'If you're going to educate 'em, you've got to entertain 'em too' : An Examination of Representation and Ethnography in Grass and People of the Wind.

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]