Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

I read about this movie a while ago—maybe it was playing somewhere, and I wanted to see it but couldn't make it—but I recently noticed there's a very nice transfer of it on youtube, so I got to see it. It's really my kind of thing. It was made by Willam Greaves in 1968, and the full title is Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One—I guess he was planning more installments—he likely had tons of footage. It's an experimental film in the purest and best sense of what that means. He apparently set it up like he was making a drama, with a large group of people who were likely film students and local actors—shooting in Central Park—using three cameras at once—supposedly to back-up the primary action, and also to document the filmmaking process. The drama, what we see of it, is badly written and acted, and as a director, he's kind of bizarre—and he allows the crew to film them talking about the whole process when he's not around. Apparently, he had in mind, the whole time, that he was going to construct something totally unique in the editing processes. This kind of reminded me of an attempted video I started with some friends, in which we taped a large open call audition for a “movie”—with fairly ridiculous audition scripts. That, in turn was inspired by the Iranian, Mohsen Makhmalbaf's 1995 feature, Salaam Cinema, about a staged audition. This kind of experimentation is prominent in Iranian cinema—I wonder if they were influenced or aware of Greaves? Anyway, it's hard to explain why this movie works so well—a lot has to do with the way it's constructed, which feels effortless—but I'm sure was very difficult. It's nice hearing these people in 1968 talk, too—interesting to compare it to how a group of people talk now. Also, it's very funny. Miles Davis on the soundtrack doesn't hurt, either.