Mark Rappaport Movies

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...

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

A fictionalized biography on John Dall who was in two great movies - Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950).

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...

A video essay where the author presumes motivations and insights in a fictionalized biography regarding Debra Paget, a contract player for...

Mark Rappaport's first film—a study of a young man named Gerald Mur.

BECOMING ANITA EKBERG is an exploration of how the construct of "Anita Ekberg" became an internationally famous sex goddess as a result of the...

As a teenager, Sergei Eisenstein signed his drawings with "Sir Gay". Mark Rappaport sees clear signs of his sexual preferences throughout the...

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...

Scenes from New York in the 1960s. Four young people, friendship, jealousy, separation.

One of Mark Rappaport's later narratives (which won the Gold Hugo for Best First Feature at the Chicago International Film Festival in 1979),...

In Rappaport’s dazzling and bizarre feature-length debut, he focuses on states of imaginative possession and dispossession, demonstrating how...

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...

A video essay by Mark Rappaport, which spans René Magritte and Michelangelo to Bonnie & Clyde. Let’s mask up to rob a bank! But make...

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

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...

An adroit expansion on the notion of a "blue" movie, Mark Rappaport's early short BLUE STREAK contrasts the rarified realm of classical composition...

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...

The screening room used to be a microcosm of a larger world, filled with churning emotions and explosive temperaments. Welcome to the comfortable...