Epic Journey: How A Trio Of 1920s Adventurers Filmed The Bakhtiari Migration

HOLLYWOOD, November 21, 2008 -- The nomadic tribes of southwestern Iran fascinate rug lovers for their great variety of weaving.

But what is less known is how much they once fascinated Western cinema audiences.

Eighty years ago, people crowded into movie theaters to see a silent film about Iran's nomads that has since became a classic of documentary movie-making.

The film is "Grass: A Nation’s Battle for Life," released in 1925. It follows a branch of the Bakhtiari tribe on its seasonal migration to summer pastures. Along the way, it offers an astonishing look at a nomadic way of life which, today, has all but disappeared.

The film was made by three intrepid Western adventurers and begins with their traveling east from Angora (today Ankara), following the caravan routes to Iran. As the trio says at the outset, they are in search of a "Forgotten People" -- the nomads -- whose life is unchanged since primordial times. And they find their subject in the Bakhtiari tribes, which migrate with the rains and grass to survive.

The epic feel of the film comes from the scale of the migration: 50,000 people herding half a million animals on a 500 mile trek. And the drama and suspense grow with the spectacular nature of the terrain. A raging river and a 5,000 meter high mountain range separate the nomads from their goal.

One unforgettable scene is the crossing of the Karun river, which is swollen with Spring snow melt. The tribes have no boats to cross and the racing water is a forbidding sight. But as proof of the age-old ingenuity of man against the elements, they have a solution.

The nomads' answer is to inflate goatskins and use them as floats for rafts to carry across the women, children, and weakest animals. The men paddle across individually, holding onto their own floats like inner-tubes. Whether anybody can swim and, indeed, whether it is even possible to swim in such rough water without drowning, is left to the imagination.

The Karun river, Iran's most voluminous, originates in the high peaks of the Zagros mountain range in Chahrmahal va Bakhtiari Province and flows to the Persian Gulf. The nomads cross it only to face their next and still more daunting challenge -- crossing the mountain range itself.

The difficultly of the task can best be imagined by thinking of the Alps. The crossing point is a snow-covered mountain called Zard Kuh which rises up 4,500 meters, just a few hundred meters short of Mont Blanc's 4,800 meters. There is no visible trail over it and, as the thousands-strong, barefoot tribes march toward it, no hint they will find one.


But, again, there is a solution. The first groups of men unpack shovels and, in the same way one might dig out a driveway, steadily clear a path up the mountain. It is unimaginable work, made possible only by the sheer numbers of men available. And over a period of days, the hordes of humans, goats, and mules zig-zag their way up the slopes and over the range.

Such scenes cannot be seen today on anything like this scale. All over the world, nomads have been steadily settled by governments determined to end the land disputes that arise from herders moving freely over vast territories. And, indeed, as this 1925 movie makes clear, past generations of nomads moved like small armies. The thousands of tribesmen have rifles slung over their shoulders and could both hunt game and fight the authorities with them.

But for anyone who might think that the nomads, once settled, simply become like everyone else, the film is a welcome reminder of just how extraordinarily different the nomads' experience is. And the images can only increase one's interest in the mysterious symbols that even settled nomads continue to weave into their carpets -- the echoes of primal hopes, fears, and strengths.

Who made "Grass," and why?

That story is almost as interesting as the film itself.

The co-directors -- who doubled as cameramen -- are two American soldiers who remained in Europe after World War I. As Central Europe fell into a power vacuum with the defeat of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and the civil war in Russia, they joined the fight to carve out an independent Polish state.

One of the pair, Merian C. Cooper, was a volunteer pilot in the fledgling Polish air force and flew numerous missions against Russian troops until he was shot down in Ukraine. Taken prisoner, he escaped again eight months later. (He is shown here in Polish Air Force uniform).

The other, Ernest B. Schoedsack, worked with the Polish war relief.

The third member of the team, who appears on camera chronicling the migration, is Marguerite Harrison. She was an American journalist with the Associated Press who also spied for Washington in Russia and Japan. She was imprisoned for ten weeks in Moscow's notorious Lubyanka prison.

