Chris Olsen: The Boy Who Cried

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Max Ophuls is the legendary director and two of his favorite actors are James Mason and Danielle Darrieux. Mason and Darrieux were each in several Ophuls projects but were never together in an Ophuls movie, although they should have been. What might that movie have been like? It's anybody's guess (but cinephiles can dream, can't they?). Somewhere between a historical essay and a speculative one.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.