Symbiopsychotaxiplasm // I Am Curious

William Greave’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is performance art about film as a genre within a film. The film opens with a dual screen scene between a man and a woman with terrible dialogue and soapy direction. Eventually we take a step back and meet the crew that’s putting this together; including Greaves at the lead, directing his way through Central Park. We then take another step back into a post-shoot meeting of the crew, engineering a sort of mutiny against Greaves for doing his job poorly, and not being a clear leader on the project. The crew does some philosophizing about why they are shooting this meeting, and what exactly are Greaves intentions in making this film.

With three cameras on-hand, it’s hard not to believe that Greaves was conducting an experiment in filmmaking. With two cameras on the actors acting, and a third usually doing behind-the-scenes shots all on screen, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm opens itself to us, allowing minute details to breathe. The crew knows there are cameras present the whole time, and they notice Greaves behaving differently in front of them; the idea of acting and how we act is a clear through line in the movie. The scenes that are the most authentic are when people don’t realize the camera is rolling, like when the male lead jokes about his co-star, or when a homeless man comes and talks to the crew. As an experiment, I would say it’s largely successful. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm plays with our notion of power dynamics and directorial voice.

Both films are about the “Group” colliding with “Individual”. In Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, Bill Greaves pits his crew against him, and he gives them a creative voice in the film. I Am Curious - Yellow, has similar themes of Group vs Individual. There’s a lot of different things happening in I Am Curious, so it’s difficult to parse the plot into words. First off, it’s a movie about personal politics and politics large. Lena, an actress and Socialist activist, stars in a movie for director Vilgot Sjöman about lovers. Lena and Vilgot are lovers themselves so he has reservations casting who she wants to be lovers with, for fear that she will leave him for her. So it’s also a film about personal relationships, expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies.

The lines between realities are constantly being blurred. Our reality and the film’s merge in “woman on the street” style interviews where Lena questions people on the street about class, nonviolence, and income inequality. Vilgot interviews Martin Luther King Jr. yet there’s a strange disconnect between the shots of Vilgot and the shots of King in a filmic manufactured reality. Within the movie, the reality between the movie within a movie and the film itself are being blurred as well. We see a scene of the two lovers within the movie arguing after a string of movie within a movie scenes. They argue and it cuts to the camera crew shutting the door, a clear indication that this is not the film within a film anymore, but one reality away. Combined with text on screen, fake contents in the middle of the film, and constant switching between realities, I Am Curious proves to be a disorienting viewing, constantly forcing us to to re-align, re-adjust and re-think within it’s reality. It’s a strange ideology film, that wants you to commit to nonviolence while showing you how ridiculous it is.