I became Kalantar at the age of 20, in those days I had to fight my way through these mountains. I lived with my own armed gang and we punished those who did not respect us…Ali Aga has told his men he wants them to kill a fat young sheep. He wants to make an impression. I accept Ali Aga’s hospitality but it doesn’t make me forget that fight a few years ago. It was caused by a cow.
-The Babadi tribal Kalantar (chief) Jafar Qoli, voiced by British actor James Mason, in the documentary film People of the Wind (1976), about the spring migration by sheep and goat pastoralists of the Bakhtiari tribal confederation
A staggering trip. The film fills and stuns the eye. Remarkable!
-Los Angeles Times
There are two hundred miles of raging rivers and impassable mountains to cross. There are no towns, no roads, no bridges. There is no turning back.
-publicity material, DVD release
I had grown up looking at a 16mm Castle Films short of the silent documentary film Grass (1925), about the same migration route filmed in People of the Wind fifty years later, made by the same co-directors who made the Hollywood movies King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. It stuck me on the idea of animal migrations still made across long and hard open spaces in modern times, and some years later I heard about this film. It had not been commercially released despite being nominated for an Academy Award, it was hard to find in the educational market, and few people outside anthropology circles had ever seen it. Those who had, said it was great, a worthy successor to Grass.
When I was thinking about how to edit Voice of the Whip in the mid 1980s, my partners and I discussed our options how to present recorded dialogue and testimonial. Subtitles? Voice over? With what kind of English language voice artist? Arabic accented or not? With the field recorded sound audible or inaudible? Textually accurate or loosely edited?
I wish I had been able to have seen People of the Wind at that time, but it was not released on DVD until 1999. If I had been able, it would have answered a thorny question about the ethics of representing reality in ethnographic filmmaking- which of the two, subtitling or voice over, is the closest to the lived truth, both at the time of filming and on screen?- because it uses the plummy voice of James Mason, unforgettable in Lolita, North by Northwest, Quentin Tarantino’s blaxploitation favorite Mandingo, and Genghis Khan in which he played a Chinese nobleman. Mason’s voice answered my question.
In the documentary, Mason speaks the well crafted lines of a tribal chief’s imagined interior monologue, with perfect Oxbridge diction and the best RSC dramatic effect. And this got me thinking- what if I had gone that route for Voice of the Whip, with Hollywood actors voicing the lines, maybe Robert De Niro as KhairAllah, Samuel L. Jackson as Bilal, and a gaggle of B listers for the others.
KhairAllah might have turned to Yousef, the headstrong apprentice khabir who challenged him for being too old and too slow to set the pace for the others, and asked, You talkin’ to me? Or we might have remade What’s Up, Tiger Lily? along the darb al-arba’in, with forty thieves led by Phil “KhairAllah” Moskowitz on a forty day trail delivering forty camel loads of egg salad to Egypt…
