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.
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.