STALKER AND ME :: Igor Grubić

Posted: March 24th, 2009 | Author: marta.popivoda | Filed under: texts | Tags: film, igor_grubic, tarkovsky |

The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, diabetes and pregnancy healing
the sixties counterculture at large, caries and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, psychiatrist which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, diabetes and pregnancy healing
the sixties counterculture at large, caries and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, psychiatrist which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, healing
the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, read more
the sixties counterculture at large, try and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, doctor which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, diabetes and pregnancy healing
the sixties counterculture at large, caries and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, psychiatrist which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, healing
the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, read more
the sixties counterculture at large, try and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, doctor which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
Barbara Kruger, this an American artist, is the author of the famous statement I go shopping, therefore I am. The slogan from her poster - an ironic perversion of a famous philosophical statement - brings us into a situation, in which all the media perform different forms of seduction in order to fulfil our needs, in which even culture has long ago become a product and we have all become entangled in the market system. It was this circulation into which Marcel Duchamp has placed art one hundred years ago. He exhibited a mass production object as an object of art and thus turned the artistic creation into an equivalent of a capitalist production. The products are consumed in a feverish tempo and the accelerated consumption requires an increased production, which again encourages consumption, as we all know in theory from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Today the artists use the fact that consumption and production become more and more entangled and that production becomes post-production, that is making use of, sampling, creating collage, cutting out of the ready made products. This was very well described by a French sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World.
The artists move happily in this global culture and hedonically consume in order to produce and vice versa. According to Bourriaud, a DJ and a programmer become the heraldic figures of the new age. The question remains how to avoid being drowned in the consumer culture, how to keep a critical view in the never ending process of satisfying one’s delight of consuming. In order to fulfil their old critical duty towards the society, the artists have to look for new strategies. They have to get around in the same way as hackers do: they have to acquire the system, identify with it and occupy it as thoroughly as their own house. If they treated the system ironically or passed moral judgements over it, no one would believe them. Only when the artists control the system and seemingly totally identify themselves with it, they can uncover its obscene basis. At the same time they put the viewers in a situation that requires his or her critical attitude. They do not answer their questions, but ask them.
We believe that this is the context of the CZECH DREAM project, that has started as a shooting of a film about those, to whom the statement of Barbara Kruger /I go shopping therefore I am/ applies. But the project has grown and a stage for a spectacular show was created as its “postproduction” or its parallel product. It illustrates what our “realistic” socialist life has turned into. For some of the participants, the staging of this show might change an entertaining game into an unpleasant awakening. But this is the role of contemporary art: to show how manipulated our everyday “reality” is by the means of this very “reality”.

