‘“I’m well versed in murder. I invent several each day. I bring different people to death, old ones for the most part, I don’t know why.” — Danielle Collobert

‘Danielle Collobert committed suicide when she was thirty-eight years old. It’s amazing to think that her first novel, Murder, which she began writing in 1960 at age twenty, didn’t receive an English translation until 2013—amazing in the true sense of the word, as in, like, causing wonder. Because reading this book will make you wonder why it took so long to find its way into English; it will make you wonder how Collobert could have extracted something so deep, so haunting, while still so young.

‘Murder was originally published in 1964 by legendary French publisher Éditions Gallimard and championed by none other than Raymond Queneau. Collobert’s style is unique. Her sentences are often heavily segmented by chains of commas, intensely lyrical and enigmatic, effortlessly elevating personal experience to the realm of broader, more universal truths. The “chapters” in Murder, for lack of a better word, are rarely longer than two or three pages. Because the text is so fragmented, it often feels like a cross between a series of short stories and prose poems, or like fleshed-out and gaping photographic stills. There is a sense of the writing functioning both above what’s written, and below, calling to mind the charged and spooky images of Francesca Woodman or the gritty and blood-soaked snapshots from a book on the Algerian War.

‘Such an analogy isn’t meaningless, either. Collobert was a supporter of Algerian independence and she wrote Murder while in political exile in Italy. This is an important point. Because her writing is so enigmatic, it isn’t always clear what Collobert means—at least not on the surface. But there’s no doubt that the backdrop of the war heavily informs Murder.

Returning, with the brutal passage of time, in the rupture of space, toward this city, suddenly arisen, without reality—our trajectory through it—and its immense disappearance, without reason, because we are going to leave.

What happened in the city is still there, at our feet, without our having given a purpose to that death. Here, now, there is silence, above the city. But over there we can hear a siren wailing.

‘The translation by Nathanaël is done cleanly and with great nuance. Pains have clearly been taken to retain the sheer and simple quality of Collobert’s language. It’s this delicate balance between real-world horror—i.e., Algeria—and a sort of hovering omniscience that separate Collobert’s writing from lesser material covering similar themes. In an interview with HTMLGIANT, Nathanaël touched on this point, saying “[Murder] is tempered by the residues of such histories; but the work’s strength is in its ability to evoke them without resorting to explicit accounts, or naming. The generalization of historical violence is embedded in the intimate accounts presented to the reader—seemingly placeless, nameless, they nonetheless achieve historical exactitude through relentless repetition—a reiterative (mass) murder (one is tempted to say: execution), which afflicts and incriminates the gutted bodies that move painstakingly through these densely succinct pages.”

‘Nathanaël’s use of the word “incriminate” is of particular interest, considering Murder’s implication that the witness is also guilty: “If the eye looks suddenly behind itself, if it turns around on itself, then there is the rise of each edge of the aqueous and malevolent substance that clouds it, blinds it, and terrifies it, until it can once again forget everything that happened, for it, deep down, without having that great invasive fear to overcome with each degree, with each new step, scaled like the highest of mountains, the steepest of summits.”

‘Collobert left behind a handful of books, all produced in only twenty years. Like many writers who have chosen to end their own lives, her voice occasionally takes on a gravity that is, if nothing else, alarming, urgent.’ — David Peak, The Rumpus

Stop. It’s important—important—you mustn’t miss this, the last moments. But you don’t like that. You want to go quickly. You let yourself be carried, removed, killed. And me, in the world that veers behind you, only later will I have the strength to hold you back, only later, after the others—forgive me—when they will have taught me how to stop a piece of earth torn off by the wind—a finished man, a failure, a shadow, a song, a last song—a whole dumbfounded world …

 

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Further

Reading Danielle Collobert
‘Blake Butler on Danielle Collobert’s “Murder”‘
‘Murder’ reviewed @ The Brooklyn Paper
‘Murder’ reviewed @ Fjords
‘Danielle Collobert’s Aux environs d’un film: Poetic Writing On the Brink of Cinema’
‘Murder’ reviewed @ lost gander
‘Slammed into Walls: Violence and the Impersonalized Subject in Danielle Collobert’s “It Then”
‘Writing (at) the Limits of Genre: Danielle Collobert’s Poetics of Transgression’
‘Violence and Identity in the Poetry of Danielle Collobert’
‘Oh fuck. I didn’t know Danielle Collobert was dead.’
Danielle Collobert @ Editions POL
‘TOUJOURS LENTEMENT LE MÊME TEMPS’
xcerpts from the Journals of Danielle Collobert, 1960-1961
re: ‘Danielle Collobert | Œuvres 1’
Danielle Collobert @ goodreads
‘[anthologie permanente] Danielle Collobert’
Audio: ‘Rencontres des solitudes, Danielle Collobert & François Bon’
Buy ‘Murder’

 

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Extras

Danielle Collobert, Meurtre, Gallimard, 1964. Excerpt read by François Bon.

