Film-type fusionPerhaps the film that best exemplifies
the fusion of narrative, documentary, and experimental film
types is William Greaves’s Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One
(1968). Greaves employed three camera crews and instructed
the first crew to shoot only the series of actors performing
the scripted scene, the second crew to film the first crew
shooting the scene [1], and the third to shoot the entire
multileveled production as well as anything else they judged
footage-worthy going on around them. The edited film
frequently uses split screen to present several of its multiple
layers simultaneously [2]. Greaves intentionally provoked his
various crews and casts with vague or contradictory
directions until what amounts to a civil war erupted as some
of the film professionals involved began to question the
director’s intentions and methods. Greaves, who functioned
as the director of the actors as well as a sort of actor himself
in the dual layers of documentary footage, made sure that
every aspect of the ensuing chaos——including private crew
meetings criticizing the project——was captured on film and
was eventually combined into an experimental amalgam that
breaks down audience expectations of narrative and
documentary, artifice and reality.^22
1(^2) Amy Taubin, “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Still No Answers,” Cri-
terion Collection DVD Liner Notes: (December 5, 2006),
http://www.criterion.com/current/posts/460.
(^3) Many thanks to Dr. James Kruel and University of North
Carolina Wilmington professors Shannon Silva, Andre Silva,
and Dr. J. Carlos Kase for some of the ideas in this analysis.
transcend any architectural or anthropological
investigation of commercial suburban development.
Ray Tintori’s narrative movie Death to the Tinman
(2007) most certainly tells a story, but does so with
narration, cinematography, performance, and pro-
duction-design stylings that subvert audience
expectations as only an experimental film can.
We’ve already discussed the importance of nar-
rative to many documentary films. A growing num-
ber of narrative feature films that incorporate
documentary techniques demonstrate that the bor-
rowing works in both directions. Contemporary
directors such as Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
(The Kid with a Bike,2011), Lance Hammer (Bal-
last,2008), Darren Aronofsky (The Wrestler,2008),
Zack Godshall (Lord Byron, 2011), and Kelly
Reichardt (Meek’s Cutoff,2010) use small crews,
natural lighting, handheld cameras, and nonactors
(alongside deglamorized professionals) to lend
their gritty narrative films the sense of authentic
realism associated with documentary aesthetics
and techniques.^3
Genre
Our brief survey of documentary and experimental
cinema demonstrates that both of these primary
types of movies can be further divided into definedGENRE 83