Films Rappaport
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Debra Paget, For Example
Debra Paget was a contract player for 20th-Century Fox, whom they groomed and coached for stardom. But she never quite caught on. Maybe the movies weren't interesting enough. Or maybe she didn’t stand out from the rest of the pack. Or the studio didn’t take enough care in...Watch Movie
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Becoming 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...Watch Movie
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The Double Life of Paul Henreid
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...Watch Movie
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Sergei / Sir Gay
As a teenager, Eisenstein signed his drawings with 'Sir Gay'. Roguish essayist 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...Watch Movie
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The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk
A video essay exploring the frequency and meaning of that particular prop in a wide variety of Sirk movies. Is it a device that traps and keeps women in an artificial world with a limited point of view? Or is it a gateway to the past and the future, and a distorted but...Watch Movie
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The Circle Closes
An examination of four different films, which to varying degrees, center on a prop or an object or an item that crosses various characters lives and passes from hand to hand in THE CIRCLE CLOSES. The story in each film is, to a certain extent, told from the point of view of...Watch Movie
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Our Stars
Stars of the 1940s and 1950s, were they cast for their mutual affinities or for their commercial appeal? If and when they were re-starred years later, did the magic still work? Did sparks still fly? The movie business, a machine that manufactured romance and desire at the same time that it...Watch Movie
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Chris Olsen - The Boy Who Cried
In the movies since he was an infant, Chris Olsen appeared in films by some of the best directors of the 50's. Even though he never became a famous child actor, he was in a handful of the most iconic fifties movies. He "retired" at the age of fourteen. Looking back on his life...Watch Movie
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Max & James & Danielle...
Max Ophuls, James Mason and Danielle Darrieux: the legendary director and two of his favorite actors. Mason and Darrieux were each in several Ophuls projects but were never together in an Ophuls film (although they should have been). What might that movie have been like? It’s...Watch Movie
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I, 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...Watch Movie
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From the Journals of Jean Seberg
An unmistakable master of the intersection between documentary and narrative, Mark Rappaport easily ranks among the great filmmakers of our time. As Jonathan Rosenbaum noted in the introduction to his Cineaste interview with the director from 1996, "Rappaport virtually...Watch Movie
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Exterior Night
Using extensive rear projection to remarkable effect (actors, in color, against black and white backgrounds and all photographed in high definition), Mark Rappaport evocatively plays with the themes of noir while contemporizing the stakes involved. In EXTERIOR NIGHT, there is no past. There is no...Watch Movie
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Mur 19
Mark Rappaport's first film commences with Gerald Mur "studying the cinema" in the form of a blow-up glamour shot of "La Garbo." Then "the cinema" studies Gerald (from numerous angles) followed by a standoff as filmmaker and subject circle one another, dueling with cameras to determine who's...Watch Movie
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The Scenic Route
Making relationships work is murder, sometimes literally, in Mark Rappaport's 1978 feature, a Strindbergian battle between (and within) the sexes that filters melodrama through the gallery sensibility of 1970s video art and myriad other cultural reference points. Coolly...Watch Movie
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Local Color
A young artist seeks inspiration from an older man (and freedom from his own father) in this wise and warm coming-of-age tale, one infused with a love for impressionist art and loosely based on director/screenwriter/artist George Gallo's own life. The quiet, dreamy John would rather visit museums...Watch Movie
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Postcards
A long-distance love affair is prolonged through a series of postcards in Mark Rappaport’s extraordinary short film, one of the director’s first experiments in video. The "deliciously ironic" (according to the Los Angeles Times) POSTCARDS tracks a romance played out entirely on assorted mailings...Watch Movie
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Mark Rappaport: The TV Spinoff
In MARK RAPPAPORT: THE TV SPINOFF (originally made for public television, though try to imagine such an experimental sensibility on PBS today), Mark Rappaport begins musing on "the movies" and then quickly turns to the subject of "my movies" in this raffish introduction to his...Watch Movie
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Impostors
A polysexual vaudeville playing promiscuously with melodramatic intrigue, camp and intellectual gamesmanship, IMPOSTORS remains as unclassifiable as it was in 1979. Its slippery "plot" centers on the romance between besotted Peter (Peter Evans) and elusive Tina (Ellen McElduff). She's a faithless...Watch Movie
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Chain Letters
"Life is a river. A very dirty river," one protagonist decrees in Mark Rappaport's last narrative feature before he embarked on a 1990s trilogy of quirky, highly personal documentaries about Hollywood (such as ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES). Made in Manhattan during the worst early depths of the AIDS...Watch Movie