Danielle COLLOBERT – Redécouverte (France Culture, 1978)

Danielle COLLOBERT – Paysages d’une Bretagne intérieure (France Culture, 1989)

Un extrait de “Il donc”, de Danielle Collobert, lu par François Bon.

Un extrait de “Meurtre” de Danielle Collobert, lu par François Bon.

 

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Handwritings

 

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Interview with Nathanaël
translator of ‘Murder’
from HTMLGiant

 

Kit Schluter: To begin, what drew you to Danielle Collobert’s work? How did you discover it?

Nathanaël: I want to say that it was accidental, but I’m quite sure it wasn’t. Unless one understands friendship as accident. I entered, as did many, into Il donc, and Collobert’s Carnets, though with an eye turned away – perhaps out of a desire not to seek the life in the work, however much it is written there, and with such determinacy; the ‘twenty years of writing’ set against the impending suicide. Still, it is a hazard of hindsight to be able to set the life against the work, though this is so obviously a deformation of the reader, and so I resist as much as I can the tidy narrative of a life fallen from letters. The short answer to your first question is: Collobert’s language. But if the virtuosic remnants of Il donc are almost a perfect epitaph to the twenty years, I was much more viscerally and immediately impelled by Meurtre; I even borrowed an epigraph from this work into We Press Ourlseves Plainly much before the idea even of translating it had presented itself to me. Perhaps most immediately because of a shared concern, or conviction, that the distinction between murder and death is unconvincing and too readily upheld.

KS: What were the circumstances surrounding Danielle Collobert while she was composing Murder? Do you find that the book draws material or imagery from her experience?

N: My knowledge of Collobert’s biography is quite limited. Not unlike her parents and her aunt, who were all actively engaged in the Résistance during WWII, Collobert, a supporter of Algerian independence, was a member of the FLN (Algeria’s Front de libération national) at the time of Meurtre. She chose exile in Italy, where she completed work on the manuscript. It may be worth underscoring the importance of 1961, for the outcome of the war, which, in French contemporary society was never acknowledged under the name of anything other than the euphemistic “les évènements” (“the events” – to do otherwise would have been, not only to have acknowledged, if only semantically, Algeria’s nationhood, but the repressive force employed by France to resist – and as it happened, to defer – decolonization and independence). On October 17, 1961, a peaceful demonstration of many thousands of Algerians living in Paris, protesting the curfew imposed exclusively upon them, and the acts of police violence to which they were systematically subjected, was violently suppressed by Vichyist Maurice Papon’s police force, resulting in the arbitrary deportation of large numbers of Algerian demonstrators, and the summary execution of up to two hundred Algerians, many of whose bodies were pulled out of the Seine in the following days; several thousand Algerians were rounded up during the demonstration and distributed among prisons, the Palais des Sports and area hospitals. Several months later, on February 8th, 1962, what has come to be known as the Charonne Massacre took place at the eponymous Paris métro station; this demonstration, organized by the Left against the paramilitary OAS (the reactionary Organisation de l’armée secrète, which violently opposed Algerian independence), and often conflated in people’s memories (and in historical accounts) with the October massacre, resulted in the death of eight demonstrators at the Charonne métro station. It is not insignificant that French FLN supporter Jacques Panijel’s 1961 film, Octobre à Paris, which documents the moments before, during, and after the October demonstration, was censured by the French government and only shown for the first time in a French cinema in 2011 – half a century after it was made.

The photograph on the cover of Murder accounts, obliquely, and somewhat prochronistically, for these activities – it is a photograph of a bombed out building in Madrid, taken in 1937 by Robert Capa, during the Spanish Civil War.

Meurtre is tempered by the residues of such histories; but the work’s strength is in its ability to evoke them without resorting to explicit accounts, or naming. The generalization of historical violence is embedded in the intimate accounts presented to the reader – seemingly placeless, nameless, they nonetheless achieve historical exactitude through relentless repetition – a reiterative (mass) murder (one is tempted to say: execution), which afflicts and incriminates the gutted bodies that move painstakingly through these densely succinct pages.

