Word: chappaqua
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...national character by following a young girl. Rosselini describes his newest film La Prise de Pouvoir de Louis XIV as an educational film, and indeed, its greatness emerges from the simplistic straight-forwardness of films about artists and poets shown in high school auditoriums. Most recently, Conrad Rooks' extraordinary Chappaqua is, from start to finish, a home movie...
Rooks' film, though visual poetry of a sort, is equally a selfish attempt at preserving past experience, the act having therapeutic overtones in this case. Chappaqua is Rooks' autobiography, the story of a 27-year-old alcoholic and drug addict who enters a private Parisian sanitarium to take a cure. The film juxtaposes the reality of the sanitarium, its doctors and attendants, with Rooks' drug hallucinations during the tortuous process of the cure, also with memories of past drug visions while still a full-time addict...
...prime function of Rooks' home movie is for Rooks himself, as bitter nostalgia for a less-than-sweet 13 years, and a document-reminder of a life-style by necessity gone forever. Chappaqua, however, transcends personal therapy, Rooks keeping the audience in mind and treating his own life with little self-indulgence. As a personal statement, Chappaqua appears uncompromisingly honest, by virtue of the rigorous structuring of the film, the asceticism of the visual effects (compared, say, to Corman's The Trip), and Rooks' own sympathetic and attractive personality...
Though initially confusing, as Rooks blends drug-illusion with reality, and cuts color with black-and-white and monochrome tinted shots, Chappaqua is conventionally constructed with a beginning, middle, and end. Before Rooks-Harwick is shown on-screen, Rooks hints at his deviation by opening the film with a scene of a nurse meeting the boat train in Paris in search of her new patient; passengers walk by her, but she doesn't give them a second look, this indicating Rooks' distinction from accepted social and physical norms. Cutting to New York, just prior to Harwick's plane trip...
Rooks, now 32, put 41 years into the making of Chappaqua, along with an inherited $500,000. He refers to the project as a "rehabilitation program," and claims that "any halfway-intelligent spectator will see that it is not favorable to drug addiction." His only previous movie experience came at 21, when he had a brief fling in production at Expert Films, Inc., part of Manhattan's nudie industry (TIME, Oct. 20). That ended when Rooks was arrested for possession of narcotics. Given a three-year suspended sentence, he drifted in and out of odd jobs and a brief...