CHAPPAQUA

A forgotten and improbable film, featuring Ornette Coleman (who was inspired by the film to compose one of his most important works, the Chappaqua Suite), William S. Burroughs, Jean-Louis Barrault and Ravi Shankar. With Robert Frank handling cinematography, in a similar vein to Me and my Brother, the film flips between hallucinatory scenes and cinéma-vérité, telling the story of a junkie going through withdrawal in France. A key piece of Beat Generation cinema, the film was funded by the director (Conrad Rooks), and in its defiance — and explosion — of standard narrative forms was a harbinger of the New Hollywood. A film unlike any other.