Grass: 100 Years

DVD | 1925| Directed by Merian Cooper and Ernest Shoedsack| United States| 72 minutes| Silent film with intertitles

Free admission. No registration required.

"A damned half picture," said Merian Cooper of his film Grass. Isaiah Bowman, director of the American Geographical Society, declared that Grass was "the best thing I have ever seen." The audience will have to make up their own minds at the centennial screening of this early ethnographic film, which follows the pastoral migration of the Bakhtiari tribe over the Zagros Mountain range in Iran. Cooper and Schoedsack went on to reach Hollywood fame with King Kong, but Grass was their first film, taking as its basic theme the struggle between man and nature. Widely considered one of the best documentaries ever made, cinematographically stunning and technically ambitious, Grass is a monument to the nomadic culture of the Middle East and to its ancient transhumance routes.

Post-screening conversation with Bahman Maghsoudlou (author of Grass: Untold Stories), Sacha Mouzin (Oxford University), and Harvey Weiss (Yale University)

Presented by In the Field

Sponsored by: European Studies Council of the Yale MacMillan Center, Council on Middle East Studies, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Film and Media Studies Program, Department of History, GSAS Dean's Fund