Welcome to Flashback Friday – for when you just can’t get enough of Throwback Thursday. This week, we are reviewing the bizarre, aggressively-meta 1968 comedy “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm,” playing at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive as part of their multi-month-long event “Hippie Modernism: Cinema and Counterculture.” Our critic Rey Barcelo highly recommends you see it, if you get the chance.
“Symbiopsychotaxiplasm”
“Over the Cliff” is a film too awful to exist. The acting is stilted, the camerawork is unfocused and the script is so abominable that it makes Adam Sandler’s “Bedtime Stories” look like “Tokyo Story.” Thankfully, it is not my task to review “Over the Cliff,” because “Over the Cliff” is not a real film. It exists in no form and every form, a sort of eternal recurrence in which different actors play out the same scenario ad infinitum.
Confused? Welcome to the mind-bending meta-musings of William Greaves’s “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm,” which you can see this Friday at the Pacific Film Archive. The 1968 film is part of the Archive’s series entitled “Hippie Modernism: Cinema and Counterculture,” where its place among hippie counter-culture is rightly earned. Loaded with self-referential humor, sexual innuendo and political outrage, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” is hippie modernism at its weirdest, cleverest and – dare I say it – symbiopsychotaxiplasmic.
The plot (if there is one): Director William Greaves and his film crew wander through Central Park day after day, shooting the same scene of their nonexistent film – “Over the Cliff” – in every possible permutation of actors, settings and dialogue. While one set of cameras focuses on the performances, another camera crew records the filmmaking process itself; the two images are often presented in split-screen. At the center of this maelstrom is Greaves, who presides over his set with such incompetence that he pushes his crew to the brink of mutiny. In a final self-referential twist, the crew holes itself up in a back room (sans Greaves) to debate the meaning of the film itself. They agree that “Over the Cliff” is a disaster, but can’t decide whether Greaves is simply making a bad film or if he’s actually making a film about a bad film – in other words, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” itself.
At this point, perhaps it’s necessary to distinguish between Greaves-as-director and Greaves-as-actor-playing-director. His first lines in the film are “Don’t take me seriously,” and the most fruitful reading of his film involves following that advice. For all of his onscreen antics, the William Greaves in the editing room is nothing like the one mumbling instructions in Central Park. The film comes across as a taut, delightfully funny and surprisingly introspective inquiry into filmmaking itself. In his production notes, Greaves cited jazz as a major influence, and his benevolent choice to include his own crew’s rebellion shows him willing to engage in a collaborative process that gives all voices equal weight.
Despite its weighty themes, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm” is an accessible, genuinely entertaining film that can be enjoyed for its camp value alone. You don’t need a degree in philosophy to enjoy the pathetic antics of the lead actors both on-screen and off; my favorite so-bad-they’re-good lines include “You’re damn right I am sick; I am sick of you!” and “Come on sport, give me a chance!” In fact, I have a confession to make: If “Over the Cliff” were a real film, I’d be watching the hell out of it right now.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm has no definition in the Oxford English Dictionary, so I’d like to offer up my own: Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (n), the infectious combination of hippie humor and Escheresque self-referentiality that produces chronic laughter if left untreated.
The revolution will not be televised, but it will be playing this Friday at Pacific Film Archive. Bring a bud – and a friend.
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm will be playing this Friday, the 17th, at 7:30 p.m. at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
Contact Rey Barcelo at rbarcelo ‘at’ stanford.edu.