KS: The language of Murder‘s passages is slippery, but in a productive kind of way. Although Collobert’s later work seems almost entirely irreverent of traditional genres and forms, the language of this early work, written around the age of twenty, seems to skirt the boundaries between the short story and the prose poem. Nobody is named, no locations are specified, no motives for actions are explained. And yet these prose pieces seem to function toward the development of short narratives that retain these traditional tools of the “short story,” however non-traditionally they might be getting used.

How would you address the issue of genre in this book? What are we dealing with here? Do you sense any influences informing the form of the pieces in Murder, or does this seem to be a mode of writing that Collobert can call entirely her own?

N: I would resist attempting to attribute a generic definition to Meurtre; I would not seek to inscribe it in a lineage, either. Which is not a rejection of eventual antecedents – often Collobert’s work is read against Beckett, for example. But a habitual reliance on lineage as a way of reading seems limiting to me, and a decidedly academic concern. Before even beginning to attempt to make this kind of attribution, one would need to recognize the distances the text has had to travel between French and English, and then acknowledge the divergences between generic constructs in those two (much more than two) literary cultures (though there is increasing adherence to English language delineations in French, which is indicative, perhaps, of a desire for change, but more cynically, of the global influence of specifically American industry, since this direction is distrustful of the generic fluidity for which French literature of the twentieth century came to be known), and take some note of the development of those movements over time, because, like anywhere else, they are not static, whatever limits are imposed to prevent alterations from loosening them from their categori
cal holds. Which is to say that the bolstering of the boundaries governing generic territories, such as they are defended, is in large part contextual. I would argue that it is no less accurate to categorise Meurtre as prose than it is to categorise Il donc as poetry; Meurtre has a strong poetics, as is Il donc continuing to grapple with the sentence. But one might suggest just as convincingly that all of her work has something of the film script (her language is at times much more succinct than passages in some of Antonioni’s film scripts, for example, which read like prose). I might offer these lines of Derrida’s as more eloquent provocation: “ ‘What / is…?’ laments the disappearance of the poem – / another catastrophe. By announcing that which is /just as it is, a question salutes the birth of prose.” (Tr. Peggy Kamuf)

KS: Collobert, in the final passage of the book, defines the book’s namesake, murder, as follows: “One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it’s because of that, that way of killing” (96). This, for me, is provocative and explosive language. And, I should say, that goes for the whole book: this isn’t a neutral work, but one that digs in its heels and takes a firm political stance. What political urges do you find central to Murder?

N: You have identified what is for me perhaps the most powerful passage from the work (these are the same lines I borrowed into the afore-mentioned epigraph). Out of this passage, I would signal the unlikely conjunction of routine and inspiration. There is here the suggestion of the sublimation of emotion into bureaucratisation. “That way of killing” is not distinct from the way of language, from a poetics or an aesthetic impulse; ‘inspiration’ is the incipit of murder – the very breath of it. This admission walls the text off from anything resembling hope. And yet it is also anything but nihilistic. It is snared by its own realisations – with emphasis on the real.

KS: It seems [to me] that [Collobert] is arguing that to embrace life one must embrace mortality; that to embrace mortality one must embrace the absolute solitude of living; that to embrace this solitude one must confront the fear of what she calls “losing oneself,” even if that lostness be irremediable.

However, something about her understanding of the relationship of life and death reminds me of Rilke’s concept of Das Große, or “The Big Thing,” which he develops in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge: the inexpressible fear of the death that is, to paraphrase, growing within us from our birth as a ripening fruit. And yet, there is perhaps a crucial difference between Collobert’s “getting lost” and Rilke’s “The Big Thing”. While Rilke’s term figures death as an existential inevitability of life, Collobert’s term is more politicized and argues that our deaths are imposed on us by social forces over which we have no control. Rilke’s death grows from within and thus one must die alone, while Collobert’s is imposed and thus one is forced in death into the company of an enemy. That is the sort of solitude she is discussing—the solitude we are forced to find when in company we cannot allow ourselves to tolerate, company that is expressly against the freedom of our wills.

