Word: hand-held
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...know anything about making films" said Beatle Paul. "We realized years ago you don't need knowledge in this world to do anything. All you need is sense, whatever that is." Trouble was, the Beatles carried this theory to the point of nonsense by taking turns operating the hand-held cameras. If there was anything worth shooting, it was often hard to tell, because the film was so shaky and out of focus...
...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 of the film becomes episodic, cutting more deliberately between hospital scenes...
...dust, and Harwick falls into the frame (his first appearance), desperately groping for an intact cube of acid. He is, we recognize, an addict. Effortlessly and economically, Rooks simultaneously establishes the character of the hero and the premise of the picture without adding unnecessary dramatic exposition to his (hypnotic) hand-held camera images...
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...
...even admit that it's there," says Watkins.In his true-life-story-which-could-easily-happen-to-you-and-yours, he tries to make us face the monster. The actors are for the most part local citizens, amateurs. The film was made on location, much of it with a hand-held camera. The result is a film as gripping--and as distant--as any documentary of Nazi war crimes...