The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, diabetes and pregnancy healing
the sixties counterculture at large, caries and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, psychiatrist which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, healing
the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, read more
the sixties counterculture at large, try and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, doctor which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
Barbara Kruger, this an American artist, is the author of the famous statement I go shopping, therefore I am. The slogan from her poster - an ironic perversion of a famous philosophical statement - brings us into a situation, in which all the media perform different forms of seduction in order to fulfil our needs, in which even culture has long ago become a product and we have all become entangled in the market system. It was this circulation into which Marcel Duchamp has placed art one hundred years ago. He exhibited a mass production object as an object of art and thus turned the artistic creation into an equivalent of a capitalist production. The products are consumed in a feverish tempo and the accelerated consumption requires an increased production, which again encourages consumption, as we all know in theory from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Today the artists use the fact that consumption and production become more and more entangled and that production becomes post-production, that is making use of, sampling, creating collage, cutting out of the ready made products. This was very well described by a French sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World.
The artists move happily in this global culture and hedonically consume in order to produce and vice versa. According to Bourriaud, a DJ and a programmer become the heraldic figures of the new age. The question remains how to avoid being drowned in the consumer culture, how to keep a critical view in the never ending process of satisfying one’s delight of consuming. In order to fulfil their old critical duty towards the society, the artists have to look for new strategies. They have to get around in the same way as hackers do: they have to acquire the system, identify with it and occupy it as thoroughly as their own house. If they treated the system ironically or passed moral judgements over it, no one would believe them. Only when the artists control the system and seemingly totally identify themselves with it, they can uncover its obscene basis. At the same time they put the viewers in a situation that requires his or her critical attitude. They do not answer their questions, but ask them.
We believe that this is the context of the CZECH DREAM project, that has started as a shooting of a film about those, to whom the statement of Barbara Kruger /I go shopping therefore I am/ applies. But the project has grown and a stage for a spectacular show was created as its “postproduction” or its parallel product. It illustrates what our “realistic” socialist life has turned into. For some of the participants, the staging of this show might change an entertaining game into an unpleasant awakening. But this is the role of contemporary art: to show how manipulated our everyday “reality” is by the means of this very “reality”.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, page as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, doctor who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, population health enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, diabetes and pregnancy healing
the sixties counterculture at large, caries and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, psychiatrist which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, healing
the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, read more
the sixties counterculture at large, try and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, doctor which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
Barbara Kruger, this an American artist, is the author of the famous statement I go shopping, therefore I am. The slogan from her poster - an ironic perversion of a famous philosophical statement - brings us into a situation, in which all the media perform different forms of seduction in order to fulfil our needs, in which even culture has long ago become a product and we have all become entangled in the market system. It was this circulation into which Marcel Duchamp has placed art one hundred years ago. He exhibited a mass production object as an object of art and thus turned the artistic creation into an equivalent of a capitalist production. The products are consumed in a feverish tempo and the accelerated consumption requires an increased production, which again encourages consumption, as we all know in theory from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Today the artists use the fact that consumption and production become more and more entangled and that production becomes post-production, that is making use of, sampling, creating collage, cutting out of the ready made products. This was very well described by a French sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World.
The artists move happily in this global culture and hedonically consume in order to produce and vice versa. According to Bourriaud, a DJ and a programmer become the heraldic figures of the new age. The question remains how to avoid being drowned in the consumer culture, how to keep a critical view in the never ending process of satisfying one’s delight of consuming. In order to fulfil their old critical duty towards the society, the artists have to look for new strategies. They have to get around in the same way as hackers do: they have to acquire the system, identify with it and occupy it as thoroughly as their own house. If they treated the system ironically or passed moral judgements over it, no one would believe them. Only when the artists control the system and seemingly totally identify themselves with it, they can uncover its obscene basis. At the same time they put the viewers in a situation that requires his or her critical attitude. They do not answer their questions, but ask them.
We believe that this is the context of the CZECH DREAM project, that has started as a shooting of a film about those, to whom the statement of Barbara Kruger /I go shopping therefore I am/ applies. But the project has grown and a stage for a spectacular show was created as its “postproduction” or its parallel product. It illustrates what our “realistic” socialist life has turned into. For some of the participants, the staging of this show might change an entertaining game into an unpleasant awakening. But this is the role of contemporary art: to show how manipulated our everyday “reality” is by the means of this very “reality”.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, page as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, doctor who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, population health enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, anesthetist as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, diabetes and pregnancy healing
the sixties counterculture at large, caries and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, psychiatrist which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, healing
the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, read more
the sixties counterculture at large, try and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, doctor which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
Barbara Kruger, this an American artist, is the author of the famous statement I go shopping, therefore I am. The slogan from her poster - an ironic perversion of a famous philosophical statement - brings us into a situation, in which all the media perform different forms of seduction in order to fulfil our needs, in which even culture has long ago become a product and we have all become entangled in the market system. It was this circulation into which Marcel Duchamp has placed art one hundred years ago. He exhibited a mass production object as an object of art and thus turned the artistic creation into an equivalent of a capitalist production. The products are consumed in a feverish tempo and the accelerated consumption requires an increased production, which again encourages consumption, as we all know in theory from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Today the artists use the fact that consumption and production become more and more entangled and that production becomes post-production, that is making use of, sampling, creating collage, cutting out of the ready made products. This was very well described by a French sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World.
The artists move happily in this global culture and hedonically consume in order to produce and vice versa. According to Bourriaud, a DJ and a programmer become the heraldic figures of the new age. The question remains how to avoid being drowned in the consumer culture, how to keep a critical view in the never ending process of satisfying one’s delight of consuming. In order to fulfil their old critical duty towards the society, the artists have to look for new strategies. They have to get around in the same way as hackers do: they have to acquire the system, identify with it and occupy it as thoroughly as their own house. If they treated the system ironically or passed moral judgements over it, no one would believe them. Only when the artists control the system and seemingly totally identify themselves with it, they can uncover its obscene basis. At the same time they put the viewers in a situation that requires his or her critical attitude. They do not answer their questions, but ask them.
We believe that this is the context of the CZECH DREAM project, that has started as a shooting of a film about those, to whom the statement of Barbara Kruger /I go shopping therefore I am/ applies. But the project has grown and a stage for a spectacular show was created as its “postproduction” or its parallel product. It illustrates what our “realistic” socialist life has turned into. For some of the participants, the staging of this show might change an entertaining game into an unpleasant awakening. But this is the role of contemporary art: to show how manipulated our everyday “reality” is by the means of this very “reality”.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, page as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, doctor who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, population health enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, anesthetist as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

