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.

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.