Further thoughts on William Greaves and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

Last night I watched an hour-long documentary on the direct William Greaves, which cleared up some of my confusion about his astonishing and unique documentary/drama, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. The documentary made it clear that Greaves had a lot of acting experience in his youth, including training at the famous Actors' Studio in NYC, where he was imbued with the technique of Stanislavski: Actors inhabit and create the characters; use of lots of improvisational exercises to learn the craft. Greaves walked away from a promising acting career and studied documentary film and became an extremely successful and appreciated documentary filmmaker, focusing primarily on various aspects of black life and culture in America (his work includes what may have been the first documentary bio on Muhammed Ali). All this before he began to shoot Symbio (in 1968). So with that background it's obvious that Greaves knew exactly what he was doing in shooting Symbio and all the directorial bumbling, the indirection, the unfamiliarity with equipment and with shooting protocols, the weird instructions to the actors, the lack of clear instruction to the crew - all this was an act, playing a role - with the goal of provoking the crew the bridle at the director, to express their doubts about his skill and about about the whole project, and to begin a mini-revolt against the project itself: 3 layers, in a sense, with Greaves at the center, playing the role of a director in over his head; the "actors" several man-woman duos of pro actors whom Greaves directs (or misdirects) in various readings of a lovers' dispute,\ (the script is intentionally bad) seemingly auditioning for a part in a movie to be; and the crew (not actors, just the actual team of photographers, production managers, sound and light, etc.) filming the project, itself in 3 layers, one filming the "actors" as if that's to be an end product in itself, the 2nd filming the making of this film, and the 3rd instructed to shoot anything of interest, including people passing by in Central Park. When Greaves pulls it together in the final edit, we have a film that like non other shows the filmmaking process and captures the anxieties and tensions among cast and crew.