Quartile rating: 6.5/10 · 1 rating
In Manhattan's Central Park, a film crew directed by William Greaves is shooting a screen test with various pairs of actors. It's a confrontation between a couple: he demands to know what's wrong, she challenges his sexual orientation. Cameras shoot the exchange, and another camera records Greaves and his crew. Sometimes we watch the crew discussing this scene, its language, and the process of making a movie. Is there such a thing as natural language? Are all things related to sex? The camera records distractions - a woman rides horseback past them; a garrulous homeless vet who sleeps in the park chats them up. What's the nature of making a movie?
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is a genuinely singular artifact of experimental American cinema. William Greaves layers multiple cameras and levels of self-awareness — the scene being shot, the crew filming it, and a camera watching the crew — into a recursive meditation on filmmaking itself that feels decades ahead of its time. Cinematography earns a 4 for its inventive multi-camera structure and the organic, alive quality of the Central Park footage, blending cinéma vérité spontaneity with deliberate conceptual architecture. Novelty is clearly a 4: few films before or since have so radically interrogated the act of filmmaking from within the act itself, and Greaves's approach is utterly unmistakable. Acting is a solid 3 — the screen-test actors are earnest and occasionally compelling, though the deliberate artificiality of the scenario creates uneven moments that are partly intentional. Plot scores a 3 because the film's non-narrative structure is purposeful and coherent as a philosophical provocation, even if it resists conventional dramatic momentum. The ending is the weakest element — the film simply trails off without resolution, which suits the anti-narrative ethos but leaves the viewer with little sense of culmination, earning a 2.