Ebert Symposium 2023: Film Screening

On Tuesday, April 18, join us at a screening of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), an experimental documentary film by Black Emmy award-winning filmmaker William Greaves that was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2015. Ebert Symposium keynote speaker Amir George, artistic director of Kartemquin Films, selected the film and will share introductory remarks.

The film was described as "a unique 1960s time capsule, a telling look at the myriad tensions involved in film creation—a film on the making of a film—with three camera crews recording different parts of the process and personalities involved (director, actors, crew, bystanders). Though Greaves is undoubtedly the film's visionary auteur—notable for an African-American filmmaker in the 1960s—it is truly a film made collectively by Greaves and his multi-racial crew, whose staging of an on-set rebellion becomes the film's drama and its platform for sociopolitical critique and revolutionary philosophy." Read the expanded essay.

"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." —CRITERION CHANNEL

This event is presented by the Roger Ebert Center for Film Studies.

See more details: https://media.illinois.edu/EbertSymposium2023

(Pictured above is a 2005 poster for the theatrical release of the 1968 film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One. The belated distribution of the film, decades after its production, was an effort by director William Greaves with the help of Steven Soderbergh and Steve Buscemi.)