“Just Another Word for Jazz”: The Signifying Auteur in William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One

Drawing on material from the William Greaves collection at Indiana University’s Black Film Center/Archive, this essay situates Greaves’s unstable, chaotic, and long unseen 1968 documentary Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One within an expanded historical context of black independent cinema. I will explore Greaves’s “feature-length we-don’t-know” as a referendum on the convoluted subject position—a double-consciousness, at least—of the pioneering black independent filmmaker, and the pressure to exploit the communicatory possibilities of a newly democratized medium while resisting its modes of oppression. How strict is the correlation between the one who holds the camera and the one who wields the power? Greaves’s aesthetic experiment suggests a subversive and historically resonant form of direction through indirection—a Brechtian “theater of possibility” that turns cinematic self-reflexivity into a multilayered implication of the spectator.