N: Your question seems to be calling up an irrevocable rift in the apprehension of death; some would argue that the boundary lies at Auschwitz, others, that it is endemic to modernity. Certainly, Benjamin writes of the loss of an important function of the house once people cease to die within their own walls; Rilke distinguished between ‘serial’ and ‘proper’ death; in the same Notebooks you quote from, he writes: “Now there are 559 beds to die in. Like a factory [fabrikmässig] of course. With production so enormous, each individual death is not made very carefully; but that isn’t important. It’s the quantity that counts.” I am quoting Rilke as quoted by Agamben in Remnants of Auschwitz, in which he writes: “In Auschwitz, people did not die; rather, corpses were produced.” (tr. Daniel Heller-Roazen) In my own stubborn misremembrance, Vladimir Jankélévitch writes (my translation), “Death died in the death camps”. (His actual claim is that forgiveness [le pardon] died in the death camps). The mortality Collobert is grappling with in her work is post-mortal, I would say, in that it is stripped of its ontology, and offered to cold scrutiny (the so-called empiric scalpel); whatever intimations exist in Rilke, and may be fastened to an understanding of modernity, Collobert’s language comes after WWII. It is imprinted by it. But the political dimension of this morbid actuality is not, I would argue, unilateral: the enemy is also oneself. The figures moving through Meurtre are murdered and murderers, they are both executioner and victim; the force driving them to deaths sustained or committed is never made explicit or specific; one might go so far as to say that the vital impulse of this work is stifled by the permanent recognition that one stands ever before a firing squad (a perhaps more temporally torqued version of the vital corpse is Ortega y Gasset’s man who enters into battle with a wound in his temple). I am not convinced however that Collobert’s ‘we’ ever designates a collectivity; there is no indication of a shared plight of solitude; when she writes ‘we’, the we is inhuman in that the individual elements that comprise it have no individuation, they are hulls of selves, like the scraped crab on the beach; they have abandoned themselves to a cadaveric assembly line cum funeral procession.

KS: One of the distinctive traits of Collobert’s work is her play with the grammatical gender of French. There’s a nice story, told by Jean-Pierre Faye, in the foreword to first volume of her Oeuvres (P.O.L.), in which he, upon receiving a copy of Collobert’s Dire, begins editing the text by circling inconsistencies in the narrator’s gender. In one sentence the narrator is referred to with male adjectives; in the next, female; in some, the narrator is referred to with both, by turns male and female. It is only after reading further in the text that he realizes that, in fact, this is a very deliberate part of Collobert’s language, perhaps its singularizing trait. Do you see Collobert as part of a larger tradition of Francophone writers experimenting with gender in their texts? What distinguishes her play from the others’?

N: One might see continuities between Collobert’s refusal to settle on a single gender – a way, perhaps, within the confines nonetheless of French grammar, to unsettle the ‘I’, pluralize and fragment it, and resist the facile habit in the reader to conflate the narrative ‘self’ with that of the writer – and Nathalie Sarraute’s neutral ‘il’. Collobert’s ‘il’ becomes depersonalized (it), while the intent of Sarraute’s ‘il’ (he) is to generalize away from gender specificity, and away from the French grammatical intention which determines that ‘il’ stands in for (erases) ‘elle’ (even when bias indicates otherwise). In an interview with Simone Benmussa, in which Benmussa asks Sarraute to qualify her thinking about ‘le neutre’, Sarraute replies: “For me, the neuter [le neutre] is the human being. There is a word for that in Russian, it’s tcheloviek and in German Der Mensch, the human being, male or female, regardless of age, regardless of sex. In French ‘être humain’ is ridiculous. In fact, in Elle est là, I say: ‘It’s a human being, it’s ridiculous but it must be said.’” Sarraute is adamant her concern is not androgeneity, nor, do I think it is a concern of Collobert’s. Away from the syntactical injunctions of Romance languages – for monolinguistic English speakers, for example – it is nea
rly impossible to appreciate the grammatical dictatorship under which one lives in such linguistic regimes (Sarraute’s further discussion of Russian indicates the impossibility of avoiding gender altogether in language; and as Benmussa points out, Der Mensch too is gendered masculine). To misapprehend the specific violence done to the mind, and by extension, to thought, under such a regime is to misapprehend much of what has taken place in French thought over the course of the twentieth century, whether Sarraute’s neutre, Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de style, Glissant’s Antillanité, Derrida’s Monolinguisme or Jeanne Hyvrard’s Pensée corps, to name but these. To return for a moment to the brief passage quoted from Sarraute, it is utterly telling that these problems become most evident in translation; it is through recourse to other languages (Russian was Sarraute’s first language) that she is able to articulate her concern. A grammar wishes itself to be hermetic; but is rendered porous (or revealed to be thus) precisely through the work of translation.