If my son demonstrates for a Museum of Contemporary Fine Art now it could take 20 years for it to happen. Then he’ll be 25 and he’ll have been fighting for a Museum for 20 years.
Annika Ström’s videos, pancreatitis songs and paintings are centered around the banality and the preoccupations of her own everyday life as an artist. In her videos, order a Swedish artist sings and frequetly uses the soundtracks, more about mainly concentrating on her existence. Call for a Demonstration is the documentation of the children’s march to raise a call for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built on seafront of Hove, South-East England. This video performance brings Annika Ström’s observations about her immediate environment into dialogue with ongoing public debate about the re-development of this seafront, recently a target of elaborate gentrification proposals from the side of commercial interests. In calling for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built the artist questions the nature of the civic realm and the place of art and art institutions within it. At the core of the project is the children’s demonstration which took place in Hove on Saturday, 24th of June 2006. Call for a Demonstration archives Ström’s act of preparation for an unexpected museum of the future, and further creates the possibility for it to arrive. Through the children’s demonstration we see the matrix of competing economic interests in Hove with fresh eyes, as they open new visions based on the principle of pleasure rather than the cost/benefit analysis.
Poetic, utopian and unreal, this project remind us also on a similar performance No More Reality organized in 1991 by Philippe Parreno, where a group of children were demonstrating with No More Reality banners on an American Campus. Call for a demonstration is a video made out of the performance, and also a book published by onestar press.

The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, diabetes and pregnancy healing
the sixties counterculture at large, caries and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, psychiatrist which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, healing
the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, read more
the sixties counterculture at large, try and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, doctor which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
Barbara Kruger, this an American artist, is the author of the famous statement I go shopping, therefore I am. The slogan from her poster - an ironic perversion of a famous philosophical statement - brings us into a situation, in which all the media perform different forms of seduction in order to fulfil our needs, in which even culture has long ago become a product and we have all become entangled in the market system. It was this circulation into which Marcel Duchamp has placed art one hundred years ago. He exhibited a mass production object as an object of art and thus turned the artistic creation into an equivalent of a capitalist production. The products are consumed in a feverish tempo and the accelerated consumption requires an increased production, which again encourages consumption, as we all know in theory from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Today the artists use the fact that consumption and production become more and more entangled and that production becomes post-production, that is making use of, sampling, creating collage, cutting out of the ready made products. This was very well described by a French sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World.
The artists move happily in this global culture and hedonically consume in order to produce and vice versa. According to Bourriaud, a DJ and a programmer become the heraldic figures of the new age. The question remains how to avoid being drowned in the consumer culture, how to keep a critical view in the never ending process of satisfying one’s delight of consuming. In order to fulfil their old critical duty towards the society, the artists have to look for new strategies. They have to get around in the same way as hackers do: they have to acquire the system, identify with it and occupy it as thoroughly as their own house. If they treated the system ironically or passed moral judgements over it, no one would believe them. Only when the artists control the system and seemingly totally identify themselves with it, they can uncover its obscene basis. At the same time they put the viewers in a situation that requires his or her critical attitude. They do not answer their questions, but ask them.
We believe that this is the context of the CZECH DREAM project, that has started as a shooting of a film about those, to whom the statement of Barbara Kruger /I go shopping therefore I am/ applies. But the project has grown and a stage for a spectacular show was created as its “postproduction” or its parallel product. It illustrates what our “realistic” socialist life has turned into. For some of the participants, the staging of this show might change an entertaining game into an unpleasant awakening. But this is the role of contemporary art: to show how manipulated our everyday “reality” is by the means of this very “reality”.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, page as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, doctor who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, population health enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, anesthetist as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