The three, who all met in Poland, decided to film the Bakhtiari migration following the box-office success of one of Hollywood's first documentary and ethnographic films: Nanook of the North (1922). Here they pose in Ankara in 1923 at the start of their journey. Their own highly adventurous life imminently qualified them for their work, which included nearly freezing to death with their subjects.

"Grass," was commercially successful and launched Cooper and Schoedsack on lifelong careers as filmmakers. The two went on to make a documentary in Thailand ("Chang" in 1927) and later teamed up again to make the 1933 classic "King Kong."

Harrison, who wrote several books about Russia and Asia, later co-founded the Women's Society of Geographers and the Children's Hospital of Baltimore.

The lives of southwestern Iran's nomads have continued to fascinate film-makers ever since "Grass."

The story of the Bakhtiari migration was retold in "People of the Wind" (1976), which followed the migration in reverse.

And the nomadic Qashqai were recently featured in "Gabbeh" (1996) by Iranian director Mohsen Makhmalbaf.

All of the films are currently available on DVD.

The whole of "Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life" also can be viewed on the Internet: CLICK HERE

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

Related Links

Wikipedia: The Bakhtiari

Wikipedia: "Grass: A Nation's Battle for Life"

Wikipedia: Merian C. Cooper

Wikipedia: Ernest B. Schoedsack

Wikipedia: Marguerite Harrison

Wikipedia: The Polish-Soviet War (1919 - 1921)

Wikipedia: Greater Poland Uprising (1918 - 1919)

Ryszard Antolak: Iran, King Kong, and Paradise Lost

How Traditional Are Iran’s Modern Gabbehs?

HANNOVER, Germany; January 17, 2008 --

Is it true that as life gets more complicated, designs get simpler?

There is one enduring example. It is Iran’s gabbeh carpet – today very simple, and very popular.

Gabbehs were not always the minimally decorated, sometimes single-color canvases they are now.

Originally, gabbehs had boldly colored, complex designs. Until the mid-1900s, they still looked more like tribal kilims than like modern abstract paintings.

Nejatollah Hakakian is a Hamburg dealer with many years in the rug business. He dates the change in the gabbeh’s design – and its rise to popularity in the West -- to just a few decades ago.

“Twenty years ago they started in Iran to do gabbehs with less and less designs and with tone-on-tone colors. So they changed from highly decorated carpets to more or less nothing in the field, with just a border around it, and sometimes not even a border,” he says.

“The rule today is three to four colors only, no more, when a normal Iranian carpet has seven to 17 colors. Now the Pakistans and Indians do the same, making carpets with almost no design. Mainly you just see the tone-on-tone colors.”

That simplification has had the effect of making gabbeh patterns, which have a centuries-old history among Iranian nomads, easy to mistake for Western contemporary designs. And it has made the carpet almost a household fixture throughout Europe and, increasingly in the United States.

Hakakian says he once asked a venerable German carpet dealer why European buyers did not prefer the many more complex workshop and tribal carpets Iranian producers could offer him instead.

The reply was one of the best insights Hakakian says he ever received to selling in the West.

“You Iranians are hungry to see grass that is green, but we are full of it in Europe,” the dealer told him. “We need calm and quiet, so the less design you have, the more of your carpets we can sell.”

But if the gabbeh has a heritage of rich, complex designs itself, how much of its contemporary look is still faithful to its past?

A great deal, according to Mahsa Heidarian, whose family company of the same name just won an award for Best Traditional Nomadic Carpet at the Domotex 2008 trade show in Hannover, Germany.

The winning gabbeh’s design very much resembles geometric abstract art.

The Heidarians, based in the west-central Iranian town of Shahr-e-Kord, say they won by letting their nomadic weaver add her own personal touches to a design inspired by a nomadic masterpiece from the past.

"In nomadic carpets, we don't tell the weavers anything, because it is like abstract art, it has to come out of herself to be artistic," says Mahsa Heidarian. "We just try to choose the right person to do it, who knows the tradition of making nomadic carpets."

