An Exchange of Letters between Maya Deren and Gregory Bateson

Dear Gregory Bateson: I have just finished reading your article on the South Seas exhibit (I hope I may keep it), and I regret enormously that I had not read it before our discussion Saturday night, for it clarifies in my own mind the pattern which is basic to this projected film and provides me also with an objective point of reference, which I could have so well made use of in trying to make myself clear the other evening. For what is to me, at this moment, exciting about your article is that whether or not d'Harnoncourt intended it that way consciously, or even whether or not it actually came out that way, is almost irrelevant to the fact that the pattern which you describe is very close to what I had in mind about the film. That is (leaving aside the actual intention or the degree of its realization in the Museum exhibit), you say that it is possible to create a transcendent horizontal pattern of development by cutting through a series of, as it were, vertical integrities without violating these latter, or falsifying them, or even distorting them. As a matter of fact, you praise the exhibit precisely for the fact that each grouping of materials was true to the individual culture which it represented, at the same time that these groupings were so arranged in reference to each other as to create a sensible pattern which transcended them all and even strengthened them, each in their individual terms as well. It is this concept of relationships upon which I wished to build my film, and when, upon first reading your article, I felt that you had actually stated it, I immediately suspected that perhaps my personal preoccupation had induced me to impose upon someone else's thinking my own organization. But I have gone over it twice since, and I still get the same answer, and I hope it is not a misinterpretation. And if I have understood you correctly, then you have yourself answered any number of the reservations and objections which both you and Miss Mead posed the other evening, and which I answered rather with intuitive passion than coherence. My problem, in a sense, was to build a fugue of cultures. But each voice must have its own melodic integrity. Consequently, my preoccupation with searching out a variety of cultures which had retained, in their own terms, their homogeneity was not based upon my personal interest in exoticism, but out of the need to have a variety of homogeneous structures which would relate to each other in the film rather than blend into each other in the melting pot manner. The Irish cop in Central Park did not belong in the pattern I had in mind largely for aesthetic considerations: the cultural pattern which he represented was so familiar that it would not carry the impact of a form. Had it been a question of an Irish wake, it would have been quite another matter. For it seems to me that, whereas a casual, social action can be understood only in terms of the cultural whole, the artifacts of a culture contain that whole

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