- Format: Black & White, DVD-Video, Silent, PAL
- Language English
- Region: All Regions
- Aspect Ratio: 4:3 - 1.33:1
- Number of discs: 1
- Classification: Unrated (US MPAA rating. See details.)
- Studio: Image Entertainment
- DVD Release Date: 28 Mar 2000
- Run Time: 71 minutes
- Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- ASIN: 6305773955
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 99,474 in Film & TV (See Top 100 in Film & TV)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extraordinary footage from a disappearing world,
By
This review is from: Grass: Nation's Battle for Life [DVD] [2025] [US Import] (DVD)
An extraordinary 70-minute film that provides a dazzling visual insight into the Middle East before the motor car, national borders and centralised states changed the region forever.
Travelling the silk-road from central Anatolia, the three film-makers journey by cart, horse and foot through the mountains of Kurdistan and the Iraqi desert to the winter pastures of the Bakhtiari tribe in Khouzestan. On the way they film a Turkish caravanserei, a Kurd hunting wild goat in the mountains and an Arab mounted-police patrol setting off from their desert castle. But the real story starts with the Bakhtiari, meeting the chief Haidar and his son Lufta, as they plan their journey to the high summer pastures. Highlights are the crossing of the Karun - cold and swollen by melt-water - on inflated goat-skin rafts and the bare-foot ascent of a snow-bound 12,000-foot mountain pass. When you see people throwing themselves into a broad, raging river with a herd of sheep, or carrying a mule on their backs over a mountian, you really start to understand some of the things the history books cannot convey about a world that has recently died but lived for millenia. The captions - made in 1925 it is a silent film - tell their own story of contemporary Western style and attitudes towards history and ethnography. The Bakhtiari are presented as the early fathers of an Aryan race that the film makers prize as their own. Their migration is portrayed as a distant part of the progression of Europeans Westwards through America. Having spent several years living in the Middle East and exploring parts of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, this film helped put flesh on the bones of the past.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A breathtaking trek worth taking twice (on your couch),
By
This review is from: Grass: Nation's Battle for Life [DVD] [2025] [US Import] (DVD)
I could have done without the first 20 or so minutes of this silent film documentary which presented the camera crew's journey from Constantinople to the mountain foothills in Iran. Those scenes felt heavily edited and seemed tame compared to what the Bakhtiari tribesmen were going to go thru in the balance of the movie.
The remaining 50 minutes or so flew by as I watched these nomads with their pack animals and herds cross an icy river, climb the precipitous slopes of a mountain, cross its snowy summit before descending into a warm valley of pasture lands for their herds. It was an incredible glimpse of a vanishing lifestyle. The only defect in my view was the use jokey title cards (eg, "Brrr", "Brrr" when crossing the chilly river) ruining my sense of involvement. 50 years later, in 1976, another documentary, this time in color, would once again follow these people in equally fascinating detail. That film was called PEOPLE OF THE WIND. I recommend seeing both since each gives some details that the other doesn't. (According to Wikipedia, as of 2006 a small percentage of Bakhtiari still made the journey -- but with transport for the herds and they didn't go barefoot in the snow.)
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
4.7 out of 5 stars (18 customer reviews) 29 of 32 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The most amazing film I've ever seen,
By James Hassett - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Grass: Nation's Battle for Life [DVD] [2025] [US Import] (DVD)
This 1925 silent film documentary is not for everybody. The first half is irrelevant and slow, and the commentary is hokey. I was surprised there were no dramatic Hollywood scenes of people falling off cliffs. But what I got instead was a historical record of 50,000 people and 500,000 animals walking for 48 days across Persia to avoid famine. It's hard to believe that these are real people, genuinely swimming for their lives, crossing a half-mile of freezing rapids holding on to blown up goat skins. We are so used to seeing things staged, that it's hard to accept that they really are climbing that 12,000 foot mountain in their bare feet, to get a better grip in the ice and snow.
15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A remarkable document, with message aimed at contemporaries,
By Nathan Andersen "film lover, philosophy profe... - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Grass: Nation's Battle for Life [DVD] [2025] [US Import] (DVD)
This remarkable film easily fits on the same shelf with the finest early documentaries, such as Nanook of the North, Silent Enemy and Man of Aran, whose aim was to capture on film ways of life that were in the process of passing away and now no longer exist. What sets this one apart from the others is that in this film there was a real effort to achieve authenticity and not to create a false (even if "true in spirit") narrative as a backdrop for the plot. In all of the other films mentioned there was a fairly substantial artificiality to the story that was used to retain interest in the material (i.e. they show natives engaging in activities that they no longer engage in, or that they rarely engage in; they set up little dramas; this is something that Schoedsack and Cooper found they needed to do for the success of their next film: Chang; but here they tried to be more naturalistic). In this case, there are two narratives that undergird the document: the story of Schoedsack and Cooper themselves (who remain for the most part in the background) and of the woman who accompanied them (Marguerite Harison); the second is the story of the tribal leader and his young son who will someday take the mantel of the father and lead the villagers along the same journey. While there is some staging of these "stories," it is less complex than in the other films and retains a ring of authenticity -- the boy really will have to become a leader and the crew really did make it across (it is also interesting to note that they include a mark of the authenticity of their journey in the film by filming a signed affidavit from a local authority that they had in fact completed the trek). The real "heroes" of the story, whose actions could not be faked, were the tribe as a whole who had to walk barefoot over snowy mountains to bring their animals to pasture.
In addition to a compelling portrait of a passing way of life, which is full of poignant and witty intertitles and small moments that humanize the massive scope of the operation, the film has a subtext which is to remind American audiences that they have "gone soft" -- that they have lost the hardiness of their pioneer ancestors and that these living people retain it. This is a message that Schoedsack and Cooper remind us of in their subsequent fictional masterpiece: King Kong. 12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Amazing and Horrific,
By PeerGynt "peergynt" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Grass: Nation's Battle for Life [DVD] [2025] [US Import] (DVD)
Though the movie does not dwell excessively on the pain of the 50,000 people who twice anually must trek for 48 days in order to survive, the horrors of such a journey cannot be ignored. The movie is a beautiful account of the lives of humans in the harshest of conditions.
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