If my son demonstrates for a Museum of Contemporary Fine Art now it could take 20 years for it to happen. Then he’ll be 25 and he’ll have been fighting for a Museum for 20 years.
Annika Ström’s videos, pancreatitis songs and paintings are centered around the banality and the preoccupations of her own everyday life as an artist. In her videos, order a Swedish artist sings and frequetly uses the soundtracks, more about mainly concentrating on her existence. Call for a Demonstration is the documentation of the children’s march to raise a call for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built on seafront of Hove, South-East England. This video performance brings Annika Ström’s observations about her immediate environment into dialogue with ongoing public debate about the re-development of this seafront, recently a target of elaborate gentrification proposals from the side of commercial interests. In calling for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built the artist questions the nature of the civic realm and the place of art and art institutions within it. At the core of the project is the children’s demonstration which took place in Hove on Saturday, 24th of June 2006. Call for a Demonstration archives Ström’s act of preparation for an unexpected museum of the future, and further creates the possibility for it to arrive. Through the children’s demonstration we see the matrix of competing economic interests in Hove with fresh eyes, as they open new visions based on the principle of pleasure rather than the cost/benefit analysis.
Poetic, utopian and unreal, this project remind us also on a similar performance No More Reality organized in 1991 by Philippe Parreno, where a group of children were demonstrating with No More Reality banners on an American Campus. Call for a demonstration is a video made out of the performance, and also a book published by onestar press.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, oncology as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, pills who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, for sale enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, diabetes and pregnancy healing
the sixties counterculture at large, caries and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, psychiatrist which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, healing
the sixties counterculture at large, and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
The tumultuous New York film and theater world of the late 1960s oscillated between two opposing ideas: the auteur and the collective. The American version of Cahiers du cinéma’s auteur theory inflated the idea of the director as “auteur” into that of an individual artist whose stardom could eclipse that of any mere actor and whose power was greater than the Hollywood studio system. On the other hand, read more
the sixties counterculture at large, try and in particular its political wing—the overlapping civil rights movement and the New Left, doctor which was primarily an anti–Vietnam War movement—idealized the collective, the commune, and the group, notwithstanding the fact that its image was built around its leaders and stars. In this crazy, mixed-up moment, the films of the radical documentary collective New York Newsreel (soon to become Third World Newsreel) showed at the Filmmakers Cinematheque side by side with the works of such avant-garde filmmakers as Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage, the cinema vérité films of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles, and Elia Kazan’s 1956 Baby Doll, made with a cast of Actors Studio members and at that point still condemned as pornographic by the Legion of Decency. Early in 1968, Leacock and Pennebaker’s company acquired Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise and brought the celebrated French new wave director to the United States to tour with the film. Godard returned to Paris just in time to take to the streets in May of 1968, but he returned to the United States in the fall of that year—his identity now split between JLG the auteur and JLG a member of the Dziga Vertov Film Group—to collaborate with Leacock and Pennebaker on One American Movie (One AM), a project he abandoned in postproduction. JLG’s on-screen instructions to the crew at the opening of One American Movie bear a striking resemblance to William Greaves’s on-screen instructions to his crew at the opening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, the film Greaves shot in the late spring of 1968 (several months before One American Movie) but that would not receive its first screening until 1971.

