The Cinema of Mark Rappaport 6 Seasons Available
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.
Rock Hudson's Home Movies
ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES uses a collage of film clips from throughout Hudson’s career, and a winking performance by Eric Farr as a Hudson stand-in, to highlight the homosexual subtext in his work.
Rock Hudson's Home Movies: Special Feature - Sergei/ Sir Gay
Mark Rappaport’s other brilliant investigations into film history: Sergei/Sir Gay (2017) is an exploration of Sergei Eisenstein’s sublimated desires (36 minutes).
Rock Hudson's Home Movies: Special Feature - John Garfield
Mark Rappaport’s other brilliant investigations into film history: John Garfield (2002) is a concise portrait of the pugnacious actor (9 minutes).
Rock Hudson's Home Movies: Special Feature - Blue Streak
Mark Rappaport’s other brilliant investigations into film history: Blue Streak (1971) is an expansion of what a “blue movie” really means (16 minutes).
Rock Hudson's Home Movies: Special Feature - Conrad Veidt—My Life
Some of Mark Rappaport’s other brilliant investigations into film history: Conrad Veidt—My Life (2019) is an in-depth examination of this anti-Fascist actor who was famous for playing a Nazi in Casablanca (60 minutes).
From the Journals of Jean Seberg and Special Features 4 Episodes
From the Journals of Jean Seberg
Mary Beth Hurt portrays Jean Seberg, as she is plucked from obscurity to star in Otto Preminger's Saint Joan, to the critical drubbing that followed, her resurrection as a star in Godard's Breathless and through her death in 1979.
From the Journals of Jean Seberg: Special Features - Becoming Anita Ekberg
Some of Mark Rappaport’s other brilliant investigations into film history: Becoming Anita Ekberg (2014) reconstructs how Anita Ekberg became an internationally famous sex goddess (17 minutes).
From the Journals of Jean Seberg: Special Features - Debra Paget, For Example
Some of Mark Rappaport’s other brilliant investigations into film history: Debra Paget, For Example (2016) digs into how 20th Century Fox groomed Paget for stardom (37 minutes).
From the Journals of Jean Seberg: Special Features - Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna
Some of Mark Rappaport’s other brilliant investigations into film history: Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna (2019) is a close-up tribute to actresses from Anna Sten to Anna Karina (31 minutes).
The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender and Special Features 4 Episodes
The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender
A witty and enlightening essay on the gay undercurrents of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Dan Butler acts as tour guide as he uncovers a squeamish fascination with gay eroticism and camp.
The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender: Special Feature - The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk
A video essay exploring the frequency and meaning of that particular prop in a wide variety of Douglas Sirk movies. Is it a device that traps and keeps women in an artificial world with a limited point of view? Or is it a gateway to the past, and the future, and a distorted but nevertheless real vision of the roles that woman are forced to play in society (2014; 11 minutes)?
The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender: Special Feature - The Double Life of Paul Henreid
Paul Henreid, perhaps most famous for his roles in Casablanca and Now, Voyager became a star at Warner Brothers during World War II, as the exotic lead with the European accent. After the war, his contract was cancelled and he was left to his own devices. He continued acting and also began producing and directing. In his choices, both as actor and director, his work evinces an increasing bitterness and cynicism. A personal statement? Or a result of the unceasing political shifts of the times? (2017; 34 minutes)
The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender: Special Feature - Martin Und Hans
Following the sentimental destinies and the actorial fortunes of the two exiles, Martin und Hans is a further, ingenious chapter in Mark Rappaport’s complex revisionist writing of the history of cinema.
Casual Relations
In Mark Rappaport’s dazzling and bizarre feature-length debut, he focuses on states of imaginative possession and dispossession, demonstrating how impossible it is to separate fantasies, dreams, and realities.
Mozart in Love
An irreverent take on Mozart’s relations with the three Weber sisters: Louisa, whom he loved, but who didn’t love him; Constanza, whom he loved and married; and Sophie, who loved him but whom he didn’t love.
Imposters
Brecht said drama should always be performed with the house lights up so that that the spectator never forgot he was watching a play. Rappaport wants to remind us how artificial realism is, and how unreal our lives are.
Local Color
In this melodrama an incriminating revolver is passed between eight disparate characters. Each has a different reason for coming in contact with the gun. To reveal those reasons, the film wavers between the dream and waking states.
