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still
no answers by Amy Taubin
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 cinema’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, 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 verite films of Richard Leacock, DA 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’ 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'
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 Nation Film Board – established by the trailblazing
British documentarian John Grierson and at the time the premier
organization for innovative verite 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, aw 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 competent 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
limbs, 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 Greave’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 expose 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
we’re 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
decided 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 ways 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’ 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 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 an Steven Soderbergh (who has manifested
in his own narrative experiments something of Greaves’ 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’ 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’ 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.
Amy
Taubin is a contributing editor for Film
Comment and Sight & Sound. She also writes
frequently for Artforum.
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