Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

​Cinema vérité reaches a new level of reality in this film-within-a-film as director William Greaves dares to break the accepted rules of cinema. It is 1968 and Greaves and his crew are in New York’s Central Park ostensibly filming a screen test. The drama involves a bitter break up between a married couple. But this is just the “cover story”. The real story is happening “off” camera as the enigmatic director pursues his hidden agenda. The growing conflict and chaos – accompanied by moments of uproarious humor – explodes on screen producing the energy, and the insights, that the director is searching for. The director uses multiple cameras, mixes cinema vérité and conventional shooting styles and experiments with a variety of other cinematic techniques including the use of simultaneous split-screen images. The result is a film with multiple levels of reality that reveals, and comments upon, the creative process. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One may well be the first self-reflexive feature film to have been produced in cinema vérité style, and its director as an African American filmmaker is considered to be a pioneer in the industry.