srijeda, 9. svibnja 2012.

William Greaves – Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (1968. i 2005.)





Eksperimentalni meta-dokumentarac o snimanju filma: ispiranje čiste stvarnosti (reality) iz artificijelne metatekstualne petlje: dokumentarca unutar dokumentarca unutar dokumentarca… Režiser pušta glumce koji u Central Parku glume par koji se svađa da sami shvate o čemu je u filmu riječ i što se zapravo događa. Snimateljska ekipa snima snimateljsku ekipu i također ne hvata sve konce. Slučajni prolaznici upadaju u kadar. Film koji snima vlastito (neuspjelo) nastajanje i postupno raspadanje… u što? Je li "stvarnost" moguća samo kao efekt u fikcionalnom kontekstu? I obratno - dobivamo li u "realnom životu" samo meta-fikcijske petlje (pogrešne percepcije pogrešnih percepcija..)? Postmodernistička pitanja koja navodno više nikoga ne zanimaju?

Take One je iz 1968. a 2005. snimljen je i Take Two.





Cijeli film (iz 1968.) je na Vimeu


„Don’t let the odd title put you off! It’s just some funny word meaning how things can become interconnected. Cinematically, it contains both “Psycho” and “Taxi” so how can the film be bad? And imagine how smart you’ll sound when it rolls off your tongue in front of your friends.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is an experimental meta-documentary by William Greaves, a documentary filmmaker and actor. The premise is very simple: Greaves auditions couples in Central Park, repeatedly running them through the same inane dialogue. Meanwhile, his crew films him filming, increasingly turning the camera on themselves to express their growing unease with Greaves’s (deliberate) lack of direction. From this cascades a loosely controlled experiment in dissolution, which quickly becomes intensely dramatic and absorbing… It’s proto-reality TV!
Greaves later revisited the project, aided by Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi, in the mid-2000s, to make another version, Take 2 1/2. That you can get on the wonderful Criterion release, which the video below is taken from.“ – AD Jameson

„Seeing this singular 1968 American experimental feature by William Greaves a second time (on video; the first time was in 1981, in its original 35-millimeter format) has led me to value it more, though arguably the fact that it loses relatively little impact on video constitutes one of its limitations. Greaves, a pioneering black actor whose career stretches back to postwar films made for black audiences as well as the underrated Hollywood feature Lost Boundaries, went on to direct over 200 documentaries, host and executive produce NET’s Black Journal, and teach acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute. For this eccentric venture, he got two white actors to play a quarreling couple in Central Park and proceeded to film not only them (in both rehearsal and performance) but also himself and his camera crew and various other people in the vicinity, often juxtaposing two or three camera angles simultaneously in split screen in the final edit. The crew’s own doubts and speculations about the film being made were also recorded later and edited into the mix. The couple’s quarrel is vitriolic and singularly unpleasant, the acting variable, the collective insight into what Greaves is up to mainly uncertain. The title modifies a term coined by political scientist and philosopher Arthur Bentley that refers to the interactions between people and their environment, and the notion of a shifting center is what gives this experiment much of its interest and also limits it from going very far in any single direction.“ - Jonathan Rosenbaum

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