‘The reputations of many documentary film-makers rest on their production of one or two ground-breaking pictures. But there are some, such as William Greaves, whose real achievements only become apparent when we look at the full accumu‚lation of their work. In Greaves’s case this was made possible by a recent retrospective of his films at the Brooklyn Museum. It included a screening of his never-released, unconventional, cinema‚verite-ish feature film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968/1971), which is now being screened at festivals, art houses, and museums. Moreover, Greaves is still making innovative, rigorous films -as demonstrated by his documentary Ida B. Wells: A Passion for Justice (I989), a historical biography of the black feminist civil rights leader Ida Wells that recently aired on PBS’s “The American Experience” and that has won numerous prizes on the festival circuit.
‘Black independent film-maker Bill Greaves has played a significant if not always fully appreciated role in the creation of a new post-1968 era in U.S. documentary cinema-one that is characterized by greater cultural diversity among those making films. During the nineteen-fifties and early nine‚teen-sixties Greaves endured a protracted struggle to establish himself as a documentary film-maker of artistic integrity. By the mid-nineteen-sixties he finally began to produce films on subjects of particular importance to African Americans. In 1968, while continuing to further develop his own still limited film-making opportunities, Greaves began to assist a new generation of young black documentarians through the initial stages of their professional careers-film-makers such as Kent Garrett, Madeline Anderson, and St. Clair Bourne. Greaves was not only a harbinger of a new era of multicultural film-making but a pivotal figure in the history of African-American cinema.
‘Greaves, in addition to being an important historical force, has produced an impressive and surprisingly diverse body of work, both in ap‚proach and subject matter. This testifies, on one hand, to his inventiveness and broad range of interests and, on the other, to the numerous prac‚tical exigencies he has faced over several decades. Greaves has received much recognition for his work as executive producer and co-host of public television’s “Black Journal,” an Emmy-winning public-affairs series, and for his direction of such ground-breaking films as the historical documentary From These Roots (1974), which looks at Harlem during its cultural renaissance in the twen‚ties and early thirties. However, the broader course of Greaves’s career and the substantial contribution he has made to African-American film production-from acting in black-cast films during the nineteen-forties to serving as executive producer on Richard Pryor’s 1981 hit, Bustin’ Loose – are only now starting to receive adequate attention.
‘Even aside from the scores of films and tele‚vision programs that Greaves has produced, directed, edited, photographed, written, and/or appeared in, his career itself deserves attention for the way it traces many aspects of African-Ameri‚can involvement in (and exclusion from) motion picture, television, and related industries. He was born and raised in Harlem and educated at Stuy‚vesant High School. While enrolled as an engineer‚ing student at City College of New York during the early forties, Greaves used his skills as a social dancer to become a performer in African dance troupes. From there he moved into acting at the American Negro Theater and was soon working in radio, television, and film. Among the films he was featured in (and sometimes sang in) at this time were the whodunit Miracle in Harlem (1947), one of the most technically polished of black-cast films, and the Louis de Rochemont-produced Lost Boundaries (1948), a highly popular film based on a true story about a black doctor who set up a practice in a New England town while “passing” for white.’ The doctor and his family are played by white actors (in keeping with Hollywood conventions of the day), while Greaves portrays a debonair black college student who is completely comfortable with his African-American identity as he interacts with his white counterparts. It was an image seldom if ever seen in American films prior to that date. Greaves’s role here clearly prefigured many of those played by Sidney Poitier in the next decade, and one is apt to wonder whether Greaves would have become one of the crossover stars of the fifties had he remained in screen acting.
‘Greaves has constantly struggled against being stereotyped in his work-as an actor and as a filmmaker. His work has always displayed diversity: he has balanced his numerous documentaries with repeated forays back into fiction film-making, such as Bustin’ Loose (as executive producer, 1981) and the never-released, hurriedly made black exploitation feature The Marijuana Affair (1974). Furthermore, Greaves has alternated films on contemporary subjects and issues with historical treatments. Films focusing on African-American concerns are countered by numerous films preoccupied with other issues (i.e., Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One); according to Greaves, roughly half his films have addressed topics other than the black experience. Industrials and government‚sponsored films that operate within circumscribed parameters are offset by films in which Greaves took large artistic or financial risks.
