So this movie with the pretentious name is a meta-fictional quasi-documentary about making movies, despite which it is not terrible.

As the movie starts, we see actors (badly) performing this melodramatic scene where a couple is having this big argument. And then we see different actors performing it, and different ones. Credits roll, and now we pull back to see the director, William Greaves, explaining to his crew that a) one camera is going to be filming the actors who are performing this scene, b) one camera is going to be filming the crew filming the actors, and c) another camera is going to be filming anything that seems interesting nearby or on the set.

So that’s pretty much the thesis of the movie laid out: It’s a multi-layered thing where everything you’re watching is part of the movie in an intentional way. This particularly includes Greaves, because he is in fact playing a character, a kind of clueless director who has his crew out here filming… something, but who doesn’t seem to really know what he’s doing or why.

Apparently — or allegedly — Greaves was doing this to provoke discontent and confusion in the crew, and hoping to get some kind of dramatic reaction from them, with a plan to just capture whatever happened and then figure out how to edit it into a movie.

Well, apparently/allegedly, this worked out perfectly, because the crew ended up having a secret meeting to gripe about things. And in this secret meeting — which they film, and in which they directly address their viewer, apparently expecting it to be both Greaves and some audience — they speculate about the nature of the film, and about why he’s having them film everything, and what he’s really doing, and if his cluelessness is real or just an act. And they get extremely meta about this, and talk about how the viewer can’t even know if this meeting is real, noting that for all the viewer knows, Greaves could be standing there just off-camera directing the whole thing as just another scene.

And so reading up on this, allegedly/apparently Greaves was not there, and was not directing this; he really was play-acting at incompetence, but everything past that was real. Steven Soderbergh, quoted on Wikipedia, says “I think when he was presented with that material, he must have felt like the cinema gods were smiling on him.” And indeed he must have, because it’s perfect for what he’s doing. Arguably too perfect, which is why I keep saying “allegedly” here.

(It might seem rude to imply that Greaves is lying about his movie, but let’s be real: if you’re doing a metafictional quasi-documentary where things aren’t what they seem, you’re deliberately engaging in some lying, and I have to imagine that inspiring this kind of question is exactly what he was aiming for.)

But so if you’re reading this and haven’t seen this movie, you’re probably thinking that this all sounds deeply unpleasant. Like, yeah, okay, wow, really deconstructing shit and playing with perception and yadda yadda, I get it, can I skip watching the thing?

But the genuinely surprising twist is: It’s actually fun. Watching the actors go through this scene, clearly annoyed by having to keep performing this terrible dialogue, but trying to be professional (but also being actors, with all that entails), and watching the crew’s exasperation, and Greaves’ puckish grandiosity… it’s entertaining and good-natured.

Probably the most fun bit of the thing is when Greaves has the actors perform the scene while singing, in a kind of Jacques Demy pastiche. The actors struggle with this, and the crew is just openly cracking up at how silly this is. (There’s another extended scene where a flamboyant homeless drunk talks to the cast and gives some cinematic moments; this again strikes me as a too-good-to-be-true moment, and feels like improv with an actor playing a homeless drunk. But who knows!)

This makes an interesting contrast with Out 1, because that was an explicitly fictional movie full of scenes of actors doing acting exercises, but those scenes really were actors doing acting exercises. Whereas this one is a nominally non-fictional movie full of actors doing takes of scenes that may or may not be what they seem; it’s a quasi-reversal of the reality/fiction line, and also a tonal reversal in that Rivette’s movie is desperately self-serious where this one has a mischievous energy.

Another parallel with Out 1 is that this is another movie that couldn’t really be seen until decades after its filming. It was filmed in 1968, but — like Rivette — Greaves couldn’t get distribution for his movie. So it sat in archives until a museum doing a Greaves retrospective in 1990 dug it up and showed it to positive reactions. This inspired him to take it on the festival circuit in 1992, where it attracted prominent fans, like Steve Buscemi and Soderbergh, who worked to get it broader distribution (and to get a sequel made). Not until 2005 did it finally get a limited theatrical run, and 2006 is when Criterion released it on disc for home viewers. So even though it’s a half-century old, it’s only really been available for twenty years now.

I can definitely understand why nobody was eager to distribute it back in the day — it’s genuinely weird and not especially commercial — but it’s also easy to understand how it picked up a fandom in recent decades, and why it’s on this list.