The following is a transcript of a twenty-three-minute, black-and-white 16 mm film directed by Gregory Bateson and Weldon Kees in 1954, narrated by Charles Levy, with text by Bateson and Kees, editing by Kees and William Heick, and music by Jon Sutton. A copy of the film is held by the Gregory Bateson Papers, University of California, Santa Cruz, and was transcribed by Rebecca Ora; it is reproduced with the permission of the Bateson Idea Group. Although The Nature of Play was conceived as a multipart series of educational films, Bateson and Kees completed only Part 1. The images from Part 1 and the uncompleted Part 2 are from a digital transfer of the 16 mm originals held in the Bateson Collection at the Don D. Jackson Archive, University of Louisiana at Monroe; they were collected on-site in spring 2015 and are reproduced with the permission of the Bateson Idea Group and Nora Bateson, with the aid of Wendel Ray. —Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan

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