A Film Canon

Part documentary, part travelogue, Grass can be divided into two semi-discrete sections. The first sees Cooper, Harrison and Schoedsack travelling through a series of increasingly sparse Middle Eastern landscapes towards the region inhabited by the Iranian Bakhtiari people. Their journey is construed as a progressive movement back in time - or, alternatively, as the spatial equivalent of an Aryan myth of origins - but this probably arises from a sense of the epic, heroic possibilities of documentary cinema, rather than any particularly orientalist agenda, explaining the emphasis that is placed upon their participation in the events portrayed. The second section portrays the Bakhtiari's mass migration over a series of increasingly impassable landscapes, in search of food for their people and flocks. Again, the movement is narrativised, this time in biblical terms, with rivers and mountains taking on particular significance. Nevertheless, the directors' primary focus is the logistical ingenuity of the tribespeople, as if Nanook's relatively discrete, localised challenges were applied to an entire nation. The two strongest sequences - in which the tribespeople float their way through a maze of treacherous river currents, and climb a near vertical rock face - prioritise long-shots, which, combined with the black-and-white starkness of muddy river and snow-covered mountains, manage to abstract and define human life as one continual negotiation with the physical environment.