Film Forum

(1968) Screen tests are being shot in Central Park for the leads in a possible feature, while another crew films the filming of the tests, and a third films the first two in the context of life in the park going on around them. Avant-garde verité that slipped off the radar for 30 years. 35mm. Approx. 75 min.

Reviews

“What if they made a revolution and nobody saw it? That’s what happened in 1968, when William Greaves filmed one of the most daring and original movies of the time… It’s one of the greatest movies about filmmaking ever made, and one that would have spoken to young independent filmmakers of the time. It’s a vision of filmmaking that didn’t get seen when it could have made a decisive difference for a new generation… The movie is no mere self-exploration or self-reflection but a vision of the times, a crucial work of late-sixties politics in action.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“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… Thanks to Greaves’s 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.”
– Amy Taubin, Criterion