She adds that finding the right person is not always easy. "A problem is that there are increasingly fewer nomads in Iran who have a traditional weaving knowledge base," she says. "People are increasingly settling down."

The Heidarians say the simplified patterns of modern gabbehs are obtained by magnifying just one or more of the small parts found in a traditional gabbeh. Thus, just a medallion can be expanded, or just part of a field, into a whole carpet design.



"This simplification responds to the Western market's preferences for abstract art but it is also true to tradition, because the simple element is there already," says Mahsa's husband, Arash.

He draws parallels with African art, whose spare lines so interested Europe’s abstract artists at the beginning of the last century. "There is the same immediate rapport between abstract art and nomadic art," he says.

One might argue that the rapport for modern buyers -- not all of them artists -- must go deeper than just recognizing familiar abstract patterns in a nomad's work.

Perhaps there is a longing in all modern societies for simpler things, and the art of tribal peoples -- which is the product of more elemental lifestyles -- helps to satisfy it.

True or false, gabbehs have done well exploring that possibility.

In the early 1990’s, gabbeh producers gained still more interest in the West by turning their backs on synthetic dyes in favor of natural dyes made from local plants, instead – the nomads’ traditional way of coloring the carpets. The return to nature was so successful that the carpet was one of the main attractions at the 1992 Grand Exhibition in Iran.

Authors Murray L. Eiland and Murray Eiland III note in their book ‘Oriental Rugs’ that “the next year there was such a boom in new gabbehs that it had created a wool shortage throughout the country.

The gabbeh’s marketing also got a boost from Iran’s film industry when prominent director Mohsen Makhmalbaf agreed to do a movie centered on the carpets and the Qashqai nomads who weave them. The drama, simply titled “Gabbeh,” was commissioned by an organization dedicated to the export of handicrafts, but it won prizes both at the 1996 Cannes and New York film festivals.

Gabbehs are hardly the only weavings to grow simpler over the decades and become more popular with Western buyers in the process.

Hamburg dealer Hakakian points to carpets woven by Tibetan refugees in Nepal as another example.

"The Tibetan carpet was the first with no design, just one or two colors, no flowers, no medallion. There was a high demand for that until about two years ago. The Tibetan was almost only white or off-white. Gabbeh went with darker tone-on-tones, terra cotta, blue, black, red."

Hakakian says that the Tibetan and gabbeh producers are keenly aware of each other and learn from each other's successes. The main difference between them may be in how rooted they remain in their own traditions.

The Tibetan refugees were encouraged to weave by Swiss aid agencies which helped them resettle in Nepal in the 1960’s. Today, joined by many Nepalese, the refugees are a major weaving pool for Western interior designers.

The gabbeh weavers have never had to leave home. And while some are amenable to design suggestions, the best still stick closely to their own interpretations.

#

RETURN TO HOME PAGE

#

Related Links:

Gabbehs:


Barry O’Connell (JBOC): Guide To Gabbeh Rugs
http://www.persiancarpetguide.com/sw-asia/Rugs/Persian/Gabbeh_Rugs/Guide_To_Gabbeh_Rugs.htm_Rugs.htm

JBOC's Gabbeh Rugs
http://www.squidoo.com/Gabbeh-Rugs

JBOC’s Notes: Notes on Lori Gabbeh Persian Rugs
http://www.spongobongo.com/em/nm/eme9916.htm

Jozan: Persian Gabbeh Rugs
http://www.jozan.net/distrikter/gabbeh.asp

OldCarpet.com: Gabbeh Carpet Properties
http://www.oldcarpet.com/gabbeh.htm


Tibetan Carpets:

Jacobsen: Tibetan and Nepalese Weaving in Nepal
http://www.jacobsenrugs.com/nepal.htm


Contacts:

Hakakian Brothers
http://de.sireh.com/n/33/nossites_gebr_hakakian_gmbh-hamburg/

Heidarian Carpet
http://www.heidarian.com/html/Process.htm


Advice:

A Magic Carpet Ride Purchasing a Handmade Tibetan rug -- Without Getting Rolled
http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/2003/05/01/341270/index.htm