Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
What am I watching? Is this real?
Directed by William Greaves
United States, 1968
…no plot that we can see…no end that we can see…action we can’t follow
The year is 1968, the place Central Park, New York City. A white, middle-class couple are bickering: Alice attacks her husband Freddie for forcing her to have ‘one abortion after another’. She calls him a ‘faggot’. There is a palpable sense of anger but the editing is off and the scene feels too stagey. Then the picture switches to split-screen and the scene continues with different actors…
Confused?? The first audiences were. At least they would have been if the film had been given a theatrical release. The perplexingly titled Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is an experimental feature written, directed and produced by documentary filmmaker William Greaves. He assembled a cast from the renowned New York Actors Studio, hired a crew and gave them a sketchy set-up. They are shooting screen tests with a range of actors for a film with the tentative title ‘Over the Cliff’.
The focus is on just one scene and Greaves tells them – onscreen – that they are shooting with three cameras, each one bizarrely holding just eleven minutes of film. The first cameraman is to film only the actors playing the scene; the second is to film the first cameraman and crew; and the third cameraman is to film everything: the actors, the whole crew, and anything else that is happening around them, including the onlookers.
Greaves: Terry, your job is that you're the person that is in charge of filming this film being filmed. Okay?
The reactions from bystanders, including an NYPD cop on horseback looking for their film permits, are integrated into the film and become highlights.
Having to constantly manage curious members of the public is a common struggle when shooting on location and I found these scenes hilarious – N, a filmmaker
In 2023 we are accustomed to this kind of meta-filmmaking. From Orson Welles’ ‘F for Fake’ to the US sitcom Community, and more recently Nathan Fielder’s ‘The Rehearsal’ … all of them play with breaking the fourth wall. In 1968, however, this really was ground-breaking and the crew are genuinely unsettled by the process. But that’s just the start and Greaves takes it further. As the director he appears vague and purposeless. His instructions are often uncertain and he seems inept. His script for the actors is clichéd, reactionary and brazenly sexist. Greaves provokes both cast and crew, pushing them until they start to rebel.
In three remarkable scenes, with Greaves himself absent and without his knowledge, the crew debate whether they want to continue with the film. They try to make sense of what Greaves is trying to do, criticise his competence as a director, and pointedly question how much of what we are watching is real.
If you ask him what the film’s about he gives you some answer that’s vaguer than the question …
Greaves himself is unaware of all this (we assume) but the footage does end up in the final cut.
If this sounds chaotic…it is. But then through inventive editing, use of double and triple split-screen imaging, and startling moments of genuine emotion from the actors something that is highly entertaining, energetic, and yes, meaningful evolves. It is an intelligent form of chaos and its spontaneity is propelled by the ebb and flow of Miles Davis’ proto-ambient score – loops of the album, In a Silent Way.
So what is William Greaves attempting to do with Symbiopsychotaxiplasm? Well he does a pretty good job of exposing the bare bones and artifice of the filmmaking process. He achieves this by repeatedly putting us on the back foot and challenging us to question what we are watching.
T spotted that although the film looks like it is shot in one day with the crew never changing their clothes, the filming actually took place over eight days…
In fact the best actor on screen is Greaves himself – you can never be sure of when he is performing. Is he really this incompetent? Is he really this sexist? The crew somehow never twig that he is in fact an accomplished and Emmy award-winning filmmaker.
As importantly, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is a film about power. Greaves as director is trying to make the filmmaking process democratic but despite the near-mutiny he remains in charge. Does this mean that the director’s role is a prerequisite for a coherent film? That struggle for dominance is also central to the fictional couple’s battle over her pregnancy and his sexuality. Bear in mind that both abortion and homosexuality were criminalized in New York at that time.
And of course bubbling under the surface but never made explicit is the question of race. Greaves is a black director working with an almost exclusively white cast and crew, practically unheard of even in the supposedly progressive 60s. With a track record in acting, directing and producing, his work had focused on reflecting the African-American experience.
In 1952 in an attempt to get out of the rut of stereotyped roles he moved to Canada. There he established a name for himself behind the camera. As an established documentary filmmaker Greaves’ film can be seen as an abstract commentary on the social and political upheavals surging around the world in 1968. The war in Vietnam, riots in US cities, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, the Prague Spring, a near-revolution in Paris – it has to be one of the most tumultuous single years in history.
The only certainty we the audience have is that Greaves has the answers to these questions – or do we? A film then of serious intent but also enjoyable to watch and often laugh out loud funny. But no distributor would touch it, not until in 1991 the actor, Steve Buscemi, and director, Steven Soderbergh, saw the film at a festival, put it on the map and even got the money to try and make a follow-up.
A film too far ahead of its time …
In 2015 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm was selected by the US Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry as it is considered ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’. Would Greaves have switched this honour for a theatrical release back in the 60s? And as for the title: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm refers to a term coined by the social philosopher Arthur Bentley. Go look it up …
Reids’ Results (out of 100)
C - 66
T - 71
N - 78
S - 75
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