USA,
1966, 82 min
Shown in 1968
CREDITS
- dir
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Conrad Rooks
- prod
-
Conrad Rooks
- scr
-
Conrad Rooks
- cam
-
Robert Frank
- editor
-
Kenout Peltier
- cast
-
Conrad Rooks, Jean-Louis Barrault, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Ravi Shankar, Paula Pritchett, Ornette Coleman, Moondog
-
COMMENTS
New Directors series; Conrad Rooks in person.
The first of the new directors to be honored this year is an unusually gifted American who has astounded the international world of cinema with an autobiographical debut film. Ten years ago, Conrad Rooks found himself addicted to morphine and sedatives as the unfortunate result of early hospitalization and pain during his adolescence. Shocked by the futility of his dependence upon drugs and alcohol, he submitted himself to a sleep-cure treatment in a Swiss clinic, and successfully regained possession of his health and will power. Rooks turned to filmmaking as a means of absorbing himself totally into work which would offset a possible relapse. And quite without planning, a simple narrative about his youth and the death of a loved one grew into a complex, vast mosaic of an individual's harrowing confrontation with the exaltative regions of drugged dreams and hallucinatory illness. This film became a four-year labor of love, financed by the filmmaker's personal inheritance and the assistance of friends. The finished product is a stark masterwork, named after one of Rook's poems. The young director managed to obtain the cooperation of some of the most astonishing people who work with him in the film, and also manages to play the leading role with the confidence of one who controls the workings of a revivified nightmare.
—Albert Johnson
FACTOID #162
The Stand-In (1985), Nina Takes a Lover (1994), Dream for an Insomniac (1996), Dream with the Fishes (1997), Teknolust (2002) and Dopamine(2003) were not only screened at Festival but were also shot in San Francisco.
