Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

Filmmaker William Greaves (1926-2014) already had a track record as a documentary maker and TV producer when he decided to make a film about 'Freddie' and 'Alice', a couple facing relationship problems in New York in 1968. The result, a narrative experiment presented as a docudrama, was submitted to the programmers at Cannes Film Festival. The film was rejected, however, and only premiered in the 1990s at a Greaves retrospective in New York”s Brooklyn Museum.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is now regarded as one of the most creative and inspiring reflections on the dynamics between actors, crew and filmmaker, the power of the editor and the structure of storytelling. Greaves provides an ingeniously stratified narrative in which a man and a woman try to work out their sexual and interpersonal problems in Central Park.

It's a typically 1960s film in that the authority of the director is constantly being challenged: how 'collective' is the end result when it is the filmmaker who”s responsible for the final cut? Issues like abortion and homosexuality – both criminal offences in New York State in the 1970s and 1980s – were also high on the political agenda at the time.

Preliminary film

Commandment Keeper Church, Beaufort South Carolina, May 1940 (Zora Neale Hurston, 1940, 16').

In 1940, Zora Neale Hurston, acclaimed African American author and anthropologist, directed a movie crew from New York to capture religious services on film and recorded sound at the Commandment Keeper Church in Beaufort, South Carolina. More than a film about religious ecstasy, the Commandment Keeper Church documentary offers a glimpse inside African American religious rituals as well as habits of living that tell deeper stories of dignity, faith, and community.

Garrett Bradley

These films are selected by American artist and filmmaker Garrett Bradley, whose exhibition is on display at Eye. About her film selection she says:

There exists in this constellation of films, something that shaped me as I emerged in the world, a terrible and beautiful symmetry—a series of visions that reflect not only the abyss of human ignorance and the convulsions of violent power, but also the quiet, stubborn radiance of resistance.

These sacred dispatches from the edges of human consciousness, are a bulwark against the erasure of memory. When art is silenced, the past is sterilized, the present flattened into obedience, and the future, a barren repetition of sanctioned myths. A singular narrative emerges, one that dares not confront its own ugliness, nor the courage to imagine beyond it.

These works are not mere entertainment (although some were commissioned as such); they are fever-dreams of our shared condition, how we stagger beneath the weight of history and yet still raise our heads to dream. I return to them again and again as a reminder that though the world is often cruel, our collective capacity to endure, to fight, and to imagine something better is a defiance so profound it borders on the sublime.