KS: In your own text, “(Self-)translation: an expropriation of intimacies,” you write, “Syntactically speaking, the sex of the sentence is not (necessarily) transferrable. A body thus destabilised loses sight of its referent when transversing into another language. English’s pronominal preoccupation, for example, singles out the subject’s gender as part of speech, which in French, again for example, is severally located in the sentence. Where one benefits from the ambiguity the other falls into normality. To dislocate gender’s stranglehold in French, one must strive for discord, grammatical disagreement in the place of English’s mis-fitted neutering.”

Did you find these grammatical differences between French and English coming into play in your translation work on Murder? Did you have to bend the rules or experiment with English grammar to make it speak the sense of Collobert’s prose?

N: In translating the Collobert, I resisted such acrobatics, which I tend to resort to far more sparingly in the translations of other authors’ works than I do of my own. To try to reproduce the movement between genders in Collobert’s text would have been to falsify it in English (largely in light of the fact that they are marked adjectivally with the first person pronoun as referent). Because the larger questions of the work remain otherwise transmittable. This may appear as something of a conservative decision, but to have done otherwise would have been to have submitted Meurtre to contortions it itself doesn’t resort to; it would also have been to treat English grammar as though it were interchangeable with French grammatical concerns. It is also worth underscoring the degree to which this tendency is much more prevalent in Collobert’s later works. If I may speak for a moment of Je Nathanaël, a work I published in both French and English versions, the very impetus of the French work, which was to hermaphrodise French (an impossible project, and one which necessitated enormous constraint, such as limiting myself to invariable adjectives, the imperative and the second person singular in the present tense), all but disappears in English in which gender is differently marked – and often suffers from (and is at times priviledged by) being unmarked (the so-called neutral). Rather than try to force the English into a discourse and grammar that weren’t its own, I allowed the text to become something else – at the risk of introducing a possibly (false) universalising strain in the work. In the case of a work like Collobert’s Il donc, Norma Cole’s decision to translate “il” as “it” is a perfect rejoinder to Collobert’s French impersonal pronoun. In Meurtre, there is only one instance in which, mid-passage, I let the sea’s pronoun slide from the more habitual “it” in English, to “she” as it becomes increasingly anthropomorphized in the text.

KS: Françoise Morvan, in her introduction to Oeuvres I (P.O.L.), speaks of a community of French poets who have, since Collobert’s passing, kept her memory alive: François Bon, Jean Daive, Ludovic Janvier, Bernard Pingaud, Jacques Roubaud, Claude Royet-Journoud, Alain Veinstein. Now, Collobert passed away in 1978, and it wasn’t until twenty-six year later, in 2004, that the first edition of her complete works was published in French. In this light, it seems that though her memory has not been dead, it has existed more in the underground. How do you understand Collobert’s influence, in France and abroad? Are there any key figures who have especially helped to keep this influence alive?

N: I’m not in a good position to answer this question, though I am suspicious of the homogeneity of the list of writers such as it is presented. Norma Cole, for example, might have been included among the keepers of Collobert’s memory – her translations have been tremendously influential on poetics and textualities specific to the United States, much as Paul Celan’s have been – producing departures from their initial languages, and localised styles. Collobert’s work was very marginal when she was alive; though Meurtre was originally published by Gallimard with the support of Raymond Queneau, after having been first rejected by Éditions de Minuit, her subsequent works did not meet with such favour; and in fact, Survie was first published in Italian translation before it was published in French. This is indicative of nothing, except that the vagaries a work can be subjected to are legion. One need only sample other near buried works that have met with subsequent irrefutability (Kafka, Benjamin, Robert Walser, etc.)

KS: It seems though that now this work is getting attention from the younger generation of French writers. For example, I first found out about Collobert from two young poets, who live in Marseille and run a wonderful journal of poetry, politics, and aesthetics, La Vie manifeste. One of these poets has actually dedicated much of her personal studies to Collobert’s work, recently writing both her undergraduate and masters theses on her works.

Given this sort of attention from certain contemporary poets and publishers, do you sense that Collobert’s work is experiencing an increase in readership or influence? If so, what about her work do you see as keeping her a vital figure for poets at work today? What alternatives does her work offer that can’t already be found in someone else’s poems? What can we learn from her that we can’t find elsewhere?