Greaves’s film was certainly of its moment, and the director was perhaps uniquely situated to appreciate the various currents that informed it. He had a connection to all the worlds mentioned above, and a foot in several others as well, yet he remained something of an outsider to these groups, apart from any overriding political identification, except for his abiding, and at times quite practical, concern with civil rights, a cause he has quietly and effectively championed throughout his career, often in groundbreaking ways. At the time he shot Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, he had just been appointed executive producer of National Educational Television’s public-affairs series Black Journal, then the only national television series dealing with African-American life. (Greaves became executive producer after the staff staged a walkout to protest white control of the show.) He also had his own documentary film production company and was a member of the Actors Studio, where he participated as a director, actor, and teacher.

Greaves began his professional life as an actor, in the 1940s, performing both on the stage and in films. He appeared on Broadway in the musicals Lost in the Stars and Finian’s Rainbow and on-screen in A Miracle in Harlem and Souls of Sin (both made specifically for the black postwar audience), and in the major studio picture Lost Boundaries, where he shared the screen with the well-known African-American actor Canada Lee. But with the dearth of roles for black actors, he decided to try to take control of the production process by becoming a director. He enrolled in the film program at City College, where he studied with the avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter and apprenticed himself to the documentarian Louis de Rochemont. In 1952, despairing of ever breaking through the racism of the film and television industry in the United States, he moved to Canada, where over the next eight years he worked for the National Film Board—established by the trailblazing British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier organization for innovative vérité documentary filmmaking in North America—graduating from assistant editor to director/writer/producer. In the early sixties, he was asked by the United Nations to direct a documentary about global airline flight. The job gave him the chance to return to the United States, where he formed William Greaves Productions and was hired by the United States Information Agency to make several films focusing on the civil rights movement. His most notable film from this period, Still a Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class, deals with the conflict within the black community between integrationists and militants. It aired on PBS a few weeks before Greaves took over the leadership role at Black Journal and simultaneously began work on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One.

What was immediately striking about Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One was that it did not directly engage race or racism, although the fact that Greaves is both the film’s director-writer-producer and its on-screen protagonist—the focus of almost every scene—guaranteed that the viewer, regardless of race, had to confront whatever racial stereotypes she or he held. Quite simply, in 1968, there were at best a handful of African-American directors working in television and no African-Americans directing feature films. For an African-American director to make a feature film, let alone one as experimental as a film by Warhol or Godard, could not have been imagined if Greaves hadn’t gone out and done it.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One uses a single situation as the basis for a theme-and-variation structure that interrogates every aspect of the filmmaking process as well as the categories of fiction and documentary. The film is posed as a screen test, not for a film that is yet to be made but as an end in itself. In Central Park, on a beautiful summer day, a film crew is assembled to record two actors playing a scene that has the ring of a hack imitation of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? or one of Tennessee Williams’s vitriolic marital battles. The scene is an irritant (at one point, the soundman attacks Greaves for making him listen to something so ugly through his headphones over and over, for days), like the grain of sand in the oyster.

On-screen the director (Greaves) outlines the responsibilities of the crew. The film is being shot by three 16mm cameras, each equipped with a zoom lens and a magazine that holds eleven minutes of film, and all three synced, in the clumsy technology of the day, to reel-to-reel sound recorders. One cameraman, Greaves instructs, is to focus solely on the actors playing the scene; another cameraman is to film the crew that is shooting the scene; and the third is to include the actors and the crew, as well as onlookers and anything interesting that’s happening in the park. (Sometimes Greaves himself wields a fourth camera.) Since the theme of the film is sexuality, Greaves explains, the third cameraman should try to capture anything that relates to it: “Look, there’s that woman with the tits,” he says, and as the camera whirls to show us a woman on horseback, he continues, “Get her, get her, they’re bouncing.” “Greaves, you’re a dirty old man,” jokes one of the crew members, and Greaves, once again in the center of the shot, responds with no trace of embarrassment, “Don’t take me seriously.”

