare feet, followed by the snow-covered, pathless Zardeh Kuh, before the tribe descends into a fertile grassy valley⁵. Among the people shown are Haidar Khan, the tribe's chief, and his nine-year-old son Lufta, identified as a future leader³.

The filming was a risky venture for lives and equipment alike, and the filmmakers worked in fear of running out of film before reaching the destination. Schoedsack calculated his film use carefully; by the time the party reached the summer quarters he had eighty feet left to shoot an ending³. Anticipating that audiences might find a single trek unbelievable, the film opens with a photograph of a statement notarized by the American consul in Shiraz certifying that the filmmakers did make the trek⁸.

After parting with the tribe, the filmmakers went to Isfahan, where Cooper cabled editors he knew and raised money for the return trip to New York by way of Paris, where the film was developed. Cooper and Schoedsack had hoped to return to film the tribe's journey back and possibly build a story around a single family, but that part of the project never developed³.

Release and reception

The completed film was first shown as part of a lecture tour given by Cooper. In January 1925 Famous Players-Lasky Corp. bought the rights to release it theatrically, and the New York opening followed on 30 March 1925³. The film showed audiences parts of the world they had never seen, even in photographs³. In April 1925, Literary Digest noted that much debate surrounded the question of whether the film might have improved had a love story been woven into its plot³.

The filmmakers were not fully satisfied with the finished picture, and Paramount cut their edit down further⁹. Cooper wrote a 1925 book about the adventure, also titled Grass, which one later ethnographic-film historian notes is more about the adventure than about the Bakhtiari; Harrison recounted the journey in her 1935 autobiography There's Always Tomorrow³^•⁸.

Standing and influence

According to modern film historians cited by the American Film Institute, Grass and Nanook of the North were the two most significant documentaries of the silent era, made before any prescribed standards for the genre existed, and they became the model for later documentaries³. Film scholars place Grass among the first longer narrative documentary films with ethnographic themes, produced at the beginning of the 1920s alongside Nanook, though such early works are now read for their romanticized visions of their subjects¹⁰. One assessment calls the central passage, in which hundreds of people and thousands of animals cross a wide icy river and a steep snowy range, a spontaneous drama unmatched by later man-against-nature films, while faulting the film as ethnography for its cute intertitles and its silence on the Bakhtiari's cultural background⁸.

Later films and revivals followed. Grass inspired documentaries attempting to record nomadic life before its disappearance, including The Flaming Poppies (Hushang Shafti, 1962), People of the Wind (Anthony Howarth), and The Shahsavan Nomads of Iran (Fereydoun Safizadeh, 1983)¹¹. Fifty years after the release, Anthony Howarth and David Koff revisited the Bakhtiari and made the 1976 documentary People of the Wind, narrated by James Mason and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary³. Cooper wanted to produce a Technicolor remake; in 1956 he sent a crew to Iran funded by C. V. Whitney Productions, but the project was never completed³.

For Iranian audiences the film's reception has been distinctive. Contemporary Iranian viewers were apparently nonplussed, but the film had a memorable revival at the Shiraz Arts Festival of 1976, and it is now cherished as a portrait of a lost way of life and a testimony to the Iranian landscape and the resilience of its people⁶. The film scholar Nacim Pak-Shiraz, Professor of Cinema and Iran at the University of Edinburgh, notes that despite its limited availability, Grass reflected and represented for Iranians a heroism and pride in their people¹¹.

Preservation

The Museum of Modern Art restored the film, and the 71-minute digital restoration with a new orchestral score by Patrick Holcomb, distributed by Kino Lorber and Milestone Films, premiered at MoMA⁶. The Smithsonian's Human Studies Film Archives also holds a 20-minute abridged 16mm version of 388 feet, prepared from the theatrical release for home sale⁴. Merian C. Cooper's papers at Brigham Young University include correspondence, clippings, and photographs from the production, dating from 1923 to 1984¹².

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Documentary films by subject: people, identity, and communities

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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