‘In many respects Greaves has adapted what is most positive and progressive in Grierson’s writings regarding the possibilities of and need for nonfiction films that can inform and educate the public. His approach has differed from that of many leftist or art-oriented documentarians – Barbara Kopple being one example of the former and Errol Morris an instance of the latter – in that his conception of film-making avoids fetishizing the individual work and instead looks to each work as one instance in a larger struggle. It takes a pragmatic rather than a romantic approach, one that has its roots in the black filmmaking experience – in the race films of Oscar Micheaux, Spencer Williams, and William Alexander, which were typically made under remarkable financial constraints. Yet if Greaves’s career, like that of Melvin Van Peebles, resonates with this legacy, it has done so within an entirely new social and cultural framework. This framework, characterized by the end of legally sanctioned segregation (though not of racial discrimination) and by the dominance of television, has altered the very terms of black film-=making.
‘Like those leaders that are the subject of some of his films, Greaves has had insight into the changing realities of his time, has persisted, and, often enough, has triumphed. An examination of the career of William Greaves suggests that we need to rethink our conception and periodization of documentary film practice, which has typically been divided into two eras – the one before the cinima-viriti revolution of 1960 (e.g., Primary, Chronicle of a Summer) and the one after. There are other turning points of equal or perhaps even greater importance, not all having to do with technology. The year 1968 can be seen as a watershed, a moment when access to the means of production and distribution began to be more open; not only “Black Journal” but “Inside Bedford Stuyvesant” and “Like It Is” also began to air in that year. These and other initiatives – such as Newsreel, Third World Newsreel, and New Day Films – began to chip away at white male hegemony in documentary film-making. Today, documentarians come from much more diverse backgrounds in terms of race, gender, and publicly acknowledged sexual orientation. Although problems of discrimination and social democracy have not been fully overcome even in this limited area, the manner in which these substantial changes have occurred needs to be better understood. Such historical reconsiderations are particularly urgent at a moment when many ideologues have launched gross polemics against multiculturalism, “political correctness,” and arts funding-seemingly to taint if not obliterate our memory of these achievements.’ — Adam Knee and Charles Musser
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Stills
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Further
William Greaves Site
William Greaves @ IMDb
The Daring, Original, and Overlooked Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One
50 Years Later, We Still Don’t Know Whether This Film Is Fact or Fiction
William Greaves @ The History Makers
Book: William Greaves: Filmmaking as Mission
Making the Film: About William Greaves
“This Film Is a Rebellion!”: Filmmaker, Actor, Black Journal Producer, and Political Activist William Greaves
Three Short Films by William Greaves
William Greaves @ letterboxd
William Greaves Collection, 1968-2003
Queer & Now & Then: 1971
William Greaves on Booker T. Washington & Frederick Douglass
Remembering William Greaves
An Independent for All Seasons: William Greaves
What a Long, Strange Trip It’s Been: William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One
The Whirlwind World of William Greaves
William Greaves @ MUBI
6 Filmmaking Tips from Pioneer Documentarian William Greaves
William Greaves: Pushing Boundaries
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Extras
Speaking Freely: William Greaves
African American Legends: William Greaves
William Greaves | Television in America
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Interview: William Greaves on Symbiopsychotaxiplasm
Robert Chilcott: Your film has been categorised as experimental, or avant-garde, but it’s not really…
William Greaves: It is and it isn’t. It’s a series of paradoxes. There is no creative predecessor of this film. It has a multiple set of aesthetics, which draw on different concepts – improvisation, cinema vérité, traditional Hollywood film styles. It’s a collage, a smorgasbord, a series of metaphors, like jazz, or like how a lot of music is developed. In other words, you can’t pigeonhole this film, which is partly my intention anyway.
RC: In the 1968 version they have a very serious debate where everyone is academicising, though this is much less so in the present day version, where there is more of a technical discussion. Do you think that kind of passionate semiotic analysis has been somehow lost today?
