Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One / Take 2½ (1968/2005, William Greaves) (Patreon)

73/100 | 49/100

Second viewing for Take One, which I saw during its long-delayed original theatrical release in 2005. (As far as I can tell, Take 2½, which had premiered without delay at Sundance earlier that year—I was there, being wowed by Brick, but paid no attention, not yet having seen Take One—never got a release of its own. Definitely not in New York City.) I wrote a brief reaction on the nerd chat group, including it on a list of my ten favorite discoveries from that year: 

Amazing that this works at all, but it mostly does. For me a lot of the fun was that every mental objection I raised to the utility of Greaves' experiment wound up being voiced by somebody within the film itself, usually during one of the crew powwows. The apex being the moment when I thought, "How do we know Greaves isn't standing right outside the frame, orchestrating all this?"...about five seconds before someone said, "For all the audience knows, Bill is standing right over there." 

That someone was production manager Bob Rosen, who remains my favorite "character" in this unclassifiable, one-of-a-kind (ahem, see below) whatsit. "Nobody out there knows whether or not we're for real," he points out in that same quasi-mutinous discussion...and while I feel fairly confident that the crew's complaints about Greaves and the project's apparent mission drift were not in fact staged by the director himself (albeit made possible by his conception; there's a reason why no other crew has ever thought to document its frustration and then submit that footage to potentially appear in the final product), their effectiveness depends upon that possibility. It's the documentary version of a simulated-reality narrative à la, say, eXistenZ ("Are we still in the game?"), with tension and fascination derived from our uncertainty regarding where, if anywhere, the fiction ends and unmediated reality begins. Everything overtly meta works beautifully, so it's a shame that Symbioetc.'s surface-level text—the scripted scene that everyone's ostensibly in Central Park to shoot—is such tiresome, homophobic garbage. Though, even there, as the crew observes while similarly griping, Greaves' prospectus involved a terrible script that would force actors to improvise in order to get at something more real (though that's not really explored until Take 2½). So you can't escape the meta, really. The only remotely comparable film I've seen since, fucking to this degree with the viewer's comprehension of what they're even watching, is Vincent Gallo's badly misunderstood Promises Written in Water, which (for a different reason) has been no more visible since 2010 than Symbioetc. was between 1968 and 1991. 

When his remarkable work was rediscovered, Greaves understandably cashed in, finally making the companion piece that he'd always envisioned. (There were apparently once meant to be five takes total.) He even got Steve Buscemi, a champion of Take One, to join his reconstituted crew (which, alas, did not include Rosen, though ultra-chatty Jonathan Gordon tries to fill the void). That's not apparent for a while, though, as Take 2½ kicks off with 37 minutes of '68 footage that Greaves had omitted from Take One, picking up right where it had left off, with the switch to yet another pair of actors. A mildly intriguing addendum, though you can see why none of it was included in the original film. Once we leap forward to 2003, however (with a 1999 festival Q&A serving as a bridge to explain Buscemi's involvement), and those two actors reprise their roles in a newly written scene, shot as before in Central Park, it quickly becomes apparent that Greaves has no idea how to recapture the magic he'd generated 35 years earlier. To their credit, Gordon and the rest of the crew, in their inevitable "behind the scenes behind the scenes" scenes, acknowledge the impossibility of replicating in any meaningful or provocative way what had happened before. But an admission of defeat, while perhaps worthwhile as a supplement of some sort, can't sustain interest for an entire feature, so Take 2½ devotes most of its contemporary stretch to overwrought actors' exercises, throughout which the now middle-aged Shannon Baker (barely glimpsed in Take One) reveals himself to be something of a belligerent asshole. And all of this gets recorded on those dogshit digital-video cameras that ruined every no-budget production made around the turn of the century (plus Inland Empire), which is quite the splash of cold water if you've just revisited Take One's vibrant 16mm. For wack completists only, and that's exactly why I finally watched it.