or behaving like a combustible megalomaniac igno- rant of the disaster he’s fostering. It’s more that he conducts himself with such benign ineptitude that everyone begrudgingly goes along with the inan- ity—for a while. It’s only when the crew starts asking questions, and steals away to record a secret bull ses- sion in which they question the wisdom of everything they’ve been asked to do, that they entertain the pos- sibility—like prisoners realizing they’ve been caught in a maze—that Bill Greaves has been neither benign nor inept. And that’s when the film transforms from a curious shambles to the closest a meta-textual mak- ing-of whatsit gets to a thrill ride.
To say that the film is a social experiment would be both accurate and inadequate. Whatever Greaves’s precise intentions, there’s no doubt that the true sub- ject of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is its own production. He established a very loose framework for a film, inten- tionally left its subject and purpose vague, and then minimally intervened when his cast and crew grew impatient, confused, and mutinous. He anticipated strong reactions from his seemingly soft-headed actions, and got them; and in rushed voices of dis- sent, sarcasm and unrest, he created a vacuum where his own authority ought to have been. And thanks to the three-camera set-up, in which two-thirds of the film was always going to be a documentary, there’s plenty of spontaneously recorded material of that unrest. The mutiny and the record of the mutiny don’t seem to have been planned, but considering how much equipment was lying around, how many reels were being burned through, and how intelligent and free-thinking the collaborators Greaves handpicked
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for this project were, such an outcome could be fairly called reasonable, scientifically speaking.
Such organic caucusing also satisfies Greaves’s evident hope that Symbiopsychotaxiplam would speak to the moment at which it was made, a moment when America was ramping up its presence in Vietnam, a moment when leftists were collectivizing against corporatism and corruption. When the crewmembers, led by the wise and wonderfully articulate soundman Jonathan Gordon, finally confront Greaves on camera—foremost about the very badly written dialogue the actors are forced to perform, and the crew to endure—the film- maker, for once dropping his deft dumb guy act, basi- cally says as much. “This sort of palace revolt which is taking place is not dissimilar to the revolution that’s taking place, let’s say, in America today,” he says, a touch too hubristically. “I represent the establishment, and I’ve been trying to get you to do certain things which you’ve become disenchanted with. Now, your problem is if you come up with creative suggestions which will make this into a better production than we now have.”
But alchemical interpersonal-relations and political- metaphoric explanations don’t account for how well the project functions as entertainment. Forget docu- mentary versus fiction—Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is a hybrid of dramedic, slapstick experimental propor- tions, with its jaunty Miles Davis score, split- and triple- screen action, off-the-cuff humor, inherent mystery, and the giddy-making dialogues of the mutiny sequences. Greaves may have hid his directorial capabilities from the camera, but his editing acumen is plain as day. An especially exquisite sequence cuts from crewmembers
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