The Scenic Route
Spins the tale of a woman, her sister, and the man who completes the triangle. Told through such fertile sources as grand opera, classical painting, and Victorian melodrama.
Chain Letters
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.
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Early Shorts - Mur 19
Mark Rappaport’s first film commences with Gerald Mur “studying the cinema” in the form of a blow-up glamour shot of “La Garbo" (1966, 23 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Early Shorts - Friends
Scenes from New York in the 1960s. Four young people, friendship, jealousy, separation (1967, 18 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Early Shorts - Mark Rappaport: The TV Spin-off
In Mark Rappaport: The TV Spin-off, the filmmaker conducts a guided tour of his work that explains everything… and nothing. Rappaport shows himself to be the cinematic equivalent of Penn and Teller (1980, 27 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Early Shorts - Postcards
A separated couple try to keep in touch through postcards of typically “American” sights: motels, monuments, parks; but their postcards cross in the mail. Misunderstandings arise; passion subsides; romance fades… Yet the postcards keep on coming (1990, 27 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Early Shorts - Exterior Night
Shot in high-definition video using rear-screen process plates from classic Warner Bros. films noirs. A young man (in color) searches for his past through black-and-white scenes from The Big Sleep, Mildred Pierce, and Strangers on a Train (1993; 36 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - I, Dalio—or the Rules of the Game
Marcel Dalio made a career in French cinema of playing shady characters and small-time crooks. In other words, the stereotypical Jew. Landing in American cinema after fleeing the Nazis, he was no longer “the Jew,” but “the Frenchman.” Mark Rappaport presents us with two Dalios, or are they the same? (2015, 33 minutes)
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - Our Stars
Traces a sequence of classic romantic onscreen pairings that were initiated in the 40’s and 50’s and then reprised in the following decades (2015; 27 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - The Circle Closes
An elegant meditation on the non-human objects at the center of four classic films. “Silent, uncomplaining witnesses to other people’s lives”, these atypical movie stars are surrogates not for the viewer, but the camera itself (2015; 20 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - Max & James & Danielle...
Classic screen stars James Mason and Danielle Darrieux each starred in several Max Ophüls projects but never appeared together in an Ophüls movie. The film poses the question of what could have been (2015; 17minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - Tati vs Bresson: The Gag
Jacques Tati and Robert Bresson were very different directors, yet the way they structure a scene is very similar (2016; 20minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - The Boy Who Cried
In the movies since he was an infant, Chris Olsen appeared in films by some of the best directors of the fifties. He “retired” at the age of ten. Looking back on his life as a child actor, he tries to find the thread that ties his movies together (2016; 17 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - The Empty Screen
The screen is a neutral element in the film-going experience. Or is it? It projects dreams but it is also the receptacle of our dreams. And does it also watch the audience at the same time? Cinema as a two way street (2017; 10 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - Private Screenings
The screening room used to be a microcosm of a larger world, filled with churning emotions and explosive temperaments. Welcome to the comfortable world of the private screening rooms where what is on the screen pales in comparison to what happens among the viewers (2017; 14 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - America's Grandpa
Blacklisted gay communist 1940’s character actor Will Geer became Grandpa Walton in the hit series The Waltons. How so? (2018; 31minutes)
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - L'année dernière à Dachau
Tribute to Alain Resnais, combined with a documentary about the shooting in the gardens and palaces of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg in the winter of 1960. A making-of in which an excursion by the film team to nearby Dachau can be seen. Baroque palace and concentration camp, incomparable, side by side (2020; 29minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey
Mark Rappaport describes his fascination for the Austrian actor Turhan Bey, who made a career in exotic roles in Hollywood in the 1940s. A very personal essay about the effect of close-ups, the canvas idols of the dream factory and the role of their admirers and fans (2020; 16minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - Two for the Opera Box
In Hollywood’s studio system, sets and equipment are used over and over again. Mark Rappaport shows not only theta boxes and stage rooms, which seem to be part of the permanent décor in MGM backstage musicals, but also curious connections such as a Spanish wall with orientalist ornamentation (2021; 16 minutes).
Cinema of Mark Rappaport: Recent Shorts - Love in the Time of Corona
The new film by Mark Rappaport, which spans René Magritte and Michelangelo to Bonnie & Clyde. Let’s mask up to rob a bank! But make sure that you are home before the curfew (2021; 15minutes).