Word: chappaqua
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...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...
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...
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...