Word: colors
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...staff of eight put out the nearly two- inch-thick book. About half of the Almanac is carried over from previous years; the rest consists of new facts and figures. The 1968 edition, for instance, contains the zip code for all communities of more than 2,500 population and color pictures of the flags of all nations, including those of newly independent Guyana (red, green and yellow) and Botswana (white, black and blue). Even so, fact-hungry readers are never satisfied. When the Almanac tries to drop some marginalia, such as the gestation period of animals or the equivalents...
...Ravi Shankar's drums and a change in color tone point up an insert shot of villainous Burroughs, a close-up we later realize is imagined by Harwick (although neither he nor we have seen him before). Arriving at the sanitarium, Harwick looks warily out the car window, and 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...
Optically ascetic, Rooks and Frank film Harwick's visions in full or less-than-full color, sometimes taking colors away, never bombarding the screen with panoplies of colored light; the color sequences are always unfiltered, the tones those of the film stock without distortion. Unlike Warhol and Corman who treat the drug experience in terms of warped reality, of optically twisted images and superimposed patterns of color, Rooks and Frank are more concerned with the relationship between drugged and normal perception. Harwick, on Peyote, says, "I saw a yellow circle of light . . ." and Rooks cuts to a grey sky with...
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...