Word: chappaqua
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...CHAPPAQUA. Instead of writing his autobiography, Conrad Rooks has made an 82-minute apologia pro sua dolce vita on film, playing himself as the mixed-up son of a rich man who spirals downward into the junkie's world of hallucination and finally emerges to self-realization...
...Huston's Reflections in a Golden Eye bleeds color images through black-and-white in a startling extension of the camera's palette. U.S. movies are now treating once-shocking themes with a maturity and candor unthinkable even five years ago: the life of drug addicts in Chappaqua, homosexuality in Reflections, racial hatred in In the Heat of the Night. And The Graduate, a new Mike Nichols film, is an alternately comic and graphic closeup of a 19-year-old boy whose sexual fantasies come terrifyingly true...
...CHAPPAQUA. Conrad Rooks gives his own 82-minute phantasmagoric apologia pro sua dolce vita in which the ex-junkie-alcoholic takes himself into and then out of the world of addiction and related vice...
...Rooks cuts to his point-of-view: a blur of color suddenly coming into sharp focus revealing the chateau in an angle-shot accentuating its Castle Draculaaura. This is followed by a montage of different fantasies of Harwick resisting entering the sanitarium, in which he imagines himself Quasimodo. Chappaqua proceeds best when, as in the above examples, it moves constantly, uses hand-held camera with validity and a lack of predictability, and uses cutting to isolate moments while basically advancing action, also to destroy conventional barriers between illusion and reality and normal concepts of time sequence. If the later half...
Ultimately Chappaqua's integrity derives from still-photographer Robert Frank's color camera. Though filming took over three years, proceeding slowly on Rooks' capricious shooting schedule, Franks preserves a consistent style of juxtaposing hand-held and tripod based shots, creating, then shattering continuity in order to disorient the viewer. The camera follows Harwick into an airplane bathroom, pries closer to watch him sniff cocaine, then finds itself too close--a scant inch from his dissipated bleary-eyed face as he turns to leave the bathroom; he approaches the camera, virtually menacing the lens, and Franks cuts away to another scene...