The Hunter Moving Image Alliance is pleased to invite you to a conversation on William Greaves with very special guests Su Friedrich and Louise Archambault Greaves.
Cinéma vérité reaches a new level of reality in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1971, 75 mins.), a film-within-a-film in which director William Greaves dares to break the accepted rules of cinema.
It’s 1968 and Greaves and his crew are in New York’s Central Park ostensibly filming a screen test. The drama involves a bitter break-up between a married couple. But this is just the “cover story.” The real story is happening “off” camera as the enigmatic director pursues his hidden agenda. The growing conflict and chaos—accompanied by moments of uproarious humor—explodes on screen, producing the energy and the insights that the director is searching for.
Greaves uses multiple cameras, mixes cinéma vérité and conventional shooting styles and experiments with a variety of other cinematic techniques, including the use of simultaneous split-screen images. The result is a film with multiple levels of reality that reveals, and comments upon, the creative process.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One may well be the first self-reflexive feature film to have been produced in cinéma vérité style. Greaves compares the making of “Symbio” to jumping off a cliff without a parachute. It was one of the 25 films selected in 2015 to be added to the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress, whose mission is “to ensure the survival, conservation, and increased public availability of America’s film heritage.”
Note: The film is usually dated as 1968, which is when it was shot, but its actual release was in 1971
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Su Friedrich has directed twenty-three films and videos since 1978, which have been featured in eighteen retrospectives at major museums and film festivals, including one at the Museum of Modern Art in 2007. She teaches video production at Princeton University.
Louise Archambault Greaves is a filmmaker, director, producer, screenwriter, curator, and researcher. She was a co-producer on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.