‘In darkness by day we must press on,  / giddy at the tilt of a negative crystal’

— J.H. Prynne, The Oval Window (1983)

The image of a crystal, tilted to refract light anew, celebrates the multiplicity of interpretive possibility. It is an exhortation to take up words, relationships, ideas, and turn them under the light; a firm encouragement to ‘press on’ in pursuit of nuance. Yet, instability vested in that word, ‘giddy’ — which suggests uncontainable, childlike glee, and, (in its older sense), loss of sanity, — permeates. Prynne’s ‘negative crystal’ also references the ear’s otoconia, which help the brain sense the body’s spatial orientation — ‘tilting’ of which causes vertigo. These elements acknowledge the destabilising potential of the very attention to complexity the line champions, concisely evoking the dizzying effects of striving to recognise many truths at once. Haft Cinema’s first programme brings together two films under the title ‘Giddy at the Tilt: Unsettling the Vantage’ whose dogged commitment to perspectival multiplicity delights, and just as crucially, disorients: Pools (1981) followed by Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968). 

The collaborative effort of Barbara Hammer and Barbara Klutinis, Pools (1981) concerns the two swimming pools at California’s Hearst Castle, designed by Julia Morgan. The indoor ‘Roman Pool’ (1934) glitters from pool-basin to ceiling with the deep blues and golds of Camille Solon’s Italianate mosaics. The outdoor ‘Neptune Pool’ (1936) is flanked by neoclassical colonnades, and has a Roman temple facade — with a 17th century statue of Neptune in its pediment —  at its northern terminus. A widely used synopsis of Pools reads: ‘women take turns filming each other as they swim through the pools of William Randalph Hearst’s estate,’ and it is blatantly inaccurate. At no point in the film — with the sole exception of a still shot over which credits roll — do we see a swimmer in the pools. 

Instead, Pools is six minutes of glistering disorientation. Dimensional planes collapse as marble statues are seen refracted in light cascading across the water. At times, the camera is held level with the water’s surface, allowing the landscapes above and below to co-exist. This footage, shot from inside the pools with a handheld waterproof camera, is brought into relief by static views onto the pools from several other vantages, and then by brightly coloured, form-abiding hand paintings over still shots. Pools ‘tilts’ in the vertiginous manner Prynne’s line evokes, continually rearticulating the medium as medium, and in so doing, Hammer and Klutinis’ film imbues a viewer with something of the tactility of swimming in these rarefied waters.  

 In the films for which Hammer is best known — landmarks of lesbian cinema like Dyketactics (1974) and Women I Love (1976) — an aesthetics of touch brings the politics of the body to the body politic. In Pools, sensation, perspective, and liberation remain entwined. Of her impetus in co-making Pools, Hammer writes: 

‘I want to activate my audience, I want them to come alive, not be passive through watching cinema, and then to extend that ‘aliveness’ into their lives through conscious expansive living and responsible politics.’

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is another vertiginous exploration of perspective. That title is director William Greaves’ iteration on ‘symbiotaxiplasm,’ a term coined by American philosopher Arthur Bentley, in Inquiry Into Inquiries (1954). Bentley uses ‘symbiotaxiplasm,’ drawing on Greek roots referring to ‘together-life-arrangement-form’ to describe all mutually affecting elements and participants in a given context. Greaves, by his own description in a 2010 interview, had the ‘temerity’ to insert ‘psycho’ into the already unwieldy word, to emphasise the role ‘psychology and creativity play when a group of people [...] function as a creative entity.’  The title announces Greaves’ intent to articulate the psycho-social complexities of artistic collaboration. It’s a title that, at first, smacks of needless convolution, but which hits upon thrilling ideas. On both counts, the film follows suit. 