N: I would hope that Collobert’s reach would exceed that of so-called poetries, and circulate unencumbered through and outside of prescribed genres (even those which wish themselves to be encompassing – even these end up inventing asphyxiating constraints). I do think, however, that the demands of the text are not consistent with the consumptive speeds our worlds are submitted to today. This may account for some of the time it has taken for Collobert’s work to reach this far. It is quiet, and committed to a degree of precision that language seems nearly incapable of at this time of bulimic production. It may not even be useful to resort to comparatives in search of its specificity. Because this is something it claims without invention; and in my reading it is in time, in the time of (her) writing, and all that it has subsumed into it.

 

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Book

Danielle Collobert Murder
Litmus Press

‘A haunting and dense text that occupies a liminal space between short story and prose poem, Collobert’s first novel, originally published in 1964, is presented here in a stunning and precise translation by Nathanaël. Though the scenes created by Collobert are seemingly placeless, the characters nameless, the action mundane and without motive, the legacy of World War II and the reality of the Algerian War loom heavily over her prose. In one section, the narrator stalks her doppelganger, an old Holocaust survivor. Elsewhere, the reader is witness to a murder of crabs, men petrified by quarry dust, and a woman who compulsively carves her name into walls with her fingernails. Through her depictions of habitual and indifferent violence, Collobert has crafted a uniquely political work, writing towards the end of the book, “One does not die alone, one is killed, by routine, by impossibility, following their inspiration. If all this time, I have spoken of murder, sometimes half camouflaged, it’s because of that, that way of killing.” While Collobert may baffle or frustrate those who expect a traditional novel, any reader interested in experimental fiction and poetry will find this a challenging but captivating text.’ — Publishers Weekly

 

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Excerpt

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** seb 🦠, Hi. Yeah, sorry, not sorry, haha. What started this? There used to be this active website about my work, and the guy who ran it polled the people who looked at the site about they would most want me to do, and one of the choices was a blog, and that won, so I just decided I’d try, even though I had no interest in doing that, and I guess I liked doing it ‘cos it’s still barreling along twenty years or so later. Strange. I don’t know how, but I just feel like being able to regurgitate random facts about ciliates would come in handy. I still have a handful of smoking friends, but they keep quitting. Weirdly, I don’t have one vaping friend that I can think of. You’re good at baseball? Another handy talent. Well, not if you lived over here, but … How about if I make a miraculous seeming catch of that batted godspeed and give it to some angelic little kid watching from the stands? Or hurl it back at you, your choice. ** Misanthrope, I still smoke Camel Lights, yes. I did love the Wides, but when I got over here where they don’t have them and started smoking normal lights, they seemed too intense. You made my mouth water. Your cake did, I mean. So, well, technically you did because you wrote the description, I guess. Living over here, I miss shitty chain restaurants. They used to have Pizza Huts here where you could sit inside and eat, but now it’s just take away PH. Ha, there actually was a crabs outbreak at Pitzer when I was there, but I was spared. ** T. J., Hey! Are you back? We should galette soon if you are. ** Mark, High, discoloured fingered five. The current Black Flag is just Ginn and a bunch of newbies, right? Back when I wrote regularly for Artforum, I wrote a very negative review of a McDermott & McGough show because, at the time, I thought their ‘we’re living in the 19th century’ schtick was bullshit — I don’t anymore, btw — and soon thereafter I was at some trendy artists club and McDermott stormed up to me and shrieked at me and started hitting me with his wussy little fists then walked away. I doubt that made it into the book, but it was memorable to me. That said, cool about Kristian’s portrait, and awesome of you to frame it. Tell Kristian when you see him that when he performs live next time he should sing ‘I Don’t Love My Guru Anymore’, which is favorite song by him. ** _Black_Acrylic, I kind of want to see ‘Poor Things’, but I haven’t. Oh, shit, have you risen above your bed today, I so hope? ** Steve Erickson, Yes, that coaster is insane. I had it in my last theme park post. And, yes, huge suckage that it’s in Saudi Arabia. I’m not surprised about the large LGBTQ aspect of the coaster enthusiasts only because most of my friends who share my coaster love are LGBTQ. I hope your sense of emergency was indeed misplaced. High hope. ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yep. I think I would happily be a billionaire because I really wouldn’t change anything about my life or living situation other than probably traveling more, and I could fund my and all of my friends’ and even exciting strangers’ art projects, and, yeah, I don’t worry about being corrupted at all. I’m really not a materialist type at all, and that’s not because I can’t afford things. Luxury isn’t interesting. It would be cool to just be able to decide, ‘I want to go stay at some extremely expensive hotel for a few days’ though. When I sent to pick up our buche from this ultra-fancy hotel the other day, I did think how nice it would be to sleep in some suite there and have room service and stuff for a night or two. Anyway, blah blah … Love, if you’re listening, I can responsibly handle being a billionaire, I promise. And so can Dominik, I can vouch. Ha ha, cheese plate indeed! Love adapting SCAB into a groundbreaking video game, G. ** Darby 🫁🚬, In Frankreich ist es heute Morgen nur mäßig kalt, aber nächste Woche sollen es jeden Morgen minus zwei Grad sein. Having a penis is just whatever. It’s there, you deal with it, you know? Oh, damn, about your mom’s power there. So … will she let you? Do I need to contact this friend of mine who claims his brother is in the mafia to … persuade … her? It would take me many, many paragraphs to describe Antartica. It’s really like nothing else on earth. It’s also like nothing and beautiful at the same time. You don’t want to sleep with penguins. They shit and piss right where they’re standing, and they smell horrible, and you can smell them from practically a mile away. Oh, being in the bad psychedelic band was fun. I wish we’d stuck to it and gotten less bad. We only played two gigs, both disasters. I was the lead singer. That’s how bad we were, ha ha. I guess we were ostentatious stoners. Yeah, I guess so, relatively speaking. Later gator. ** Bill, Ah, great. His work is wonderful, especially the later, more recent works, I think, starting with ‘Rock Hudson’s …’. But even the earlier ones are cool. ‘When Evil Lurks’ is not a charismatic title, it’s true. I just watched a 4 1/2 hour documentary about the history of the FPS (first person shooter) video game which was nothing much as documentary but very interesting if one is drawn to the topic, as I am. ** Right. I guessing that most of you haven’t read the Danielle Collobert novel I’m spotlighting today because it’s bizarrely under-known, but it’s really something, and so is she, and do have a look today please. See you tomorrow.

