Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life

In 1925 three travellers set out from Ankara, stop at a caravanserai in Turkey and at a desert post in Syria, and cross into Persia. Their purpose is to join the seasonal migration of the Bakhtiari and to film it. Thousands of people, together with their herds, have to get across an icy river and a snowbound mountain pass to reach pasture. Haidar Khan leads them. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack directed this silent documentary together, the first film the pair made; the same team would later make King Kong. Marguerite Harrison was part of the journey and of the photography. The film is regarded as one of the earliest ethnographic documentaries, and in 1997 it was added to the Library of Congress national preservation registry. The camera is after the movement rather than the individuals: a whole people on the march.