Mark Rappaport Movies

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

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...

Blacklisted gay communist 1940’s character actor Will Geer became Grandpa Walton in the hit series “The Waltons”. How so?

Joan Crawford's close-up in Humoresque. Michelangelo's David and Boticelli's "Birth of Venus". Stendhal was overwhelmed by the cultural...

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...

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...

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

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

In Mark Rappaport: The TV Spin-off, the filmmaker conducts a guided tour of his work that explains everything... and nothing. Rappaport shows himself...

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...

A tribute to actresses, approaching their presence in and out the screen, humanizing the icons. From the Ukrainian Anna Sten to the French Anna...

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

A separated couple try to keep in touch through postcards of typically "American" sights: motels, monuments, parks; but their postcards cross in the...

A fictional biography of Hollywood actors Martin Kosleck and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, both of whom fled Hitler-era Germany to live a...

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

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...

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...

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...

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