WG: In Take 2½ there isn’t that kind of confrontation. Take One has a lot of conflict in it. Take 2½ was just an attempt to allow whatever was going to happen to happen, without them trying to find out what my motives are. There’s still a lot of confusion, a degree of chaos, because they’re all intelligent people trying to rationalise some clarity of why the film is being done, but there wasn’t any conflict in relation to me as authority that they were challenging, as there was in Take One. In 1968, everything was being questioned – civil rights, woman’s issues – so it was a metaphor for America during that whole period, particularly the war in Vietnam, and the anger of American youth. In Take 2½ there hasn’t been that kind of dissent, although after we made the film it was beginning. Take 2½ reflects the passivity of the crew. The actors also did not challenge me in front of the camera, as they had done in Take One.
RC: How did Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi get involved?
WG: Steve Buscemi was at Sundance. We had the screening, and the projection failed. The theatre went black, so I had to announce to the audience that it was not a part of the film, even though the film was somewhat unorthodox! Steve was in the audience – we became friends, and he said he would try to help the film. He wanted to be a part of it in some way, and so I invited him to be co-executive producer with Steven Soderbergh, who was putting up the funds for me to finish Take 2 with these two actors. We had done the Symbiopsychotaxiplasm series – take 1, take 2, take 3, take 4, take 5 – each time with a different pair of actors. Shannon and Audrey were the actors for take 2. Soderbergh wanted to know more about take 2, so I decided to use the first part of take 2 with these two actors, then, some thirty years later – what developments had taken place in their lives in the intervening years, both from the standpoint of the fictional situation as well as themselves as actors. So I mixed those two levels of reality that ran concurrently, then when we came to the moment of climax, the psychodramatic component, again it’s like a smorgasbord, a jazz combo, a riff, a spontaneous moment. I wanted to yield to any wild idea I got through the process of shooting the film. At one point the scene on the bridge with the two actors, I saw Marsha with these sunglasses on, watching from afar, and I thought she looked like some supernatural being come down to earth to look at this cosmic event – what can I do to use her in this scene to mediate this conflict between the two actors. I gave in to that intuition – it would play very interestingly in the film, so I had them walking up these stairs, which in my mind was going up to another level of reality, and when they got up there she explained, in psychodramatic terms, what she was going to do to deal with the basic conflict that was developing in the screen test. What happened then was invariably you find the psychodramatic event, the relationship of the individual to some moment of karma, and they utilise their own spontaneity.
The psychodrama process is much more profound, much more immediate – it quickly moves the individual into this area of empathy, and what you get is a terrific performance. It’s like cinema vérité, not like conventional Hollywood shooting where you can do the scene again – it’s a one time event, which if it happens you have to be there to catch it, there’s no second take. Because the actors are very skilled actors, they collaborated on this moment, using the psychodramatic components, mixed with the method, and it worked very well. What happened then, of course, is that people who are in the audience become somewhat confused – are they acting? Is this true? My feeling is that it’s a very rich, human moment.
RC: Do you think a lot of actors resist that kind of non-acting, because when they finally see it they go “but I wasn’t acting!” and they want to be able to justify the acting craft?
WG: Yes, but it’s also an eye opener for the actor because they discover there are more emotions and richness in their real life than they realise. They cannot predict that they will find that level of emotion, but to be exposed to it, to become part of it. I think these two actors have become somewhat changed, discovering feelings they did not know were available to them, in front of a camera. A camera is a very intrusive element that tends to make people nervous. Like the Heisenberg principle of uncertainty, the means of perceiving often destroys the thing that’s being perceived. In other words the camera is focussed on the actors, and the actors become distracted from the basic circumstances they are supposed to be involved in, with the intrusiveness of the camera. You realise the camera investigates the psyche, the soul of the actor, in a way that makes the actor extremely self conscious. So the means of observing, as with Heisenberg, the electron microscope destroys the atom, so you never know what reality ultimately is.
