A Balinese Trance Seance
Bringing offerings of rice, flowers, and woven coconut leaves, clients visit Jero in her household shrine to determine the cause of their son’s death. Jero lights an incense brazier, sprinkles holy water, and recites mantras as preliminaries to trance. Several ancestors and finally the young son speak through her voice, revealing the nature of his premature death (witchcraft) and his wishes for cremation. In contrast to other films about Balinese trance which focus on spectacular, community performances, this film provides an intimate view of a fascinating process of communication between Jero, the spirits, and her clients who are at one point moved to tears.

Jero on Jero: A Balinese Trance Seance Observed
In 1980, anthropologist Linda Connor and filmmakers Tim and Patsy Asch returned to Bali with video cassette recordings of A Balinese Trance Seance. The resulting film presents some of her reactions to Connor as she watched and listened to herself for the first time. Jero had a unique opportunity to spontaneously and consciously react to and reflect upon the experience of possession. Her comments provide insight into how she feels while possessed, her understanding of sorcery, and her humility in the presence of the supernatural world. More mundane thoughts are revealed as well, for example the importance of the fine appearance of her house. Jero On Jero could most fruitfully be used as a companion to A Balinese Trance Seance, which would be shown first and followed by a discussion, before screening Jero Tapakan’s own response.

Video: Untouched
Audio: Untouched
Menu/Extras: None

Video codec: mpgv
Resolution: 720×480
Display resolution: 720×480
Frame rate: 29.970029

Audio codec: lpcm
Channels: Stereo:
Sample rate: 48000Hz
Bits per sample: 16

https://nitro.download/view/885485B7B320F78/A_Balinese_Trance_Seance_&_Jero_on_Jero.part1.rar
https://nitro.download/view/5E1E80781264F01/A_Balinese_Trance_Seance_&_Jero_on_Jero.part2.rar
https://nitro.download/view/9C3DEE32317016B/A_Balinese_Trance_Seance_&_Jero_on_Jero.part3.rar

Language(s):Balinese/English
Subtitles:English hard subbed

The post Patsy Asch & Timothy Asch & Linda Conner – A Balinese Trance Seance (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A fight broke out in Mishimishimabowei-teri on the second day of Chagnon and Asch’s stay in this village in 1971. The conflict developed between the villagers of Mishimishimabowei-teri and their visitors from another village. The visitors had formerly been part of Mishimishimabowei-teri, and many still had ties with members of that village. Their friends in Mishimishimabowei-teri had invited them to return, but other factions were not pleased with this, reflecting a persistent tension in this large village of over 250 people. The visitors refused to work in their hosts’ gardens, yet they demanded to be fed. One visiting man beat a woman who refused to give him plantains from her garden. She ran screaming and crying back to the village, where her sister comforted her while her brother, her husband, and his relatives attempted to settle the dispute, first with clubs and then with axes and machetes.
Eventually the fight cooled down, as one man was hurt, others placed themselves between the two groups, and women hurled insults at each other. The event lasted about half an hour, ten minutes of which were filmed. The film is constructed of four parts. The first consists of an unedited version of what the cameraman saw and the sound technician recorded, including the filmmakers’ comments (Chagnon complains at one point “that’s the tenth person today that’s asked me for my soap”). The apparent chaos of these first ten minutes is clarified in the second section, in which Chagnon explains the sequence of actions in the fight, the relationships between the actors, and how the filmmakers’ initially confused interpretation of the events became coherent. The third section diagrams the lineages in the villages involved to illustrate the fight’s relationship to long-standing patterns of conflict and alliance within the village. Finally, in an edited version of the fight, we see how the editors’ hands shape the “reality” we view. We are reminded of the tension between the need to produce a smoothly flowing film and an informative document while maintaining the integrity of the event. The Ax Fight thus operates on several levels. It plunges the viewer into the problems of Yanomamo kinship, alliance, and village fission; of violence and conflict resolution. At the same time it raises questions about how anthropologists and filmmakers translate their experience into meaningful words and coherent, moving images.

https://nitro.download/view/705C265695A8A08/The_Ax_Fight.avi

Language(s):English
Subtitles:None

The post Timothy Asch – The Ax Fight (1975) first appeared on Cinema of the World.