Reed Birney

  • Martha Coolidge – Not a Pretty Picture (1976)

    1971-1980DocumentaryDramaMartha CoolidgeUSA

    Mixing narrative and documentary filming in a unique way the story is autobiographical and is about a date rape dissecting the characters and circumstances around it. By following the effects of the incident on the main character we grow to understand the tremendous impact of what many people don’t consider to be rape.Read More »

  • Mark Rappaport – Chain Letters (1985)

    1981-1990ArthouseDramaMark RappaportQueer Cinema(s)USA

    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. Doppelgangers and mirror-image anti-types lurk around every corner. But you would have to be paranoid to try to connect the dots. Or would you? Could there be a key that unlocks the mysteries of life? Or is that the real mystery? Can you break the chains of code? One character in the film believes all of life is a plot orchestrated by a vast government bureaucracy, but Rappaport tells us that the bureaucracy of the imagination puts that of the Pentagon to shame. The real plots are in our brains–the plots that form the haunted graveyard of Western civilization.”Read More »

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