There’s a gently anarchic spirit to William Greaves’s 1968 experimental documentary
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, which follows Greaves and his crew as they attempt to film two actors staging a breakup scene in Central Park. This description barely scratches the surface of what’s really going on: Greaves himself is playing a role, that of the bumbling director but he’s the only one in on it. The script is melodramatic; the actors mostly a middle-class white couple, but other actors of different ages, backgrounds, and races are swapped in and out overact; the crew instructed to always have three cameras going, on the scene, the crew, and the park itself stages a mutiny. Unbeknownst to Greaves, they film their grievances and critiques and present them to him once it’s all over (these make up three major sections of the movie). As one crew member remarks, this is a movie about power. But as it turns out, that was the conceit all along: at one point, Greaves explains that