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30 Jan – 9 Feb 2025

Mark Rappaport

Independent filmmaker and writer Mark RAPPAPORT (1942, USA) was born and raised in New York, where he attended Brooklyn College and graduated in 1964. Rappaport worked as an editor before making his first feature, the experimental film Casual Relations (1974), which film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum describes as “an excellent introduction to Rappaport’s glamorously home-made art cinema”. Many of his subsequent films have been shown at IFFR. Besides filmmaking, Rappaport also writes essays, having published in French film magazines such as Trafic and Cinéma. A collection of his writings, Le spectateur qui on savait trop/The Spectator Who Knew Too Much, was published in 2008. Rappaport lives and works in Paris.

Filmography

Blue Frieze (1966, short), Mur 19 (1966, short), Friends (1967, short), Bay of Angels (1968, short), The Stairs (1968, short), Persepolis (1969-1970, short), Chronicle (1970, short), Fluorescent (1971, short), Blue Streak (1971, short), Casual Relations (1974), Mozart in Love (1975), Local Color (1977), The Scenic Route (1978), Impostors (1979), Mark Rappaport: The TV Spin-Off (1980, short doc), Chain Letters (1985), Postcards (1990, short), Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992, doc), Exterior Night (1994, short), From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995, doc), Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender (1997, doc), John Garfield (2002, short doc), The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk (2014, short doc), Becoming Anita Ekberg (2014, short doc), I, Dalio (2014, short doc), Our Stars (2015, short doc), Max & James & Danielle (2015, short doc), The Circle Closes (2015, short doc), Debra Paget, for Example (2015, short doc), Tati vs. Bresson: The Gag (2016, short doc), Chris Olsen – The Boy Who Cried (2016), Sergei/Sir Gay (2016, short doc), The Double Life of Paul Henreid (2017, short doc), The Empty Screen or the Metaphysics of Movies (2017, short doc), Private Screenings (2017, short doc), The Empty Screen (2017, short doc), America’s Grandpa (2018, short doc), Conrad Veidt – My Life (2019, short doc), Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna (2019, short doc), L’année dernière à Dachau (2020, short doc)

More info: Wikipedia, Mark Rappaport

Mark Rappaport at IFFR

  • The Scenic Route

    Wry humour and seriousness in the enticing tale of two New York sisters who both fall for fake macho Paul. Full of visual jokes.

  • John Garfield

    Documentary essay about John Garfield, contemporary of James Cagney. A rebel, but also sexy and Jewish.

    • main programme short

  • Coming to Terms

    Meditation on death and its psychological impact on a broken family – a subject that has kept Jost (1943) very busy recently and which in this case he

    • Spectrum

  • Photomontage/Mon beau souci

    Taking their cue from traditional lobby cards and film posters, these surreal collages offer an alternative film history, based on the cinephile canon

    • Signals: Regained

  • Chain Letters

  • Local Color

  • SERGEI/SIR GAY

    As a teenager, Eisenstein always signed his drawings ‘Sir Gay’. The waggish essayist Rappaport sees clear signs of his sexual orientation throughout t

    • Regained

  • Becoming Anita Ekberg

    Rappaport reconstructs how Anita Ekberg became an internationally famous sex goddess as a result of the careful cultivation of her image in successive

    • Signals: Regained

  • The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk

    In this video essay, Rappaport zooms in on the dressing table and the special place it occupies in the universe of Sirk, master of the melodrama. See

    • Signals: Regained

  • From the Journals of Jean Seberg

    Sharp, humorous and ironic journey through a dramatic part of film history.

    • main programme