Indeed. Well, how exactly are we meant to view a director who is behaving, in the lingo of the day, like a sexist pig? That is the question the film raises right from the start. Who is this director? Is he the “real” William Greaves, or is he a fictional construct, or partly both, or are they one and the same? Is he, in addition to being outrageously sexist, as incompetent a director as his sometimes confusing instructions suggest, or is he playing at being sexist and incompetent in order to provoke the crew? And what about that bit of badly written psychodrama? Given that in May of 1968 the war was raging in Vietnam, students were occupying university buildings, the French left had almost staged a successful takeover of the government, and a string of assassinations had begun, this drama would be absurdly reactionary if it were taken at face value. Is the crew’s eventual antagonism, then, part of his master plan to dramatize the other major, though not explicitly stated, theme of the film: power, in particular the power struggle between the leader and the group?

The scene that Greaves has written to test the actors’ chops also limns, however crudely, another familiar power struggle. A woman named Alice is in a rage at her husband, Freddie. She attacks him for being a “faggot” and forcing her “to have one abortion after the other.” The scene is written to call attention to its stagy quality. At one point, the husband even tells the wife to “stop acting, ” which is as hilarious a double entendre as Greaves’s “Don’t take me seriously.” But Greaves seems determined to find what is referred to, in Actors Studio terminology, as the inner reality of the scene and the characters and, to that end, stages it again and again, interrupting it to give directions to the actors, who become increasingly bewildered and frustrated. “I don’t know whether to play a bisexual . . . a butch fag, or a faggy fag,” says the actor playing Freddie, before concluding, “I’d like to play him as a closet fag, so I’ll just play it straight.” As he continues, a loud bleep censors what is rapidly turning into an exposé of homophobia. One of the most interesting aspects of the film’s focus on sexuality is that, at this point in 1968, the political discourses around feminism and homosexuality were only beginning to be articulated. One wonders, first, if Greaves has written this supposedly spontaneous riff spoken by the actor playing Freddie, and if so, does he mean it as a provocation? Or is the actor playing Freddie speaking as himself and unaware of what today seems blatantly homophobic? Similarly, some of the crew members trash Alice for doing what women are programmed to do, “cut off a man’s balls,” a thesis with which none of the female crew members take issue. If this film is about sexuality, as Greaves claims, is it possible that he was attuned to what at that moment was a largely inchoate feminist and gay consciousness that would soon challenge the male heterosexual privilege that every man involved in the film seems to take for granted?

Built on such an unstable social/political/psychological ground, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One invites endless speculation both from the audience and from everyone on the screen. Increasingly restive, the crew decide to film themselves criticizing Greaves and his film, wondering all the while if the director has manipulated them into becoming his antagonist. They give him the footage they’ve shot of themselves, and, whether or not he instigated their acting out for the camera, it makes its way into the finished film. To add to the confusion, Patricia Ree Gilbert and Don Fellows, the actors who play Alice and Freddie, are sometimes replaced by other actors, among them the then unknown Susan Anspach, who carries a parasol and sings Alice’s lines as if she were Catherine Deneuve in The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.

If the production process sounds like a recipe for chaos, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One is anything but. Thanks to Greaves’s lively, innovative editing (involving some of the most surprising contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images in the history of movies), the film has the polyrhythmic elegance of its Miles Davis score. More than mere background music, the score is the abstract model for the film’s improvisations on a theme and also an expressive element in its own right.

Greaves shot about 130,000 feet of 16mm film (roughly fifty-five hours) for the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm project, which he originally conceived as a series of five movies. Take One, in fact, ends with a close-up of Audrey Henningham, briefly seen in the role of Alice, and the words: “Coming soon: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take Two.” But with no distributor adventurous enough to give Take One a theatrical release (for three decades, it received only occasional museum and festival screenings), it was impossible for Greaves to follow through with his plan.

