Mark Rappaport

A film scrapbook, images, phrases from our past, hiding their meanings behind veils. Let's lift those veils, one by one, to find how images, at one time seeming innocent, have revealed, after decades, to have homosexual overtones.

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.

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."

In this revisionist documentary, actor Eric Farr re-creates the character of Rock Hudson in order to take a look back at his films. It compares the actor's screen (and public) image with his real life and shows certain scenes, lines and situations in his films to insinuate that Hudson may have been gay.

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.

Dr. Evan Cooper is the ideal match on paper and according to her grandmother, Rose Durham and friends, including an equally pushy wedding planner, for florist Laurel Haverford, who fears to be the last of her generation to get married. Yet she keeps dragging her heels after meeting cocky Stephen Banks, who is all wrong on paper but makes her heart leap by pre chemistry.

After a much-publicized but brief stint in Hollywood, Jean Seberg was selected by Jean-Luc Godard to star in BREATHLESS. It was to become the legendary actress’s best-remembered role. This 2007 video essay by Mark Rappaport, director of the 1995 film FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG, reveals the true story behind her iconic face.

The President of the U.S. is suceeded by his naive, wide-eyed son, and his advisors try to take advantage of the situation by planning to drop an atomic bomb on Manhattan and blaming it on the Red Chinese.

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

Walt Whitman was the first major poet to create a truly American vision and style. His extraordinary example gave American verse much of its subsequent character and diction. Rejecting traditional constraints of form and subject matter, Whitman considered democracy itself appropriate grist for his own poetic mill, inventing a radically different sort of free verse to express what he had to say.

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.

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

Nine Manhattanites receive a chain letter. Depending on their decision to either pass the letter on or to break the chain, the various characters can encounter romance, fulfillment -- and sudden death.

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.

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

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.

Jacques Tati and Robert Bresson were very different directors, yet the way they structure a scene is very similar.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What could have happened – what should have happened – if two giants in film history, like Greta Garbo and Sergei Michajlovič Eisenstein, could have declared their love for each other? The world's most famous actress, an honorary Russian citizen of cinema for her many performances; the world's most radical director, who could have immortalized her face in one of his famous close-ups? Sphinx Garbo did not want to be alone: she just wanted to marry the great Sergei. Perhaps she could have played Trotsky or Pancho Villa in one of his films. Perhaps their friends Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney and Josef von Sternberg would have approved their love. Maybe they could have had a child together. Maybe all this could still have happened, in a Mark Rappaport film.

In the movies since he was an infant, Chris Olsen appeared in films by some of the best directors of the 1950's. Even though he never became a famous child actor, he played a pivotal role in some of the most iconic movies of the era. Retired since the age of 14, he looks back on his life as a child actor, trying to find the thread that ties his movie roles together.

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.

An avant-garde omnibus that features works by off-the-wall artists in many different disciplines.