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12 of William Greaves’ 18 films
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Emergency Ward (1959)
‘Stylistically, Emergency Ward falls somewhere between the “Free Cinema” of Lindsay Anderson’s Every Day Except Christmas (1957), with its carefully prepared set-ups and tripod-dependent shooting style, and the cinema-verite style of Lonely Boy (1961), by Roman Kroiter and Wolf Koenig. (Not uncoincidentally, Koenig served as Greaves’s cameraman on the film.) Emergency Ward was shot over the course of many nights and exposes us to the range of people admitted to the hospital: accident victims, people with imagined illness, people abandoned by their families, and others who are just plain lonely. Grierson’s influence on Greaves is evident in this film: Greaves humanizes his subjects and reassures the viewer that the emergency ward at this institution is run as responsibly and as well as the post office in Night Mail. The doctors know their jobs and care; orderlies and nurses are ennobled. At the same time, this film might be seen as a forerunner of Frederick Wiseman’s Hospital (1968), for instance in its visual sensitivity to character quirks, although it ultimately lacks Wiseman’s aggressiveness and sense of style.’ — Adam Knee
the entirety
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Wealth of a Nation (1966)
‘This film created by the U.S. Information Agency explores freedom of speech in the United States. The original description is that it “illustrates that freedom of thought and expression, including violent dissent, is a source of national strength in U.S. politics, education and the arts.” It was created by William Greaves, a prominent African-American filmmaker and producer from the 1960s-2000s. His career led him everywhere from the National Film Board of Canada, to Africa, to India and around the world. One of his jobs was with the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). The USIA’s primary goal was to promote understanding, “inform, and influence foreign publics in promotion of the U.S. national interest, and to broaden the dialogue between Americans and U.S. institutions and their counterparts abroad.”’ — DOCS Teach
the entirety
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Still A Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968)
‘A TV production by African-American documentarian William Greaves, Still a Brother deals with the conflicts of the Black middle class against the backdrop of the political revolution of the 1960s. Narrated by legendary writer/director/activist Ossie Davis, this was the first Black-produced doc to ever receive an Emmy nation, and deals particularly with the question of whether to align oneself with members of your race regardless of class status, or whether to emulate white standards in order to rise in the limited areas permitted by society. Speakers include Dr. Percy Julian, Julian Bond, St. Clair Drake, among others. An important, rarely screened work by one of the true greats.’ — Black Film Centre, Indiana University
Excerpt
the entirety
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Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One (1968)
‘In his one-of-a-kind fiction/documentary hybrid Symbiopsychotaxiplasm Take One, director William Greaves presides over a beleaguered film crew in New York’s Central Park, leaving them to try to figure out what kind of movie they’re making. A couple enacts a break-up scenario over and over, a documentary crew films a crew filming the crew, locals wander casually into the frame: the project defies easy description. Yet this wildly innovative sixties counterculture landmark remains one of the most tightly focused and insightful movies ever made about making movies.’ — The Criterion Collection
Trailer
the entirety
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The Voice of La Raza (1972)
‘Produced by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, this film traces the ongoing struggle for equality by the Spanish-speaking residents of the United States. Through a fictitious scenario and real discussions with a range of individuals, including local business leaders, parents, and student activists, the film explores job discrimination and the resulting hardships within the Hispanic community. Many of the interviews are conducted by actor Anthony Quinn, who relates his own family’s struggles as Mexican immigrants in East Los Angeles.’ — Texas Archive
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The Fight (1974)
