After my first viewing: Total shock! Upon some reflection, I didn't feel I was ready to write a review, so I watched the Special Features segment on William Greaves (At 1 hour, almost as long as the film) and then watched SYMBIO again. Here's the comment I was going to use after viewing once: "Is it an extremely original concept in film-making? Yes, undoubtedly! Is it enjoyable and watchable? For me, at least, the answer to that is 'Not so much' 7*******" Just how stupid am I, anyway? (Rhetorical question, that!)

Here I am, 74 years old, yet it wasn't till yesterday that I became aware of William Greaves! Can't remember the last time I could look anyone and everyone in the eye and say the words, with soulful and unabashed conviction: "GENIUS! Pure, Unadulterated GENIUS!"

Sitting here at my computer, focusing on authoring this review, the SYMBIO-experience has inspired me to an extent unparalleled by any other film in recent years. My job at this moment: Articulate this in a way that, in turn, will inspire you to watch and perhaps produce a review of your own. Here, perhaps the most challenging aspect of review-writing is to avoid anything resembling a spoiler. Don't read the Blurbs. One definitely contains a spoiler, which could easily deprive you of the joy of "Getting It" all on your own!

The two things which stand out most in retrospect? First, the sheer simplicity of the applied concept itself is truly inspirational, in and of itself!

Second, that it took a 1/4 of a century, after the fact, for Mr. Greaves to get a decent screening and begin to get some of the recognition he so sorely deserved for this cinematic milestone.

Couldn't help but notice that SYMBIO-was shot in August 1968, just a few months after the release of Stanley Kubrick's 2001. What do both films have in common? Well, thematically, not much, really. But it's hard to imagine someone like Greaves not having seen 2001 soon after its release, so...Who knows? We could always ask him!

10**********.....ENJOY! / DISFRUTELA!

Any comments, questions or observations, in English o en Español, are most welcome!

How important is the director, anyway? In this film, made in the politically tumultuous times of the late 60s where questions of social organization were prime conflicts, asks that question by making a movie that turns the camera away from the action and only begs to reveal the director, William Greaves. It is an important work, as it shows like no other movie shows the difficulties in blocking, organizing, and setting the scene; it reveals the role of the crew, something most directors frankly would like to disappear completely and that the invisibility of is essential for suspending disbelief; and it also puts into consideration the role of performance and scripting and how they match/don't match reality and what that has to say about how the director ultimately influences reality (if at all).

The documentary, or pseudo-documentary, or fictional narrative (whichever you prefer, via your interpretations of the themes) has its brain in the over-educated, over-intellectual crew, its guts in the lost performers struggling to understand the vague and ambiguous directions, and its heart in the director, who stands in as the desire to portray, to represent, to express without any idea how to do any of those things or why he wants to do it. It's a film that purposefully repeats banalities just to see if they can become more than banalities. It's a film that sometimes shows the multiple shots simultaneously, just to leave the editing to the audience and also reveal how disturbingly different shots change perspective.

It's an important work, and something that everyone interested in the industry and process of film-making should watch and understand. It, like many experimental films, has no real mass-audience appeal--it's not for them. It's for the industry, and its for the 60s, asking what to do with a group-effort medium that still relies on a single "voice" and "author".

--PolarisDiB

From its overtly innocuous title to its jabbering cast and crew this "artistic happening" bleeds sophomoric pretense by the gallons in a film filming a film with another cameraman filming both. It is a disturbing waste of film stock to witness as cast and crew go around in circles breathing life into a moribund idea where little if anything outside of annoyance and frustration are achieved. While the concept is intriguing the realization is a sloppy mess of lack of communication as director William Greaves looks ill prepared from the get go as he turns his film students loose in Central Park. It's all avant lard as Greaves directs a pair of actors in a torpid fiction scene followed by discussion while a cop and homeless man try to give the doc guerrilla theatre credentials with lack luster intrusion. Meanwhile the camera runs eating up footage on the mundane as Greaves hazily pontificates and his crew attempts to make sense of what is going on, venturing ideas on the purpose and point of the exercise in a staff meeting with Greaves excluded. Some see it as genius, some see it as a waste of time. I am solidly with the latter.

In the era of video and re-usable tape this monstrosity might be longer and even worse but at least it would not be committing the sin of wasting all that film stock on superfluous chatter and the hope something might be worth lensing on a mound or foot bridge in Central Park. Instead we have a clueless director and his acolytes bumping into each other with little to say or add to a film ( or films) in disarray which seems to be its purpose when it is more than evident this screen testing is for a film that will never get made but needed to get this faux cinema verite off the ground. A documentary whose lynch pin is based on a fiction is a bad place to start and it it makes Symbiowhatever little more than a pretentious self mockery.