William Greaves, an African American filmmaker, and an auteur whose career spanned most of the 20th century, was not mentioned in Jon Lewis’ book American Film: a History. In the book’s second edition, Lewis sheds light on the auteurs of the 1980s, the Movie Brats, as well as a variety of important Black figures in Hollywood history in the 1980’s. Was Greaves’ exclusion due to him not being well known at the time compared to the other auteurs Lewis mentioned? Or was it because of his unconventional film style, developed over his many years of work across the screen and scenic arts media? Through a deep reading of Greaves’ best known film, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, as well as a variety of interviews with him, we why he might have been excluded from the history written by Lewis. After an inquiry into the groundbreaking, experimental and political films he made, we found most of his filmography includes titles that were too challenging for the Hollywood status quo in the sociopolitical topics they tackled and often went against the industry’s ingrained institutional racism. Because of this, his legacy had until recently been erased from film histories and popular film registers. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One is the least radical in terms of leftist content, but is the most saturated with revolutionary film language, indicating Greaves’ rejection of auteurism.

Lewis tentatively includes some noteworthy Black people into his canonical narrative, but at the same time, he treats Black contributors to film as an afterthought, mentioning them as an appendix to histories devoted to white artists. Grappling mostly with Black intellectual thought, Greaves found early filmmaking success in television. As Greaves himself comments in an interview: “From the beginning, the Black filmmaker has had to be part of a parallel, separate cinema. That’s the track I’ve been on as a filmmaker.” Greaves funded his projects in service to the black community by creating educational films, which were also always in service of the black community. Greaves’ films are demonstrably impacted by his leftist politics and devotion to the advancement of people of color.

As the American film scholar Jon Lewis comments on the exodus of the Blaxploitation genre: “Since African Americans patronized what was essentially white American cinema, many movie business executives held that producing movies that catered specifically to an African American audience was unnecessary” (Lewis 346). However, Lewis states that there were other filmmakers who saw the Black population as an untapped market of viewership. This led to the production of a series of Blaxploitation films catered to African American audiences. These films can be interpreted as being empowering in some ways, as they often depicted strong female Black protagonists in positions of power or on a quest for revenge (Pam Grier in a wide variety of leading roles). While this may be viewed as progressive, they often featured stories objectifying their female leads and setting them against a backdrop of crime, which failed to represent the changing political, social and cultural zeitgeist of Black Power and the backdrop of the Civil Rights Movement. While Greaves has worked in the Blaxploitation genre, his more experimental hybrid-documentary feature film Symbiopsychotaxiplasm rejects the reductionist and archetypal portrayal of Black people in the media and opts for a docufiction deconstruction of the complicated power relations between a Black director and his crew. What are the avenues that his absence frames in the book, and what is excluded? Neither William Greaves nor his work has been included in the canon of black cinema, blaxploitation, or the 1960’s chapters.

As an actor, William Greaves gave up his career and moved behind the camera because he refused to play the series of “Uncle Tom” characters that were being offered to him. During his subsequent career spanning film, television, and print, he took on multiple identities of, “the capable host and man in charge at Black Journal, the industrious documentarian, the seemingly unqualified authority figure in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, and the justifiably “angry black man” who writes op-ed pieces for the New York Times” (Griffis). Greaves took on these multiple identities to eliminate the traps that seek to categorize Black individuals into easily recognizable, reductive types. As a filmmaker, he rejected these stereotypess. In 1968, William Greaves created Black Journal, a public news TV program made by and targeted at Black Americans, theorizing that “For the Black producer, television will be just another word for jazz. And jazz for the Afro-American has been a means of liberating the human spirit” (MacDonald). Greaves believed that Black-controlled, educational, public programming on television could be a viable way to communicate the radical revolutionary ideas of the Civil Rights movement, helping liberate black consciousness. In its purest form, jazz is an experimental medium, and Greaves saw its expression as analogous to filmmaking.

The focal point of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is the power struggle between the crew and Greaves, the director of the film, highlighting the Black auteur as a scrutinized figure and as an object of suspicion. The sound of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm non-diegetically features a jazz score by Miles Davis, serving as an aural link to jazz throughout the film’s abstract narrative model, as well as being an expression of experimentation in its own regard.

