Word: sanitariums
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...next set piece on the doctor's travels is the Desperation Bar-crammed with middle-class types of all ages and stages of neurosis and nihilism, drinking their way out of life. After that follows a bedlam of a sanitarium, where the doctors give Braun the morphine he begs for under the impression that he is planning to use it to commit suicide...
...groups, in fact, often work in the same towns. The Communists say that their new volunteers will be sent to teach in the Sudan, set up a clinic in the Congo, and build a school and irrigation dams in India, a youth center in Somalia, a sanitarium in Mongolia and a hospital on Cyprus. Averaging between 23 and 33 years old-about seven years older than the U.S. volunteers-the Communist corpsman signs up for a minimum of three months, takes a cram course on his host country and, once on the job, receives free board, lodging...
...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...
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...
Throughout, the dramatic situation underlines and motivates the visual tour de force: he enters the sanitarium, escapes to Paris where bogie-man William S. Burroughs supplies him with drugs, re-enters the sanitarium upon discovery, and finishes the cure. The film ends brilliantly with two scenes of Harwick--cured--leaving the sanitarium, expressing both the hallucinations of leaving the must have been the final visions of an almost-cured Rooks (he exits by helicopter and waves goodbye to himself, standing on the highest gable of the building), and the simpler reality of his actual exit by chauffeur-driven automobile...