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Mark Rappaport

Directing

Biography

Mark Rappaport, a native of New York, worked as a film editor before making his own films, including The Scenic Route (1978), Impostors (1980), Postcards (1990) and Exterior Night (1994). His fictional film-essays include Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1992), From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995) and The Silver Screen / Color Me Lavender (1998). Many of his articles on cinema have been published in Trafic over the years, as well as in Cinema. The spectator who knew too much is the first collection of his writings. In 2008, his photomontage film was screened for the first time at the Lincoln Center in New York, as part of the New York Film Festival. Mark Rappaport currently lives in Paris.

Known For

Alive from Off Center
8.0

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

Alive from Off Center

1985
Subspecies
5.4

Three students get caught in the struggle between a good vampire and his evil brother in the Transylvanian mountains.

Subspecies

1991
Bratz
5.7

The popular Bratz dolls come to life in their first live-action feature film. Finding themselves being pulled further and further apart, the fashionable four band together to fight peer pressure, learn what it means to stand up for your friends, be true to oneself and live out your dreams.

Bratz

2007
Goobers!
5.0

Tommy has just joined the cast of the top-rated kids' show, "Captain Mike's Mystery Monsters," and is anxious to find out just how the special effects crew gets the monsters to work. Imagine his surprise when he discovers they're not special effects at all! Adding to the situation, the monsters' original owner, evil Queen Mara, has returned to Earth to reclaim her property and take revenge on Captain Mike for stealing them.

Goobers!

1997
The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender
5.1

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.

The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender

1997
Flower Girl
5.9

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.

Flower Girl

2009
The Virgin President
7.0

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.

The Virgin President

1968
Chain Letters
5.5

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.

Chain Letters

1985
Rock Hudson's Home Movies
3.7

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.

Rock Hudson's Home Movies

1992
The Scenic Route
5.6

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 Scenic Route

1978
Impostors
6.2

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.

Impostors

1979
From the Journals of Jean Seberg
6.0

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.

From the Journals of Jean Seberg

1995
Postcards
7.3

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.

Postcards

1990
Exterior Night
5.6

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."

Exterior Night

1993
Sergei/Sir Gay
4.7

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.

Sergei/Sir Gay

2017
The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey
2.0

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.

The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey

2020
Chris Olsen: The Boy Who Cried
6.0

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.

Chris Olsen: The Boy Who Cried

2016
Debra Paget, For Example
3.2

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.

Debra Paget, For Example

2016
No image
2.5

In the Hollywood's studio system, sets and equipment were used over and over again. Maybe this is why movies seem to have a dream logic today. A feeling of déjà vu as if we have already been there - and sometimes we have.

Two for the Opera Box

2021
The Marriage of Greta Garbo and Sergei Eiseinstein
1.5

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.

The Marriage of Greta Garbo and Sergei Eiseinstein

2023