Mark Rappaport

Spins the tale of a woman, her sister, and the man who completes the triangle. (imdb)

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. (imdb)

Mark Rappaport's creative bio-pic about actress Jean Seberg is presented in a first-person, autobiographical format (with Seberg played by Mary Beth Hurt). (imdb)

Mark Rappaport's sardonic examination of gay subtext in films from Hollywood's Golden Age. (supergloo)

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. (Planet Pictures)

Impostors is a low-budget, hard-to-figure independent film...The actors intentionally parrot lines in an emotionless fashion as the story about two seemingly murderous, vaudeville magicians unfolds. Chuckie and Mikey borrow from models like Peter Lorre characters or the Marx Brothers in their antics. Their assistant Tina is of a dual sexual persuasion, apparently. One of her liaisons turns out to be a bit of an imposter himself but a lot can be forgiven because of the cash that comes with him. (All Movie Guide)

Documentary about the career and eventual death from AIDS of actor Rock Hudson.

Though we imagine ourselves on the cutting edge of the future, Local Color shows what a creaky old house we live in, haunted by melodramatic ghosts, reverberating with imaginative echoes. (Ray Carney)

Chain Letters is Rappaport's most deliciously lush and Byzantine work, It poses a mystery, but while most mysteries want us to dive down and excavate secrets, Rappaport insists that we ice skate the fractured, opaque surfaces. Strange puzzles, symmetries, and coincidences abound. (Ray Carney)

In 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. (Ray Carney)

Documentary essay about actor John Garfield. A rebel, but also sexy and Jewish. Discusses his work in film and theater, as well as his appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. (KG)

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. An anthology of arias from Mozart's operas, in which art comments on life through a cheeky use of back-projection and miming to records. (Ian Christie, BFI)

Fifteen minutes of gratuitous nudity and profanity. In between scenes of a bunch of naked hippies standing around doing nothing, images of forests/nature are juxtaposed with off-screen narrators telling personal erotic stories. (KG)

Mark Rappaport's first film commences with Gerald Mur "studying the cinema" in the form of a blow-up glamor shot of "La Garbo." Then "the cinema" studies Gerald (from numerous angles) followed by a standoff as filmmaker and subject circle one another, dueling with cameras to determine who's watcher and who's watched. (imdb)

BECOMING ANITA EKBERG is an exploration of how the construct of "Anita Ekberg" became an internationally famous sex goddess as a result of the careful cultivation of her image in various movies, both in Hollywood, by Frank Tashlin, and in Europe, by Federico Fellini. It's an exploration of the texts and subtexts of commercial films and the subterranean and complicated ways that they affect us and can be read. (fandor)

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. (imdb)

A video essay exploring the frequency and meaning of that particular prop in a wide variety of 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? It's an exploration of the texts and subtexts of commercial films and the subterranean and complicated ways that they affect us and can be read. (fandor)

Stars of the 1940s and 1950s, were they cast for their mutual affinities or for their commercial appeal? If and when they were re-starred years later, did the magic still work? Did sparks still fly? The movie business, a machine that manufactured romance and desire at the same time that it documented the process of aging. A meditation on youth and beauty, aging and box office. (imdb)

In this biographical documentary, Mark Rappaport details the multiple personae of the great French actor, Marcel Dalio {"La règle du jeu" [1939], "La grande illusion" [1937], etc.}. (fandor)

The screen is a neutral element in the film-going experience. Or is it? It projects dreams but is also the receptacle of our dreams. It's the vehicle for delivering the image to an audience — but does it also watch the audience at the same time? Is it a complicitous membrane which audience members can penetrate and which interacts with the spectators, despite its seeming passivity? Maybe — to all of the above … –Mark Rappaport

A portrait of American actress and dancer Debra Paget, under contract for 20th-Century Fox during the 1950's. (imdb)

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. (imdb)

As a teenager, Eisenstein signed his drawings with 'Sir Gay'. Roguish essayist Rappaport sees clear signs of his sexual preferences throughout the Russian's film oeuvre. Numerous asides illustrate how Hollywood productions likewise frequently played with nods and winks and typical motifs from gay culture. (imdb)

A tribute to actresses, approaching their presence in and out the screen, humanizing the icons. From the Ukrainian Anna Sten to the French Anna Karina, we can see some close-up faces that marked the history of the cinema, and whose demand is more relevant than ever. (imdb)

Tribute to Alain Resnais" "L'année dernière à Marienbad" combined with a documentary about the shooting in the gardens and palaces of Schleißheim and Nymphenburg in the winter of 1960. 8 mm footage of the actress Françoise Spira, compiled in 2010 and commented by Volker Schlöndorff. A making-of in which an excursion by the film team to nearby Dachau can be seen. Baroque palace and concentration camp, incomparable and yet side by side. (imdb)

Blacklisted gay communist 1940’s character actor Will Geer became Grandpa Walton in the hit series “The Waltons”. How so? (letterboxd)

Paul Henreid, perhaps most famous for his roles in CASABLANCA and NOW, VOYAGER became a star at Warner Bros. during World War II, as the exotic lead with the European accent. After the war, his contract was canceled 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? (imdb)

Veidt was a big star in German silent movies after his role as Cesare, the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Like many other artists in Nazi Germany, he fled in 1933. He became a star in British films as well, but when Germany attacked London, he emigrated to the United States, where, for the most part, he wound up playing Nazis—a fate that befell many German refugee actors. Veidt died of a heart attack on a golf course in Hollywood in 1943. (kanopy)

John Dall starred in two great films, Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy (1950). But, for some reason, that is not enough to make a career. The road to success in show business is lined with many pitfalls. And what do you do when you find out the director preferred another actor but had to settle for you? Would it have been a different movie if that actor had gotten your part? With Rope's End Mark Rappaport continues to rethink the history of film as the art of digress

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.

A fictional biography of Hollywood actors Martin Kosleck and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, both of whom fled Hitler-era Germany to live a long-lasting relationship.

Everyone is all masked up. We are all strangers to each other. Would we recognize each other without our masks? Not likely. We are hiding from a virulent disease, but at the same time, we are hiding from each other. Or are we? Who knows? Maybe, since we're all masked up anyway, it's a perfect opportunity to rob a bank.

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.

Two film directors share less in common than anyone else, and yet, Jacques Tati and Robert Bresson have both structured a scene which appears to be remarkably similar to each other. In Tati's case, a "gag" and in Bresson's case, an "incident". In addition to both being one-of-a-kind geniuses, they were both fanatically obsessed with creating the perfect sound effects for their masterpieces. TATI VS. BRESSON is an exploration of the use of sound in each artist's works, among others.

In the movies since he was an infant, Chris Olsen appeared in films by some of the best directors of the 50's. Even though he never became a famous child actor, he was in a handful of the most iconic fifties movies. He "retired" at the age of fourteen. Looking back on his life as a child actor, he tries to find the thread that ties his movies together.