Mark Rappaport

Hacks

Mark Rappaport

Eric Farr, Rock Hudson

Explore a dark mentorship that forms between Deborah Vance, a legendary Las Vegas comedian, and an entitled, outcast 25-year-old.

L'Année dernière à Dachau

Mark Rappaport

Volker Schlöndorff, Christine Le Goff

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.

The Double Life of Paul Henreid

Mark Rappaport

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?

Debra Paget, For Example

Mark Rappaport

Caroline Simonds, Mark Rappaport

A video essay where the author presumes motivations and insights in a fictionalized biography regarding Debra Paget, a contract player for 20th-Century Fox whom they groomed and coached for stardom.

I, Dalio

Mark Rappaport

Marcel Dalio

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?

Sergei/Sir Gay

Mark Rappaport

Sergei Eisenstein, Mihailo Stanisavac

As a teenager, Sergei Eisenstein signed his drawings with "Sir Gay". Mark 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.

Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna

Mark Rappaport

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.

From the Journals of Jean Seberg

Mark Rappaport

Jean Seberg, Mary Beth Hurt

Mark Rappaport's creative bio-pic about actress Jean Seberg is presented in a first-person, autobiographical format. He seamlessly interweaves cinema, politics, American society and culture, and film theory to inform, entertain, and move the viewer. Seberg's many marriages, as well as her film roles, are discussed extensively. Her involvement with the Black Panther Movement and subsequent investigation by the FBI is covered. Notably, details of French New Wave cinema, Russian Expressionist (silent) films, and the careers of Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Clint Eastwood are also intensively examined. Much of the film is based on conjecture, but Rappaport encourages viewers to re-examine their ideas about women in film with this thought-provoking picture.

Conrad Veidt – My Life

Mark Rappaport

German actor Conrad Veidt is best remembered for playing Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca. In reality, he was an ardent anti-fascist who left Nazi Germany for Britain, falsely claiming to be Jewish in solidarity with his Jewish wife. Using clips from Veidt’s films, acclaimed director Mark Rappaport imagines the actor narrating his life and career from the silent era—including his leading roles in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Man Who Laughs through to his Hollywood years where he often played a Nazi.

Local Color

Mark Rappaport

Jane Campbell, Dolores Kenan

Mark Rappaport's off center soap opera parody concerning several characters including a barber, his wife, and a pair of incestuous twins.

Casual Relations

Mark Rappaport

Melvin Austin, Paula Barr

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.

Impostors

Mark Rappaport

Peter Evans, Ellen McElduff

One of Mark Rappaport's later narratives (which won the Gold Hugo for Best First Feature at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1979), Impostors is an off-kilter comedy/mystery focused on two magicians trying to find Egyptian jewels, their promiscuous assistant, and a man who loves the assistant.

Becoming Anita Ekberg

Mark Rappaport

Anita Ekberg

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.

The Scenic Route

Mark Rappaport

Randy Danson, Marilyn Jones

An experimental drama that 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.

The Empty Screen

Mark Rappaport

A video essay from Mark Rappaport about movies in movies, and how the screen watches us just as we watch it.

John Garfield

Mark Rappaport

John Garfield

Mark Rappaport's look at the life and work of actor John Garfield.