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm (henceforth, Symbio) centres on a couple, Alice and Freddie, in the midst of a vicious argument in New York City’s Central Park. Alice is furious with Freddie, who keeps asking her to have abortions because (she is convinced) he is actually gay. She expresses these grievances through hyperbole and sing-song screaming: ‘You just want the gay world, Freddie! G-A-Y!’ Freddie, for his part, is without patience for Alice’s outbursts: ‘Come on Alice, stop acting!’ Symbio is also a documentary about filming this scene on location in Central Park. Much of the film takes place when Alice (or the woman playing her) ‘stop[s] acting,’ as Freddie demands. We see different pairs of actors screen-tested — at times rearranged into further new pairings by split-screen — and watch as they maddeningly rehearse the argument over and over again. The actors struggle with the borderline camp, and otherwise banal dialogue, while Greaves (intentionally) fuels disorder through indecisive direction. Symbio is also a documentary about the making of that documentary — a third camera shoots the camera crew shooting the camera crew shooting the argument scene. The camera crew(s) grow increasingly frustrated by what they see as Greaves’ lack of directorial vision, and curious Central Park passersby occasionally intervene. As cinéma vérité elements meet proliferating split screens and three layers of camera crews, what emerges is a clamouring, reflexive expression of the difficulty and humour of collaborative creative process, scored by Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way.

Three interludes, X-1, X-2 and X-3, punctuate the film. Shot using Greaves’ equipment without his presence or knowledge, the interludes consist of the crew’s debates over whether filming them is a step too far, or exactly what Greaves wanted. Bob Rosen, Symbio’s production manager, and the closest thing the film has to a villain (or, perhaps, its hero), insists ‘Greaves is so far into making the film that he has no perspective.’ Another crew member is convinced that Greaves intended just such a rebellion. As Symbio’s on-set interrogation into the perspectival clashes of collaborative process proceeds, X-1, X-2 and X-3 provide an inquisition into the vantage of its director. One crew member posits that such an intervention is wrong; that a director ought to be allowed the unfettered privilege of an unintelligible vision. But, Rosen figures, ‘he has the choice to edit this stuff anyway he wants.’ And so he did: after shooting wrapped, Rosen delivered this surprise footage to Greaves, who, by including these scenes, assembled a film whose ‘frame-multiplying reflexivity lends the small-scale action a vast, world-embracing scope,’ as Richard Brody has it in The New Yorker.

 In ‘X-3,’ a crew member proclaims of Symbio: ‘it’s an experiment that culminates in a film, and that film is not designed for Bill to keep in his basement, it’s a film that's designed to play, to reveal something.’ He was right, although what the film ultimately ‘reveals,’ is informed by having had to sit for decades in the ‘basement’ first. Shot in the summer of 1968, and finally completed in 1971, Symbio was shelved in obscurity for twenty years, only reaching audiences when rediscovered by curator Dara Meyers-Kingsley. By then, the film was a time capsule: shot months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, just before the Chicago DNC protests, the year before Stonewall, at a point when abortion and homosexuality were still illegal under NY State law, Symbio’s engagements with sexuality and authority shone through as a document of America’s turbulent late 1960s. In 2025, when most people have a video camera in their pocket, on-set conflicts over reloading filmstock, and the significance of the crew commandeering equipment and film to record themselves, also mark Symbio as record of a different era of film production. 

Greaves’ long unseen, now widely celebrated documentary about a documentary about the making of a domestic melodrama defies easy categorisation. The director has discussed it as an experiment informed by the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle;  ‘an environment’ ; ‘a calculated risk,’ and, in the film itself, ‘a feature-length we-don’t-know.’ Symbio is a many-sided crystal, and one which perhaps profits most from a manner of tilting only possible through in-person conversation. Writing for Le Cinéma Club, filmmaker Su Friedrich recalls that when it was shown at the 37th Flaherty Seminar in August 1991, ‘the room exploded, and for good reason.’

The title of this programme, and epigraph to this text, are from J.H. Prynne’s The Oval Window (1983), a poem which draws on such varied sources as a textbook on database management systems; the Financial Times; Tang Dynasty poet Wei Zhuang; Shakespeare’s Richard III; and a technical guide to classical optics. It is striking, in a poem with such range of reference, to read: ‘what can't be helped / is the vantage, private and inert.’ In proposing to screen Symbio following Pools, this programme seeks to celebrate the films’ mutual endeavour to unsettle the perspectival boundedness to which Prynne apparently admits defeat. The reflexive attention to process and environment in these films inspires giddiness in every sense of the word — a feeling well articulated by an interviewee in Barbara Hammer’s Audience (1982), who likens watching Hammer’s work to riding a merry-go-round: 

‘You feel slightly queasy, but you don't want to get off, but you can only stand five more seconds. You stand those five seconds; you feel great; you feel a little bit queasy, but it’s wonderful. ’