BATESON/MEAD FILMS
The Bateson Idea Group is soliciting funding for a project to scan, remaster and otherwise update a group of ethnographic films which were made jointly by Gregory Bateson and his then wife Margaret Mead in the 1930s. The initial project’s projected costs are something in the $7000 to $8000 range.
This project is partly at the request of Documentary Educational Resources, Inc., with whom we have contracted to serve as our distributor for a number of Gregory Bateson’s films including these films.
Ethnographic film, along with other forms of creative ethnography, has the virtue of allowing for the perception and elucidation of the nonverbal gestalts of a culture. It can bring the viewer into the task of comparison and analysis, but equally it can allow for a sensing of other dimensions of culture than verbal or written description, however encyclopedic. For Bateson and Mead, film and video were more than methods to present material – they were research tools in their own right, in a way which has rarely if ever been repeated since.
As a key part of Bateson’s and Mead's unique anthropological collaboration, these films, which dealt with aspects of the cultures of Bali and of the Sepik province of Papua New Guinea, were therefore not merely documentation but also a form of inquiry. They were based on a concept of culture which took seriously the Wordsworthian idea that the child is parent to the adult. This vision of culture, which inspired what has been called the Culture and Personality movement, emphasized the patterns of life which are learned early in life, and which can express themselves in the most everyday practices of a culture.
Margaret Mead, inspired by the theoretical underpinning of the Culture and Personality movement — and also, as she herself would not hesitate to mention, by her upbringing and concerns as a woman — emphasized childhood and learning in her work. That emphasis comes through especially in these films in a way which was unique in its time and rare even in subsequent anthropology. In most of these films she provided the narration and most of the written or spoken content, while Gregory Bateson was the photographer. (But not only the photographer, since for these two pioneering visual anthropologists, photography was an integral part of ethnographic inquiry as well as documentation). The two of them collaborated in initial processing of the films but by 1950, after their divorce, Mead was more involved in the final editing of the films into the versions which we are concerned with today.
The films we are interested in remastering and updating are the following:
Bathing Babies in Three Cultures, b&w, 1954, 11 minutes.
Childhood Rivalry in Bali and New Guinea, b&w, 1954, 17 minutes.
First Days in the Life of a New Guinea Baby, b&w, 1952, 20 minutes.
Karba’s First Years: A Study of Balinese Childhood, b&w, 1952, 20 minutes.
A Balinese Family, b&w, 1951, 20 minutes.
Trance and Dance in Bali, b&w, 1952, 22 minutes.
Learning to Dance in Bali, b&w, 1978, 13 minutes.
Of these, Trance and Dance in Bali is considered a classic film which has been deemed culturally significant by the Library of Congress of the United States and chosen for preservation by the National Film Registry. Unlike the other films, it records performance rather than focusing on childhood and learning.
The versions of these films currently available for use in classrooms, museums and for screenings were produced in the era of VHS. The LOC has created a good quality scan of Trance and Dance, but it is only available for viewing on their website. We are interested in obtaining copies of their new scan of this film and creating remastered versions of the complete series for circulation, through our distributor DER, on DVD and streaming, and that can be purchased by schools, museums and other institutions.
This is perhaps only an initial step. As Mary Catherine Bateson mentioned in 2013 in an interview with Caitlin Mullin (on psychoculturalcinema.com), “the way editing was done at that time was with a scissors, and I have been hoping for years to find someone that would take this seriously enough to edit back in the pieces that were taken out of the raw footage to make the teaching films.” Ultimately that kind of work would yield what could be considered truly new and updated versions of the films, or it could yield new work with new insights which would place the earlier films in a different context.
If you would like to donate to this project, please use the button on this web site: http://batesonideagroup.org/contact. Also you can send an email to me at phillip@batesoninstitute.org stating clearly that this is the specific project to which you wish to donate.