‘In 1971, maverick filmmaker William Greaves trained his cameras on both Muhammad Ali and his opponent, Joe Frazier, ahead of the “Fight of the Century” at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The epic battle was supposed to be Ali’s big comeback following the suspension of his boxing license in 1967. In addition to the media circus surrounding both combatants, Greaves shot the match in its entirety from a dizzying array of camera angles, making the director’s cut of The Fight both an invaluable historical document as well as a virtuosic piece of filmmaking.’ — African American Film Fest
Trailer
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From These Roots (1974)
‘Explores the extraordinary artistic, cultural and political flowering that took place in Harlem during the “Roaring 20s.” This vivid portrait of the “Harlem Renaissance” is created entirely with period photographs.’ — letterboxd
the entirety
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w/ Rick Baxter Ali the Fighter (1974)
‘Ali the Fighter was made in 1975, when the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight was still fresh in everyone’s memory banks. Thus, a generous portion of the documentary’s running time is given over to graphic footage of that famous bout. Filmmaker William Greaves frames these scenes with a fine thumbnail sketch of Ali’s rise to glory, beginning with his “Cassius Clay” days back in Louisville. Fortunately, the film was made long before Ali’s profound physical and mental debilitations.‘ — alibris
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That’s Black Entertainment (1989)
‘Semi-interesting documentary that covers black filmmakers from the 1910s through the 1950s. It’s too bad this film spends so much time bashing Hollywood’s era of blacks on screen instead of talking about the black producers of the day. Several rare film clips are shown of these films so you’ll want to keep your pen ready to write down some of the titles. I really hope someone like Kino or Criterion will release some of these important films, which aren’t discussed anymore. Even though this documentary is interesting, it would also be great for a film historian to go back, in greater detail, and tell the story of these filmmakers.’ — Michael_Elliott
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Ralph Bunche: An American Odyssey (2001)
‘William Greaves chronicles the life and times of the world-renowned African American United Nations statesman, who not only pioneered the organization’s peacekeeping and conflict resolution strategies, but was also one of the leading advocates of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The first person of color to win a Noble Peace Price, Ralph Bunche became a symbol of racial progress throughout the world in a time when black Americans were marginalized in a largely segregated America. This superb film offers a rich and largely neglected perspective on twentieth-century American intellectual and political history.’ — full frame
Excerpt
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Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2 ½ (2005)
‘A movie about making movies about making movies. In 1968, William Greaves shot several pairs of actors in a scene in which a woman confronts her husband and ends their relationship. In “Take 2 1/2,” Greaves starts with 1968 takes of one of these pairs of actors plus footage of the crew discussing the film’s progress. Then, 35 years later, Greaves brings back to Central Park those actors and some of the original crew (plus others) to film a reunion of the characters Alice and Freddie. We watch scenes of these characters and discussions among the actors and crew. Greaves explores and dramatizes the dialectic in the creative process.’ — trakt.tv
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Nationtime – Gary (2020)
‘Nationtime – Gary is the long-lost film that William Greaves made about the National Black Political Convention of 1972, when 10,000 black politicians, activists and artists went to Gary, Indiana, to forge a national unity platform in advance of the Republican and Democratic presidential conventions. The delegates included the entire range of political thinkers — Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale, Pan-Africanist Amiri Baraka, PUSH founder Jesse Jackson, elected officials Ron Dellums, Charles Diggs, Walter Fauntroy, Richard Hatcher, Carl McCall, plus key women in the fight for racial equality — Coretta Scott King, Betty Shabazz, Fannie Lou Hamer and Queen Mother Moore (who was arguing for reparations). Entertainers Harry Belafonte, Dick Gregory, Isaac Hayes and Richard Roundtree lent their star quality and entertained the crowds. Sidney Poitier narrated the film.
