Hildred Geertz calls the film pioneering, writing that Bateson and Mead are more than pathbreakers: their films "remain in certain crucial respects exemplary achievements." In her view, their films are sophisticated "even by today's standards in that they use film not as ethnographic illustration but as a powerful tool in systematic cultural research." Geertz argues that Trance and Dance in Bali sets out a hypothesis about the interconnectedness of cultural experiences of childhood, ritual, and folk drama. The film is a "minute" sample of Mead's "incredibly large corpus of visual materials", now all archived and annotated. Geertz notes, too, that the film is "a highly dramatic and moving presentation of Balinese culture" that words alone could not achieve, even if the Witch-and-Dragon ritual dance had to be shot in daylight "rather than catching it in all its terrifying mystery" at night. The visual anthropologist Beverly Seckinger notes that the film created a visual record of one performance of the Kris Dance, with the minimum of written and voiced-over narration. She comments that the film was pioneering in focusing on one ritual, rather than attempting to show a whole "culture" (her quotation marks) in one film; and in limiting the amount of narration. She quotes Geertz's conclusion that "the film remains an evocative and striking presentation of the way in which multiple meanings are condensed within a centrally significant cultural form". Seckinger remarks that all the same the film is "a product of its time", with not attempt to have the participants speak for themselves; she notes that without audio equipment, this would have been difficult. Further, the film treats the dancers as typical of Balinese culture, not as individuals, and there is no Balinese voice or quoted Balinese text. Instead, Mead's narration "inevitably takes on the character of 'scientific' authority". The hypnotherapists Jay Haley and Madeleine Richeport-Haley describe the film as "a masterpiece of historical importance". They visited Bali around 50 years after Bateson and Mead, met some of the same people, and created a film with the title Dance and Trance of Balinese Children, combining new footage with clips from Trance and Dance in Bali. The scholar of film Trevor Ponech writes that by altering the customary conditions of performance, Bateson and Mead's objectivity is open to question, perhaps influenced by their "ethically questionable, lifeworld-distorting desires". References Further reading External links 1952 films United States National Film Registry films