Chain Letters

Born in Brooklyn, NY and residing in Paris since the early 2000s, Mark Rappaport is known as a trailblazer of the video essay form, thanks to his decades-long career creating painstakingly assembled works that interrogate the cinematic medium through his striking juxtapositions. Rappaport’s career began with the 1966 short MUR 19. After making more than a half-dozen shorts in the 60s and early 70s, he made six narrative features in the 70s and 80s—CASUAL RELATIONS, MOZART IN LOVE, LOCAL COLOR, THE SCENIC ROUTE, IMPOSTORS, and CHAIN LETTERS, a series of eccentric, surprising narrative films, stuffed with cinematic references and formal experimentation.

CHAIN LETTERS (1985)
A wicked picture of the New York yuppie scene in which nine upwardly mobile Manhattanites all receive a chain letter. Depending on their decision to either pass the letter on or to break the chain, the various characters encounter romance, fulfillment—and sudden death.