Cast: Patricia Ree Gilbert, Don Fellows, Jonathan Gordon, Bob Rosen, William Greaves, Susan Anspach, Audrey Henigham, Stevan Larner, Terence Macartney-Filgate, Maria Zeheri. Screenplay: William Greaves. Cinematography: Stevan Larner, Terence Macartney-Filgate. Film editing: William Greaves. Music: Miles Davis.
Most of the experimental filmmaking that flourished in the late 1960s and early 1970s is forgotten and even unwatchable today. But one film that has endured, even though it went mostly unseen until the 1990s, is William Greaves's Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which is a movie about making a movie -- and maybe even a movie about making a movie about making a movie. It's that intricate a concept. It may sound banal: Filmmaker Greaves assembles a crew of actors, sound techs, cameramen, and others, to make a movie that may or may not be called Over the Cliff, in Central Park. But he also hires a crew to film the filming, and himself carries a camera that he uses to capture whatever strikes his fancy at the moment. The ostensible movie is about a couple in the midst of a breakup, and we see a couple of tests of actors for the roles, among them Susan Anspach, who would go on to have a notable career in movies. He seems to decide on Patricia Ree Gilbert for the role of Alice and Don Fellows for Freddy, and we see a crucial moment in their breakup, when Alice berates Freddy for making her have a series of abortions and then accuses him of being a closeted homosexual. But Greaves, the director, doesn't seem to know quite which way to go with the performances and the story, to the consternation of the crew, whom we see griping about his direction. And that's about it, except for a concluding scene in which the crew encounters a homeless, alcoholic intellectual who delivers his semi-coherent thoughts about the state of the world. Describing Symbiopsychotaxiplasm does indeed reduce it to absurdity. But it has a way of drawing you into the apparent incoherence of the situation, of making you realize that film is a collaborative art that needs a central consciousness to succeed. You may even wonder if Greaves is as big a fool as some of his crew seem to think he is. He wasn't, of course -- he's cannily playing a role. He was an important documentarian who started as an actor, trained at the Actors Studio, and went on to produce the National Educational Television series Black Journal, as well as major films about the Black experience. When he failed to get funding for the theatrical release of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, he shelved it. Eventually, after some prominent people, such as Steve Buscemi and Steven Soderbergh, discovered it at the Sundance Film Festival in 1992, it got the audience it deserved, and in 2015 was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.