Nevertheless, he held on to the original footage, which, being 16mm color reversal (the workhorse stock for avant-garde and documentary filmmakers in the sixties), didn’t decay. In 1992, Steve Buscemi saw a screening of Take One at Sundance, and ten years later he and Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’s teasing humor and desire to expose the ghosts in the machine) offered to help produce at least one sequel.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 1/2 combines material shot in 1968, and originally planned for Take Two , with an update shot thirty-five years later. Actors Audrey Henningham and Shannon Baker, who play the interracial couple in one of the “screen tests” at the end of Take One, are reunited as themselves and as their characters, Alice and Freddie. In the fiction, Alice, who has had a successful career as a singer in Europe, returns to New York in response to a desperate phone call from Freddie, who is dying of AIDS and wants Alice to adopt a teenage girl he has been fostering. He rationalizes his request as his way of giving Alice what she once wanted—a child. But Alice sees the request as Freddie being presumptuous and imposing his needs on her, as he always did. That a happy ending can be wrested from what at first seems like an impasse is a credit to both the actors and Greaves’s direction. And, indeed, the consonance of fictional and documentary reunion and resolution in the film makes it in some ways resonate more forcefully—and poignantly—than Take One. If Take 2 1/2 lacks the minimalist audacity of Greaves’s original conception (imagine seeing the clunky Alice and Freddie dialogue repeated over five films), it has a bittersweetness that testifies to how much has been lost and found by everyone on the screen—and us as well.
Barbara Kruger, this an American artist, is the author of the famous statement I go shopping, therefore I am. The slogan from her poster - an ironic perversion of a famous philosophical statement - brings us into a situation, in which all the media perform different forms of seduction in order to fulfil our needs, in which even culture has long ago become a product and we have all become entangled in the market system. It was this circulation into which Marcel Duchamp has placed art one hundred years ago. He exhibited a mass production object as an object of art and thus turned the artistic creation into an equivalent of a capitalist production. The products are consumed in a feverish tempo and the accelerated consumption requires an increased production, which again encourages consumption, as we all know in theory from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy. Today the artists use the fact that consumption and production become more and more entangled and that production becomes post-production, that is making use of, sampling, creating collage, cutting out of the ready made products. This was very well described by a French sociologist Nicolas Bourriaud in his book Postproduction. Culture As Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World.
The artists move happily in this global culture and hedonically consume in order to produce and vice versa. According to Bourriaud, a DJ and a programmer become the heraldic figures of the new age. The question remains how to avoid being drowned in the consumer culture, how to keep a critical view in the never ending process of satisfying one’s delight of consuming. In order to fulfil their old critical duty towards the society, the artists have to look for new strategies. They have to get around in the same way as hackers do: they have to acquire the system, identify with it and occupy it as thoroughly as their own house. If they treated the system ironically or passed moral judgements over it, no one would believe them. Only when the artists control the system and seemingly totally identify themselves with it, they can uncover its obscene basis. At the same time they put the viewers in a situation that requires his or her critical attitude. They do not answer their questions, but ask them.
We believe that this is the context of the CZECH DREAM project, that has started as a shooting of a film about those, to whom the statement of Barbara Kruger /I go shopping therefore I am/ applies. But the project has grown and a stage for a spectacular show was created as its “postproduction” or its parallel product. It illustrates what our “realistic” socialist life has turned into. For some of the participants, the staging of this show might change an entertaining game into an unpleasant awakening. But this is the role of contemporary art: to show how manipulated our everyday “reality” is by the means of this very “reality”.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, page as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, doctor who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, population health enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, anesthetist as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

