In writer-director-editor-producer William Greaves’ tricksy documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), everyone is an actor whether or not they see themselves that way. In a bid to apply to a movie Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle — a quantum-mechanics concept that more or less concludes that the better known one thing is, the lesser known another thing in close proximity becomes — Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is multilayered in a way few films attempt. Nominally a visual diary is being made about an outdoor screen-test process for an in-the-works melodrama tentatively called Over the Cliff that’s along the lines of John Cassavetes’ Faces (1968). But Greaves, then also the executive director of TV’s Black Journal (1968-77), puts what seems to be too many cooks in the kitchen for what ought to be an intimate process. One camera crew films the actors (Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, sometimes switched out for other performers that include the up-and-coming Susan Anspach). Another camera crew films the first. A third camera crew is mostly given free rein — the only one allowed to capture interruptions, such as the appearance of a garrulous homeless man or a posse of nosy kids, that might insert themselves into the Central Park-conducted proceedings.
Everyone involved knows Greaves is conducting some sort of experiment. They were handed a fuzzy printed-out explanation before shooting, though few have actually read it. But his hard-to-grasp goals — further blurred by how, in front of his employees, he’s slyly playing a cruder, more doltish version of himself — are received with mixed reviews. Some crew members think he’s simply incompetent and aimless, and that the fictional movie apparently being prepared for is badly written and emotionally unconvincing. Others are more charitable, finding Greaves’ “nondirection” interesting and deeming it unfair for his filmmaking style to be insulted as amateurishly clueless when his vision hasn’t yet been seen through.
Probably most surprisingly to Greaves’ on-set naysayers — that is if they find the resulting mosaic-like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm legible — the good-faith takes turned out to be fairer. (They wouldn’t be vindicated right away, though: Since Greaves wasn’t able to secure funding for his hard-to-describe film’s theatrical release in the immediate term, most people wouldn’t see it until a 1992 screening at the Sundance Film Festival, which brought it enough prominence that actor Steve Buscemi and director Steven Soderbergh soon championed it.) The movie compellingly explores Greaves’ overarching mission while also raising provocative, worthwhile questions it knows it can’t quite answer. To whom does a movie’s authorship belong, and is it fair for that credit to always be hierarchically positioned? Is objectivity attainable in a documentary? At what point is it appropriate to abandon professional niceties and tamper with someone else’s vision? Since every life is nearly entirely made up of responses to people and things, is everyone technically an actor in someone or something else’s story?
A reminder that the behind-the-scenes process of some movies is more engrossing than the product around which its crew has coalesced, the formally singular Symbiopsychotaxiplasm’s elusiveness remains conceptually fresh and accessibly heady. That it continues to feel ahead of its time — ahead of contemporary times, even — bespeaks why it dismayingly took several decades to catch on. Sometimes there really is such a thing as being too ahead of the curve, inquiring about things most people aren’t yet ready to seriously consider. After his death in 2014, Greaves continues to feed his underappreciated-in-his-time reputation: Nearly 55 years after its footage was captured, his documentary Once Upon a Time in Harlem premiered at the Sundance Film Festival. It’s gotten great reviews so far.
Peterson Reviews 