16 t/m 20 maart
MARK RAPPAPORT WEEK
A Partial Retrospective
EN After making more than a half a dozen short films in the 1960s and early 1970s, Mark Rappaport (USA, 1942), moved into making extraordinary feature films, such as Casual Relations (1973), Mozart in Love (1975), The Scenic Route (1978) and Chain Letters (1985). These films are full of innovative storytelling and in them the borders of narrative cinema are constantly defied and rewritten. The lives of both eccentric and outcast New Yorkers are portrayed. Rappaport gives equal attention to melodrama, soap operas and pop culture as he attributes to the often mythical and archetypical structures present in the core of his characters’ lives. His films breathe life, suspense, and a passion for cinema.
The construction of cinema itself, its characters and actors, became more of a prominent subject of Rappaport`s video work in the 90s, with Postcards (1990) and Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1992). Based in Paris today, he makes video essays and writes about films and film culture. Several of his pieces, written for the French film magazine Trafic were published in France in 2008 in the collection 'The Moviegoer Who Knew Too Much' (Le Spectateur qui en savait trop). Rappaport also makes photomontages and has exhibited in New York, Rotterdam, Nantes, Ghent, and Paris.
Filmhuis Cavia is happy to host this retrospective of Mark Rappaport’s essential body of work and to receive him in our venue on the 18th of March, where we will speak about his films and his trajectory as a unique maker and thinker of the moving image.
Woensdag 16 maart, 20:30
CLASSIC
Mozart in Love
Mark Rappaport | 1975 | 99'
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 married; and Sophie, who loved him but whom he didn't love. An anthology of arias from Mozart's operas, in which art comments on life through a cheeky use of back-projection and miming to records. (Ian Christie, British Film Institute)
Donderdag 17 maart, 19:00
SPECIAL
Notes on Cinema #1
Short essay films by Mark Rappaport on Sergei Eisenstein, Anita Ekberg and Douglas Sirk.
Films in this program:
Sergei / Sir gay
Mark Rappaport | 2016 | 36'
As widely known, Sergei Mikhailovich Eizenshtein established montage theory and suggested cinematic ground and validity for the Russian socialist revolution with such monumental masterpieces in film history as Bronenosets Potemkin, Strike, and OKTYABR. Starting in his teens, he also practiced drawing and left thousands of provocative and erotic arts.
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Becoming Anita Ekberg
Mark Rappaport | 2014 | 17'
Becoming Anita Ekberg is an exploration of how the construct of Anita Ekberg became an internationally famous femme fatale 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.
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The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk
Mark Rappaport | 2015 | 11'
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. The subtext is complex: is it a device that traps women in an artificial world with a limited point of view? Or is it a gateway to the past, and the future?
Donderdag 17 maart, 21:00
CLASSIC
Chain Letters
Mark Rappaport | 1985 | 96'
A wicked picture of the New York yuppie scene in which nine upwardly mobile Manhattanites all receive a chain letter. Depending on their decision to either pass the letter on or to break the chain, the various characters encounter romance, fulfilment, and sudden death.
Vrijdag 18 maart, 20:30
CLASSIC
The Scenic Route + Q&A with Mark Rappaport
Mark Rappaport | 1978 | 76'
Estelle is living in New York and recovering from a bad relationship. She meets Paul and begins dating him, before he stops calling her one day. Shortly after, Estelle's sister Lena comes to stay. Lena brings Paul along, leading to a confusing love triangle.
Zaterdag 19 maart, 15:00
CLASSIC
From the Journals of Jean Seberg
Mark Rappaport | 1995 | 97'
This film blends documentary and fiction to create a portrait of American actress Jean Seberg. Depicting her rise to fame as the winner of a talent search launched by director Otto Preminger, the movie covers her years in both Hollywood and Europe, where she became a popular French star. Addressing Seberg's personal problems, the production also looks at the lives of some of her peers, notably fellow famous and controversy-courting celebrity Jane Fonda.
Zaterdag 19 maart, 19:00
CLASSIC
Casual Relations
Mark Rappaport | 1974 | 80'
A vampire movie, a skin flick, a murder mystery, a structuralist film, and a soap opera all rolled into one. In Rappaport’s dazzling and bizarre feature-length debut, he focuses on states of imaginative possession and dispossession, demonstrating how impossible it is to separate fantasies, dreams, and realities.
Zaterdag 19 maart, 21:00
CLASSIC
Imposters
Mark Rappaport | 1979 | 110'
One of Mark Rappaport’s later narratives. 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.
Zondag 20 maart, 17:00
SPECIAL
Notes on Cinema #2
Two essay films by Mark Rappaport. The first one, a short film departing from Alan Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad (1961), the second, a featurette on German actor Conrad Veidt.
L’Année dernière à Dachau
Mark Rappaport | 2021 | 29'
A tribute to Alain Resnais, combined with a documentary about the shooting in the gardens and palaces of Schleißheim and Nymphenburg in the winter of 1960. A making-of in which an excursion by the film team to nearby Dachau can be seen. A baroque palace and a concentration camp, incomparable places, side by side.
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Conrad Veidt My Life
Mark Rappaport | 2020 | 61'
German actor Conrad Veidt is best remembered for playing Nazi Major Strasser in Casablanca. In reality, he was an ardent anti-fascist who left Nazi Germany for Britain, falsely claiming to be Jewish in solidarity with his Jewish wife. Using clips from Veidt's films, Mark Rappaport imagines the actor himself, narrating his life and career from the silent era-including his leading roles in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Man Who Laughs – through to his Hollywood years when he often played a Nazi.
Zondag 20 maart, 19:00
CLASSIC
Local Color
Mark Rappaport | 1977 | 106'
Local Color is a film about eight people whose lives overlap and touch the lives of several others among the eight, in strange and sometimes unexpected configurations. Familial ties, sexual involvements, an inescapable past, shared dreams. The plot itself is too complicated to synopsize with any degree of coherence. In a sense, the movie is the plot and the plot is the movie. Except that the plot is irrelevant. [...] And of course there is a gun which figures prominently in the proceedings.” – Mark Rappaport
Zondag 20 maart, 21:00
SPECIAL
Notes on Cinema #3
Two films by Mark Rappaport. An early short-film from 1971 as well as his iconic Rock Hudson Home Movies from 1992.
Blue Streak
Mark Rappaport | 1971 | 16'
An adroit expansion on the notion of a “blue” movie, Mark Rappaport’s early short Blue Streak contrasts the rarified realm of classical composition with an unspoken assortment of words predisposed to human sexuality, all layered over footage of a room filled with naked women and men. At the intersection of high art and low art, Rappaport skillfully dissects the absurdity of such distinctions and brings notions otherwise undiscussed in polite society to the forefront.
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Rock Hudson Home Movies
Mark Rappaport | 1992 | 63'
Mark Rappaport offers a unique look into the life of legendary Hollywood icon Rock Hudson, an actor who kept the details of his sexual orientation secret for much of his career. Using a mix of narration – from the point-of-view of an imagined, posthumous memoir read by Hudson himself – and classic film footage of the actor, Rappaport attempts to deconstruct the mystique surrounding Hudson's very private off-screen life and dalliances.