Ah, the Sixties. It was a time of pink-print minidresses and experimental film-making, as celebrated by Joseph McElroy's Lookout Cartridge. In 1968, William Greaves assembled a film crew, three handheld cameras, a couple of Nagras, and various other equipment and turned them loose on location near 68th Street and Central Park West on a project with the working title of Over the Cliff. With several pairs of actors, he shot auditions and rehearsals of a 10-minute scene of marital conflict, fraught with sensitive subject matter and (perhaps intentionally) stilted dialogue. He assigned a cameraman to follow whatever else was going on in the Park at the time: mounted policemen checking the team's permits, wannabe bystanders, a gate-crashing homeless guy. Barely in control of the process (we hear him utter statements like "Roland is in charge of all the equipment in the mornings"), Greaves suffered his crew to assemble after hours to deconstruct his authorial process. It's a bit like Walter Murch's analogy to the game of Negative Twenty Questions as a way of understanding the making of movies. Greaves then edited this mess together, using double and triple split-screens à la Timecode, into something called Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. One of the most entertaining things about this movie is asking for it at the box office. Rereleased thanks to Steven Soderbergh, the film poses this question: is this a brilliant mockumentary, or is this self-indulgent malarkey?

 posted: 12:22:52 PM