A film (like none other) about the making of a film

William Greaves's quasi-feature/quasi-documentary from 11968, Symbiopschotaxiplasm: Take One (you know I had to look that title up to get the spelling!) is an experimental and unconventional film, to put it mildly, like no other film that I've ever seen and not a film that produced a host of imitators, either, but it will make you think and will open your eyes to some of the challenges of filmmaking, and it will make you laugh, too, at times - though, echoing Samuel Johnson on Paradise Lost, none I think will wish it longer. In essence, this is a documentary about the making of a film, sort of: Greaves and his crew, shooting en plein air in Central Park, run a series of actor couples through a short scripted scene involving a fight and a breakup (the movie focuses on one of the couples, a pair of pro actors who clearly dislike each other,  but we see I think 3 other "couples" take on the same scene briefly). As was common in the era, Greaves's directing is open and unobtrusive, encouraging the actors to "live the parts" and come up w/ their own dialog - again, a common drama-class exercise in the time and probably still. While one camera if filming the actors in a conventional manner, another, or sometimes 2 cameras, are shooting the production in progress - as well as some of the goings on in the park (a group of kids watching the filming, ambient noise from passing traffic, etc.). On one level, Greaves seems to be an incompetent director - confused about the production equipment and process, unclear in his instructions to cast and crew, completely weird in some of the instructions he gives (he asks one couple to sing their lines, to the befuddlement of the crew). But in other ways he's perhaps a genius, and we even at times wonder whether the whole scene is not really a documentary but scripted to look like one (I doubt it, but I had that thought at times). In fact, there are 2 long sequences in which the crew gathers to in what may be an apartment or hotel room to discuss the film-in-progress - Greaves, apparently, is not present (though the production manager says that someday audiences may watch this scene and surmise that Greaves is present off camera - which again I doubt) and some of them raise doubts about Greaves's competence while others defend his artistic vision - exactly the debate that viewers have watching the film today. Kind of amazing that Greaves kept these sequences in the final cut. Sure the sequence with the homeless man who'd been watching the shooting should be 1 minute, not 5 - but overall it's a film worth watching (once) as there's none other like it nor will there most likely ever be.