* (restored/expanded)

 

‘Mark Rappaport is on the very short list still for the greatest living American filmmaker because of the absolutely essential work he did, first in his early fictional narratives from 1974’s Casual Relations up through 1985’s Chain Letters, then in a second phase of fictional autobiographies of movie stars that have an utter lack of use for the tenets of realism that’s inspiring, especially seeing how they were made parallel to the dire trend in more commercial US cinema of “realist” (re: swearing and torture scenes) genre films that proliferated in the early 1990s.

‘Rappaport’s stance on the narrative and “psychological” shibboleths that loiter, tired but possessed with insidious powers of seduction, in the dire waiting room of the vast majority of American and world cinema collecting gilded dildos and money in a manner that inclines one to agree with the psychoanalytic tendency to trace the origins of such tendencies to the infant’s urge to play with feces, is revolutionary because it doesn’t violently reject such things in search of the real, but deflates them so they’re no longer gods to be venerated or scorned but half-remembered scraps in the junk pile ghost story of consciousness. While often screamingly funny, they’re just as often uncomfortable as listening to a recording of one’s own voice. Frequently in the same segment.

‘While his early shorts are amusing, especially Blue Movie, the best place to come to an appreciation of Rappaport’s distinctive style is his first feature Casual Relations, a collection of around 12 shorter meditations on the place of boredom, apathy, and in-between moments. It doesn’t have quite the same Jamesian complexity of his later narratives but is, as these sorts of things go, straightforward, hilarious, and more digestible. Casual Relations establishes Rappaport as perhaps the only American filmmaker to understand the artistic potentials and the specific textures of what’s been crudely dubbed “the postmodern condition”-he’ll use outdated stylistics for his own purposes and switch them out frequently and without concern for reveling in or directly and narrowly commenting on them-they’re language, and language is a tool that he’s free to use however he sees fit and established style something he can pick up or discard at whatever tempo he chooses. An especially memorable sequence superficially resembling Rashomon perhaps best sums up this peculiar film whose greatest asset is its lack of a center. A stabbing or shooting occurs, and we see it in various states of revision until it comes up against the void of meaninglessness and becomes more and more absurd. Pluralism isn’t the keyword but rather the emergence of something more sinister, more given to dangerous laughter, something more all-encompassing, a trap perhaps…it’s no accident the film ends with Martha and the Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run” playing over a blank screen and then credits…

