Mark Rappaport

Der New Yorker Independent Filmemacher, Produzent, Filmkritiker und Drehbuchautor Mark Rappaport (geb. 1942) zählt zu den großen Autorenfilmern in den USA.. Bekannt ist er vor allem durch seine Videoessays, in denen er die Bilder aus Spielfilmen neu deutet, verdichtet und dabei die Filmgeschichte kommentiert. Durch geschickte Collagen und Inszenierungen zeigt er so das eigentlich Offensichtliche. Filmmuseum München Online präsentierte im Sommer 2020 sein gesamtes Werk. „Mark Rappaport makes movies that look, sound and feel like nobody else's movies. He is an original. He has discovered and recorded his own universe in the same sense that William Blake, Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien or Charles Addams have. You enter it on his terms, because it's his fantasy, but you get caught up in it immediately. It's a universe in which a handful of central characters adapt postures and attitudes towards each other in the midst of the broadest possible melodramatic structures. Their stories are bizarre or sad or overwhelmingly banal, but their visual universe is meticulously controlled.“ (Roger Ebert) „Having begun his career in the late Seventies with a series of dramatic art-house features, Mark Rappaport has since devoted himself exclusively to making essay films. His well Chosen words and fluent, apt images combine to exhibit a playfulness, aphoristic wit, worldly perspective, and stylistic brio that one associates with the best of literary essays. These small, gemlike essay films on cinema history constitute one of the most unique, expressive and satisfying willful bodies of essay films extant.“ (Phillip Lopate) Filmografie (Auswahl): 1985: Chain Letters (Kettenbriefe) 1990: Postcards 1992: Rock Hudsons Home Movies 1995: From the Journals of Jean Seberg 2002: John Garfield (Kurzfilm) 2014: Becoming Anita Ekberg