Jon Lewis’ chapter exploring the 1960s and early 1970s New Hollywood focuses on the political film and provides the hybrid documentary narrative Medium Cool by Haskell as an example, which has been heralded for its up-close look at the counterculture of the 1960s. In the book, Lewis provides an example of the political possibilities of cinema verite with Medium Cool, a hybrid documentary by Haskell Wexler filmed in the Verite style. Greaves also does this in Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. In the film, Greaves subliminally took on many of the issues of auteurism, race, and representation, and stylistically subverted them using an avant-garde mode of cinema verite. This is achieved in the editing, where the film shifts from interrogating the banal dialogue of the screen test to centering Greaves and his role as director, under the scrutiny of the film crew and actors. The crew members are seen being aggressive toward Greaves on multiple occasions, questioning his virtue as director and expressing frustration with the seemingly inconsequential, nonsensical story being told. The off-screen confrontation between crew and director is created by Greaves in the editing, where the crew hypothesizes about Greaves’ directorial faults and speculates their meta-involvement in the project as controlled by Greaves. Standing as the most complex moment of reflexivity of the film, Greaves interpolates the footage of the crew members discussing their dissatisfaction with the production, thereby emphasizing the role of psychology and creativity within the film’s constructed world. In the scene, the camera witnesses and provokes the crew members to express their varying interpretations of Greaves’ intentions as director and their own roles within that construction.

         The editing-centric visual language of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is at once disjointed and organized. On a few occasions, contrapuntal double and triple split-screen images dominate the frame. The film is shot with three (four, including Greaves himself) camera operators utilizing a handheld technique with experimental, nonlinear editing. Multiple cameras are positioned on the shoulders of multiple operators, with cameramen often entering each other’s open frames directly. the film contains two plots which are interwoven via the editing. “Over the Cliff,” which serves as a primary plot, is interwoven with the notes recorded for him by the film crew, creating a secondary plot. By including the democratic conversation where his function and abilities as a director are scrutinized, Greaves dissolves the traditional function of the auteur-director. Out of the remains, Greaves carves out a unique path as an anti-auteur. As American film scholar Joan Hawkins critiques the exclusion of Greaves from wider film history, “The notion of critique as rape, the rape of a Black filmmaker, sits uneasily here alongside the references to sexual violence that take place within the scene that Greaves himself repeatedly rehearses” (Hawkins 363). In a bid to portray “everything about sexuality,” William Greaves’ Symbiopsychotaxiplasm thematically ends up portraying the multifaceted, layered experience of a Black auteur, showcasing the impotence of authorship and the collectivist nature of cinema, and ultimately rejecting the auteur tide of the time. Albeit often being unable to secure distribution due to their political nature, Greaves in his independent films such as Nationtime was building a new documentary expression, enriching the cumulative visual history of African Americans. 

For his innovative editing, as seen in his biographical films on iconic Black figures Ida B. Wells and Ralph Bunche, Greaves was drawing upon an image record of Black America that was almost non-existent due to white supremacist ideology. Upon the principles of cinema verite, Greaves made films that revived lost Panafrican histories and educated the masses. After a tiresome career spanning decades behind and in front of the camera, Greaves worked exclusively for the progress of African Americans and often produced groundbreaking work, which was found incendiary to Hollywood, as well as the status quo. To a predictable effect, these efforts kept him outside the Hollywood machine, whereupon he survived by making films working closely with the US government.

Rather than choosing to exhibit his films in museum spaces and arthouse cinemas, the nature of Greaves’ work marginalized him within these closed circles, as he often struggled with distributing and making back the budget of his independently produced films. A noteworthy part of the recently reclaimed saga of William Greaves is Nationtime, Gary, a documentary film about the National Black political convention held in Gary, Indiana in 1972. Working in collaboration with a crew including his son, William Greaves is the only person with a record of the emblematic event. This film displayed a rare, clear look at a monumental moment of Black history. It was made amidst revolutionary efforts where the international Panafrican diaspora was at odds with itself, but rhetorically embraced unity through the speeches of a variety of courageous leaders. Though worthy of insurmountable political clout, the work was never distributed, and until recently, had been buried and deemed insignificant to the history of American film. 

Throughout his career as an artist working in a variety of roles within theater and screen media, Greaves concentrated the extent of his involvement in works forwarding Black consciousness; he was working as a civil servant for Black empowerment. In his own words, recorded in Scott McDonald’s biographical meta interview with Greaves, his primary purpose in returning to the United States was to “liberat[e] the minds of Americans—black Americans in particular—from the socially negative conditions that were operating in American society.” (MacDonald 26). In the US, Greaves worked under strict creative constraints in contract documentary sectors funded by various public works organizations for the government. Later, Greaves founded his own production company, William Greaves Productions.

         As a radical Black man, Greaves’ positions on sociopolitical issues were more incendiary than his contemporaries; his politics are not about representation, but about problematizing, revising, and revisiting Black intellectual thought. His positioning amidst the political specter directly contrasted any integration within the Hollywood industrial machine, and thus his legacy was erased. Working primarily within civil documentary genres and tackling Black history, William Greaves’ long career as a civil servant to Black empowerment as part of his lifelong devotion to Black progress and consciousness marks him historically as an auteur of note. Though historians have recently reclaimed Greaves, resurging his importance, Jon Lewis makes no mention of his contributions to cinema in the American Film: A History book. Greaves is emblematic of what independent cinema could be, which is radical and working for social progress for all people, but the white supremacist ideology dominant body politic excluded him from its history.

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