I don’t see where there’s a beginning or a middle or an end. I don’t mean in a con- ventional story fashion. But everything we shoot is the same. I don’t see where there’s any build in the film at all. —TERRENCE MCCARTNEY-FILGATE
Whether or not Bill is capable or cares to articulate it consciously, nobody would come up with such a crazy idea for a film. —ROBERT ROSEN
No, don’t take me seriously. —WILLIAM GREAVES
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is the cinematic equivalent of a ship listing, steadily and helplessly, over a waterfall. “The name right now is Over the Cliff,” director William Greaves says to a Central Park policeman on the first day of shooting. “We’re jumping over the cliff,” he says. “What kind of film is it?,” asks the cop. “It’s a feature- length ‘we-don’t-know,’” Greaves replies, grinning. The policeman offers an awkwardly conspiratorial laugh, remounts his horse and briskly clears the hell out of the way. The crewmembers, shouldering heavy equip- ment in the summer sun and trying to make sense of what’s being asked of them, have no such egress.
In the summer of 1968, venerated veteran filmmaker Greaves,
then-executive producer of NET’s Black
Journal, documentarian and formerly of both the Actor’s Studio and the American Negro Theatre, set out to shoot an independent film in Central Park. The idea was to shoot multiple sets of actors performing the same dialogue about a squabbling married couple. A rotation of performers, new set ups, new directives from Greaves, but the same unsavory dialogue in which
the woman accuses her husband of being a homosex- ual, and the man asserts that his wife has gone mad. Yet that’s only one set of variables. The project also entailed three different cameras recording three tiers of action: one filming the fictional scene; another capturing the making of that scene, triangulating the actors and their assigned camera; and a final camera widened out to the whole community of machines, actors, crewmem- bers and bystanders. Both in terms of the camera set- ups and the rotation of performers, it’s clear from the start that process is of more importance here than product. What’s not immediately, but soon becomes, clear is that this process is just as fucked as the product. In footage captured by the three cameras—footage, it should be noted, that Greaves chose to include in the film—Greaves seems unprepared, out of it, unhelpful when asked questions, and insensitive to the incon- veniences he’s subjecting others to; as a crewmember later observes, “He doesn’t know how to direct.”
As cinematic train-wreckers go, it’s not that Greaves is hell-bent on torturing anyone, Lars von Trier-style,
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