Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves (1968/2005) red-hot takes (Review)

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves is the new Blu-Ray release from Criterion UK. It contains genuine footage of the Roswell incident, cast-iron evidence of voter fraud, and natural health secrets that THEY don’t want you to know. None of the preceding sentence is true, but if I hadn’t come clean you’d have had to work that out for yourself. Which is fine, when you’re dealing with a liar as bad as I am – but what about other, slicker forms of disinformation, like – say – feature-length documentaries released on prestige home video labels? Greaves’s first Symbiopsychotaxiplasm film was conceived as an examination of social control in the Vietnam era, but it – and its 2005 sequel-and-a-half – remain fresh, engaging and even a little disturbing in the fake news era. Taken together, the films are a crash course in how to understand bias in a film genre too often written off as being inherently truthful.

First off, let’s talk about that title. In the extras, Steve Buscemi talks about catching a then-rare screening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One at the same Sundance Film Festival where he was promoting his new films In the Soup and Reservoir Dogs. Looking through the list of films showing, he says his eye was caught by “one with a title I couldn’t pronounce”, and while its title isn’t the least commercial thing about Greaves’s film it is the most immediately daunting. The symbiotaxiplasm is a psychological concept originated by Arthur F Bentley, who defined it as the process whereby people are changed by the outside world, then express this in ways that change the world they live in. The “psycho” is there because Greaves’s symbiotaxiplasm is artistic, and therefore internal, in nature: these films are the product of what the world has taught him, and by expressing them he can teach the world something.

For a long time, this seemed like a forlorn hope. The sequel, which is even more self-reflexive than the original, includes a scene where Greaves and Buscemi answer audience questions after a screening of the first film. Pointing to the cameras, Buscemi jokes that they’re being filmed for “a sequel to a film that’s never been released”, which isn’t an unfair summary of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One‘s commercial fortunes. There are some 1960s avant-garde films whose innovations and eccentricities have been so thoroughly absorbed into mainstream cinema that it’s now hard to understand why anyone considered them challenging. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is not one of those films. However, while it’s still several light years from anyone’s idea of mainstream cinema, it has to be said there are few experimental think-pieces that unfold as compellingly as this. It’s a mystery to be unpeeled, not a lecture to be endured.

It begins as what seems to be a stiffly-performed, melodramatic feature, with a woman berating her husband for not giving her children and suggesting he’s gay. The first hint we get that this isn’t all it seems comes when one of them raises their voice, producing a shriek of microphone feedback. This is realistic, in that shouting into a microphone can result in feedback, but it’s also unrealistic in that it calls your attention to the falseness of the scenario rather than feigning naturalism. The question of what, exactly, is reality proves central to the rest of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One. When Greaves appears on-screen directing the couple’s argument, we think we’ve got a handle on what’s real and what isn’t. But then another strand emerges, as someone – Greaves? – films a meeting of his crew members, all of whom berate his sexism, unprofessionalism and lack of communication with the actors. Is this real? If so, why has Greaves included it in the final cut? Was he deliberately behaving badly in order to provoke this reaction?

Some answers are provided in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two and a Half, which might be too much of a pulling-back of the curtain. The beauty of Take One is that it provokes the viewer to come up with their own answers to its puzzle; rather than supplying answers, it ends with an encounter with a homeless veteran whose searing, painful honesty forces you to reassess all your previous judgements about the reality of the other scenes. The press conference in Take Two and a Half offers the clarity of a behind-the-scenes extra at the expense of the useful mystery of the first film, though it has its charms. The scenes from the film-within-a-film are played out with actors young and old, of various races, which adds a set of extra complexities to the familiar script. If Ron Carter’s score can’t match up to Miles Davis’s astonishing work on the earlier movie, the switch from film to digital video only proves Greaves is full of invention in any medium he chooses. Shortly after the second film was released – in 2005 – HD became capable of superficially mimicking film, and a whole world of parallel development was closed off. There’s a defocused, luridly coloured scene of rollerbladers zipping through Central Park in autumn that feels like a kind of image I’ve never seen before. It’s just as evocative as traditional celluloid, just in a different way.

As with Second Run’s recent reissue of another African-American avant-garde director, Kevin Jerome Everson, it might be worth interrogating our current cinematic value system in the light of this. At the moment, everyone who isn’t working for an opaquely-funded right-wing website accepts that the arts should become more diverse and open to people from disadvantaged backgrounds; we also prize a certain glossiness and traditional quality as inherently ‘cinematic’. It’s worth asking if these two goals can successfully live together, or whether it will only lead to minority and working-class artists being dependent on the charity of those multinationals who can afford to produce images we consider worthwhile. Is there not a case here for a cinematic arte povera, a movement that can do for cheap digital video what previous generations of artists did for Super 8, Super 16 and other sub-Technicolor formats?

If we end up having this discussion, the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm films will be central to it, since the 37-year gap between films sees Greaves grasping the expressive qualities of two generations of ‘bad’ image, from the hand-held, documentary grain of the first film to the blown-out digital whites and warm colours of the second. Indeed, the set as a whole makes the case for Greaves – who died in 2014 – as a man who truly lived the changes in American art and society. He started off as an actor in the American Negro Theater, which was dissolved in 1949. In the engaging documentary Discovering William Greaves, included among the extras, Ruby Dee describes that institution as “the size of a handkerchief” – but it launched the careers of Sidney Poitier, Harry Belafonte and Greaves. Perhaps there is still such talent incubating in the overlooked corners of the arts – but we’ll have to take the chance on them ourselves, rather than wait for Disney to validate them. For anyone willing to take the plunge into a wilder fringe of film-making, the mercurial, maddening, rewarding, utterly original Symbiopsychotaxiplasm set is a good place to start.

Thank you for reading Graham’s Review of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm

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