William Greaves

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Classic DVD: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (1968)

August 5, 2010 in Film | Permalink

Greaves was a screen and stage actor when he moved to Canada to study filmmaking.

William Greaves’ art film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, was made in 1968 when patience with the Vietnam War was growing thin and the credibility gap of military and political leaders was ever widening. The director wanted to meditate on the revolt against authority that was in the air, so he wrote a purposely lousy, pseudo-Albee scene about a bickering husband and wife, hired a few pairs of unwitting actors to perform the parts in Central Park and turned on his camera. Oh, and he also had a second camera crew document the first and a third document the first and second. Then he waited for combustion.

Frustratingly, the actors were too professional to turn on their director, even when he had one pair sing the ridiculous lines to each another. But luckily the crew, which wasn’t in on the setup, was not quite as polite. They stealthily met offset and filmed their bitch session, in which they labeled Greaves a bad director, writer and actor, as they inched ever closer to mutiny. A couple of alert crew members did question whether Greaves was purposely playing the fool. They were, of course, on to something.

Toward the end of the film (a mix of narrative and documentary, often shown side by side in split-screen), the crew comes across a real-life homeless artist who has taken to sleeping in the park. He sums up the heart of the project without knowing anything about it. “It’s a movie,” the man says, “so who’s moving whom?” Like any other auteur (or leader), Greaves is ultimately doing the moving, but, unlike most, he’s open to examining the rectitude of that arrangement. (Available from Netflix and other outlets.)

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