Mark Rappaport

Plot: Hippo, a peculiar adolescent, and his Hungarian step-sister Buttercup struggle to come of age in late 1990s America, under the roof of a mother who has been institutionalized at least once.Read More »

IMDB:
The great French actor, Marcel Dalio, who has the lead role in Jean Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME, also appears in Renoir’s GRAND ILLUSION. In both films he plays a character who is Jewish, as Dalio was in real life. In fact, in most of the French films he’s in the 1930s, he almost always plays shady characters, informers, blackmailers and gangsters. In other words, he is always “the Jew.” When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to America and appeared in CASABLANCA and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. In America, he was no longer the Jew but The Frenchman. He became, in dozens of films, America’s idea of a typical Frenchman. His film career has these two strands in which he has two different identities. Are you defined by other people and their perceptions of who you are? Are you always a creation of the way people want to see you? Or can you exist outside of the arbitrary boundaries which are placed on you?
—FandorRead More »

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Sergei Eisenstein, one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time, was also a brilliant plastic artist. His thousands and thousands of drawings are superb–as are the hundreds of homoerotic drawings he made for his own amusement, never meant for publication. In this video, the homoerotic references in Eisenstein’s films are examined and explored in ways that they never had been before.Read More »

Synopsis:
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.Read More »

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Despite its many connotations, black and whte is most frequently used to signify the past––especially the past ihabited by our parents and grandparents, which we can see in old movies but never experience directly. A highly intelligent commentary on this phenomenon is independent filmmaker Mark Rappaport’s EXTERIOR NIGHT, made for high-definition color TV (HDTV) which combines original color imagery with archival footage of sets or backgrounds from THE MALTESE FALCON, THE BIG SLEEP, MILDRED PIERCE, POSSESSED, DARK PASSAGE, THE FOUNTAINHEAD, YOUND MAN WITH A HORN, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, and a score of other black-and-white movies. Using a blue-screen technique, Rappaport and HDTV cameraman Serge Roman frequently pose contemporary actors against studio nightclubs and streets from the 1940s.Read More »

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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.Read More »

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Near Munich, in Bavaria, Germany, is the Schleißheim Palace, where French filmmaker Alain Resnais shot his film Last Year at Marienbad in 1960. Nearby is the Dachau concentration camp, where thousands of people were killed between 1933 and 1945. An essay about the present and the past, beauty and horror, life and death.Read More »

Autotranslated description:
Joan Crawford’s close-up in HUMORESQUE. Michelangelo’s David and Boticelli’s “Birth of Venus”. Stendhal was overwhelmed by the cultural overstimulation in Florence, which Graziella Magherini described scientifically in 1979 as Stendhal syndrome. 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.
(Stefan Drössler)Read More »

Autotranslated description:
Scenes from New York in the 1960s. Four young people, friendship, jealousy, separation. Filmed in black and white, with an agile camera, without dialogue. Mark Rappaport’s early work was shot in 16mm on superimposed film material. Mark Rappaport’s instruction to the light controller in the “Movielab” copier: “Scenes are overexposed. Please try hard to get this to look good.” The camera and optical sound negative was found by Rick Prelinger. The Munich Film Museum has digitized it and redefined it. Sound disturbances at the beginning of the film and image damage at the end of the film are due to water damage.
(Stefan Drössler)Read More »