'Chappaqua'

The commercial film slowly, tentatively, expands to incorporate the different categories of film-making not usually associated with neighborhood theatres, Hollywood, and section 2 of the Sunday Times.

Privilege, by Peter Watkins explores the relationship between the fiction film and the documentary, the written script read and performed as cinema verite. In a style most closely resembling a travelogue, Chris Marker's masterpiece Le Mystere Koumiko reveals Japan's 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.

Jonas Mekas, father of the New York underground, once declared, "The home movie is the true folk poetry of the American cinema," and told us to save our 8mm film of family outings and sightseeing tours. The average man doesn't care much about folk poetry; more crucial, perhaps, the reasonably-priced, zoom-lensed, super-8mm movie camera is rapidly becoming the mass-produced means of preserving experience--of making possible the re-running of life at will and at leisure.

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.

At the completion of Rooks' analysis and cure, he felt that making a film about it would be the perfect way to enact a final exorcism of the demons, rid his mind and body once-and-for-all of drugs and liquor. Backed by a family fortune which had previously sustained his drug habit, Rooks cast himself in the lead part (giving himself a pseudonym, Russell Harwick), and went to work in 16mm, deciding 6 months later to do it up proud and shoot professionally in 35mm. Only a few of the original shots remain, indicated by a black strip of masking on screen right-or-left revealing that the 16mm frame was blown up double to 32 mm, still not quite filling the 35mm frame.

The 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 to Paris, we see the Fugs playing, standing around a huge pile of sugar cubes arranged to form the word LSD. A Fug steps on the sugar, grinding the cubes into 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.

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.

The basic plot points are clear enough so that Rooks need not specify detail: we never learn the details of his cure, the motivations or interpretations of his behavior during drug withdrawal, or whether the recurring people in his visions actually exist. When Rooks does add detail, it is always relevant; talking about his life at 18-years-old, he describes himself as a creation of 42nd Street and American movies, this partially explaining two drug experiences where Rooks pictures himself as Al Capone and as Dracula (two sequences film critics have incorrectly found self-conscious and arbitrary).

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. Walking toward a car, followed by the camera, Harwick drops a liquor bottle; about five seconds after the audience has forgotten it, the camera dips down to show the broken bottle, then back up again to Harwick, then cuts to a shot of Harwick from a reverse angle, putting him in a different position in the screen and breaking continuity.

In the car, 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 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 and Harwick's fantastic mind projections, it is so in deference to autobiographical honesty and documentary reality.

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 an optically created circle of light in the middle of the frame. Through focus changes, we see at the very end of the shot that the circle of light is, in fact, a sunset. Through camerawork, then, we discern both the object and the drugged interpretation of the object, giving us a rare understanding of the experience Rooks illustrates.

The fantasies themselves are often glorious; visions of a black-haired white-robed maiden (Paula Pritchett) walking in superimposed images through various landscapes recur to everyone's satisfaction. Among Rooks' star-studdend hippie cast,--Jean-Louis Barrault excels as Harwick's doctor, at times involuntarily imitating the writhings of his tortured patient, trying bravely to comprehend the connection between the two divided worlds.