NFR Project: 'Trance and Dance in Bali' (1936-1939)

 

NFR Project: ‘Trance and Dance in Bali’

Produced by Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson

1936-1939

21:41

Margaret Mead is probably America’s best-known anthropologist. Her ground-breaking studies of other cultures were controversial and influential.

The film we see here is part of the record of the journey she and her husband, fellow anthropologist Gregory Bateson, made to Bali (now Indonesia) in the late 1930s. The culture was undocumented in a scientific way. Mead and Bateson set out to examine it.

The idea of going into a trance state is very unfamiliar to Western minds. (In fact, part of their funding came from the Committee for Research in Dementia Praecox.) Desiring to examine the rituals of the Balinese people, they set up their cameras in a village and filmed a dance concerning an ancient legends involving a witch and a dragon, opposing forces in the imaginative life of the film’s subjects.

These dances were normally undertaken at night, but of course the filmmakers had to work in daylight, which alters the perception of the rituals a bit. (Nothing is as impressive-looking in the daylight.) They also commandeered some women to do a dance with a kris knife normally done by men. Despite these changes, the film is a fascinating record of people going into and out of trance, channeling other spirits and forces.

Film’s ability to capture the impermanent is on display here. Presumably, this native culture no longer exists, thanks to globalization. Here film is a scientific document, preserving and communicating information about the human family.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: George Washington Carver at Tuskegee Institute.