If my son demonstrates for a Museum of Contemporary Fine Art now it could take 20 years for it to happen. Then he’ll be 25 and he’ll have been fighting for a Museum for 20 years.
Annika Ström’s videos, pancreatitis songs and paintings are centered around the banality and the preoccupations of her own everyday life as an artist. In her videos, order a Swedish artist sings and frequetly uses the soundtracks, more about mainly concentrating on her existence. Call for a Demonstration is the documentation of the children’s march to raise a call for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built on seafront of Hove, South-East England. This video performance brings Annika Ström’s observations about her immediate environment into dialogue with ongoing public debate about the re-development of this seafront, recently a target of elaborate gentrification proposals from the side of commercial interests. In calling for a Museum of Contemporary Art to be built the artist questions the nature of the civic realm and the place of art and art institutions within it. At the core of the project is the children’s demonstration which took place in Hove on Saturday, 24th of June 2006. Call for a Demonstration archives Ström’s act of preparation for an unexpected museum of the future, and further creates the possibility for it to arrive. Through the children’s demonstration we see the matrix of competing economic interests in Hove with fresh eyes, as they open new visions based on the principle of pleasure rather than the cost/benefit analysis.
Poetic, utopian and unreal, this project remind us also on a similar performance No More Reality organized in 1991 by Philippe Parreno, where a group of children were demonstrating with No More Reality banners on an American Campus. Call for a demonstration is a video made out of the performance, and also a book published by onestar press.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, oncology as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, pills who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, for sale enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

Å kart group was founded in 1990 in abandoned graphic atelier in Belgrade’s Faculty of Architecture, oncology as a 2-person-quarrel&dialogue sort of collective. Å kart (means ’scrap’ in Serbian) was formed by Dragan Protić and Djordje Balmazović, pills who call themselves ‘collective-in-progress’ and base their activities on ’selfproduction-and-selfdistribution of critical communication’. Å kart often collaborates with the groups of amaterus, for sale enthusiasts or fans, whose motives, driving forces and modes of incorporation are contrary to the logic of interests, effective production or team management. Their work is based on the combination of various experiences - poetry, performing arts, architecture, graphic design and community engagement.

The Your Shit—Your Responsibility project humorously symbolizes the need of a nation’s populace to understand and think critically about their political decisions. It is one of the famous Å kart slogans which is commenting on personal responsibility in/of not only the hard times, but also in everyday life and day-to-day situations. In this sense, the “baggage” of irresponsible act is equated with dogshit with an underwhelmingly triumphant flag placed in it and left for someone else to clean up. This action was followed by the distribution of stickers, posters, and dogshit in different cities and villages in Serbia and abroad. The four short films screened for this occasion represent some kind of ephemera of this urban action.

Tarkovsky’s film Stalker aligns with the works rendering spiritual quests on screen in a most complex manner, story
conceiving meanings outside the real and ordinary experience in the domain of human unrests and subconscience, and addressing fundamental bonds with the nature and anxieties over the future of humanity.

The film obliquely dwells upon resistance to the domineering patterns of collectivism and respective idolatry, and convictions opposed to the prevailing social systems and conventions, suggesting that the only revolution is the individual spiritual evolution propelled by courage of each person who dares pursuing a loftier sense, a self-cognition.
A group of people enters an imaginary zone where only a few of them can survive. Apt and brave individuals live surrounded by dark totalitarian and detached systems, and passive and indifferent mediocrity.
The zone is a spiritual home they pursue, the only home befitting them – a road they must take to achieve a higher purpose.
Their urge to find and enter the zone can be viewed as a desire for an inner peace, self-cognition and spiritual purge.

Back in the 80s I’ve seen almost every film Tarkovsky had ever made. However, I managed to get a copy of the Stalker much later, at the outset of the war in Croatia. Somehow, what was going on around and inside me deeply corresponded to the contents of this film. And, perhaps, this is why it had such a deep impact on me, being for a while a true relief in whatever I was doing.

Beginning of the war in 1991, proximity of death, and cruelty of people found me in a state of shock and severe identity crisis.
In this outer destruction I have seen and recognized an inner self-destruction. I realized I did not want to belong to a group of people sharing a passive existence, and allowing for alien circumstance to govern their lives.
I’ve decided to take full responsibility over my own. In order to accomplish this, I had to face my inner demons: laziness, conformism, egoism, self-obsession, fear of authority, greed, and various mechanisms of self-deception.
Thus, like in the Stalker, began my quest, a personal spiritual revolution, an ongoing struggle demanding ever alert self-observation.
Through this work on myself changes occurred – release from fear, and opening to others.
The sense of rapid passing of life brings me to a conclusion that the only life worth living is conscientious and responsible one.

Translation: Irena Å entevska

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