‘One of the most powerful films Greaves ever made, this is the director’s original 90-minute version that was never released. Found in a Pittsburgh warehouse in 2018, the 48-year-old film was painstakingly restored by IndieCollect under the supervision of Louise Greaves, the director’s widow and filmmaking partner. It re-emerges at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement is galvanizing support across the nation. As we head into the presidential conventions of 2020, Nationtime is a must-see for all who care about ending racist attitudes and practices in this country, once and for all.’ — Lightbox Film Center
Trailer
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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Welcome home. I’ve been ok. The heatwave hasn’t been as violent as they’d predicted. So far. Yeah, the ‘Sluts’ ban is strange. Like I said the other day, why not just slap an age limit on who can buy it? They think it’s dangerous to adults too? And this from the country that’s probably the biggest producer of and market for kinky porn? Anyway, there’s nothing to be done except note the strangeness and move on, it seems. A horror movie starring two gay teenage boys does have a certain sirenic appeal. Hm. I have DNA proof, I swear it’s around here somewhere. Love questioning the shock on people’s faces when he says he doesn’t like Yoko Ono, G. ** Adem Berbic, You wrote, that’s good, and slop is almost always where it starts, no? That’s a good goal you’ve set before you. Tough, but good. You’re in or almost in Croatia! Make it pay. ** James Bennett, Hi, James! Well, isn’t it that you have nothing to say but your work does? Hence, the work. People’s expectation that writers would be their work’s spokesperson is understandable since they’re excluded from the writing, but the ‘saying’ is between you and it. Oh, sure, I’ve tried many times and hard to make my work more abstract and like the works I most love, but I seem to need to have emotion at the core of what I do, and characters and their incidents seem to need to be that emotion’s outputs. I guess I maintain my interest/enthusiasms because one of my big fascinations is constructing original systems within fiction. The characters and narratives — I never do plots — are completely interconnected to the overall systems. They’re always the systems’ origins to one degree or another. If that makes sense. Summer is so tired. It looks like it has finally started its piecemeal fading away phase though? Will do if I hear of an available pad. Great about Bob’s book! Let’s have a coffee or something sometime soon. ** jay, Hi, j! So happy you like R-G. I don’t know that Elsa Morante book. I’ll check it out. Being able to be generous is like being able to be religious when you’re not religious or something. That made sense in my head, haha. All the luck surely not even needed with the Chopin piece. You sound good. I’m good, I think. ‘Til soon! ** _Black_Acrylic, I suppose they were kind of like the punks of their time, at least in the literary realm. What a period that must have been when Nouveau Roman and Nouvelle Vague and Oulipo and more were all bursting out at around the same time. ** Carsten, I feel like Brando would have been very interested to appear in experimental films, and I wonder why that didn’t happen. Celine was great, but he was a solo artist and thus less splashy to the media, and plus his machinations were very different than the Nouveau Roman’s aims. The producer hunt is very early on. Unless we get extremely lucky, it’s surely going to take quite a while. ** magkneesiumm, Hi! Yeah, I can’t even read conventionally built novels anymore. I get bored right away. I’m spoiled. ‘Castle Faggot’ is as shining an example of what a novel can aspire to as anything else around. It’s grim how trained readers are to want an easy, predictable read. That goes for filmgoers too. Your release party is this coming weekend? What’s the plan, what will it consist of? Luck with the undoubtedly harried last organizing stuff. I’m good, just so over summer, but good. ** Steve, Oh, I don’t know if it’s been uploaded. As word spreads, it probably will be? Great about your Vecchiali upload! Noble work there, sir. ** laura w., In France at least Duras is considered very central to the Nouveau Roman canon. Less so here in France, but the Nouveau Roman writer who’s the most overlooked considering his greatness and centrality to the movement is Robert Pinget. And then there’s the wonderful NR author Claude Ollier who’s basically completely unknown outside of France, and not even sufficiently known here. Lonely woman novels rule. Most of the great British writers of the mid-late 20th century would fall in that category. My Spokane friends appear to be fine. It’s true, LA’s dry heat makes it more bearable. That it cools off at night and that being in the shade makes a difference. Not so here, or not of late. It cooks all night. My day was less tormented than yours, I’m pretty sure. Just the usual frustrations. I hope the dripping is dead. Given our drought, dripping does sound kind of dreamy though. ** HaRpEr //, I was going to say my pragmatism allows me to be impulsive, but if one’s impulsiveness is thought out, maybe it doesn’t qualify. ‘Providence’ was a big influence on ‘The Marbled Swarm’. There could have been some leakage into ‘I Wished’, but I wasn’t consciously thinking about it. Yeah, it’s amazing and a really good model, I think. Hm, I love ‘Artists Under the Big Top: Perplexed’, but I’m not aware of it influencing my work. Maybe though. Huh. I’ll think about that. Thanks, pal. ** Thomas Moronic, Me too! Dude, it was so great to get to spend time with you when you were here. I hope you’re getting to work on your new novel as diligently as you were hoping. Love, me. ** Right. Today I give you the opportunity to get to know the films of William Greaves if that strikes you as a good idea. See you tomorrow.
Alain Robbe-Grillet For a New Novel
Now available in North America 