‘The later films tie their strands together in more complex ways than simply a shared theme make them more complex. It took me three failed runs through his later Local Color before I could allow myself to be ensnared in it’s internal logic, but on the third time it was sheer delight, dread and awe that the movies could do such things. The film, his third (I’ve yet to track down a copy of Mozart in Love though it’s now available on Fandor and I hope to review it here soon) is his masterpiece, though in a body of work this good that means it’s a split second finish. A story of incredible complexity and one of the only, maybe the only, besides Rappaport’s own The Scenic Route, film to take the innovations of the greatest post-war writers in prose, the Pynchons and Barthelmes and Gaddises, and employ them to film on the same level to and sometimes even surpass them. To recount the plot here would be to miss the point; the plot is so byzantine and winding that it seems so on purpose so as to force the viewer in being overwhelmed to let go and stop reading it the way they’ve always read films; as things with characters who have goals and represent eternal melodramatic forces. Nothing is so cut and dried here. Character isn’t a matter of surface level coherence but of self-contradiction, petty urges with unknown origins, layers of masks draped one over the other like thatch over a pit. Attempts have been made to imitate the power and unusual tone of this film in later films to such dire effect it would be insulting to Local Color to mention them here. Some of these attempts were by filmmakers I’m not even sure saw Local Color, maybe the impetus came to them half-digested in dreams. Such things happen.

‘The second phase of Rappaport’s career involves the fake auto-biographical films that started with the classic piece of film criticism Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, a film that despite its many technical issues (the sound desperately needs to get remixed if it’s ever rereleased-Mark I know you’re reading this) redefines the boundaries of both the single subject historical documentary and the film-as-film criticism, and offers incredibly useful reinterpretations to some of the major tenets of postmodern criticism. Like the rest of his films, it’s screamingly hilarious.

‘Through the novel technique of using an actor to play the deceased Hudson who then guides the audience through a collection of clips from Hudson’s films Rappaport brings seasoned viewers to uncomfortable problems of film criticism rapidly and with gleeful abandon. By positing that Hudson was expressing his closeted homosexuality in his choices as an actor, both in scripts and performance, the cinema so straitjacketed into misreadings of French auteur theory, is broken up into an almost inconceivable spectrum of subjectivity; reading film is no longer the bitter struggle with a jigsaw puzzle of images in hopes for the imperialist domination of the “final reading”, the “director’s intent”, a flag of interpretation to hoist up, a meat thermometer to stick in so as to have the satisfaction of saying “It’s done”, but an act of imagination with no possibility of triumph beyond hard to articulate resonances. That the actor playing Hudson looks little or nothing like him, a fact driven home repeatedly by his literally being posed next to pictures of the actual Hudson, works because it shows the intent is not to bring Hudson back to life in the creepy necrophile manner of so many bio-pics obsessed with the actor’s superficial resemblance to the deceased.

‘How much of self is social? How much of the social self is noticed even if it is? When taking the text on its own terms what sorts of rabbit holes might we stumble into? If trying to find the author (in this case Hudson) is a doomed task of endless supplements and uncomfortably off doubles must this be viewed with the bitter taste of having been betrayed by stories of the possibility of truth? Or can the lack of “truth”, of recovery of the dead, be seen on its own terms as a new aesthetic path defined by an almost unlimited potential?’ — Dan Levine

 

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Stills

 

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Further

Mark Rappaport @ IMDb
The Strange and Sad Saga of How Filmmaker Mark Rappaport Lost His Movies
Mark Rappaport on His Movie Archaeology: “If I get pretentious with this, slap me senseless”
MEDIUM FOR A DEAD PERSON: MARK RAPPAPORT COMES TO FANDOR
Mark Rappaport Fires Back at Ray Carney
AN INTRODUCTION TO THE WORKS OF MARK RAPPAPORT
Man on a Shoestring: An On-Location Report on Mark Rappaport’s IMPOSTORS
all that editing allows
Mark Rappaport: Snapshots of the Man Wearing the Mask
Mark Rappaport on Proust and Marienbad
Image and Voice: The Audiovisual Essays of Mark Rappaport
Podcast: Mark Rappaport on Fresh Air
‘Rock Hudson’s Home Movies’ Hits Criterion: Seeking the Hidden In the Evident
Mark Rappaport’s From The Journals of Jean Seberg
AN ESSAY BY MARK RAPPAPORT ON PHANTOM AND DISSOLUTION
Podcast: Film Essayist Mark Rappaport, Directorial Left Turns

 

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Extras

Breaking Through the Screen: Movies by Mark Rappaport

Mark Rappaport | Interview at Curtocircuíto 2016

Continuidades e descontinuidades na obra de Mark Rappaport

 

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Interview

 

When you read pieces by people like me calling you “the father of the modern video essay,” what do you think? Do you say, “What the hell are these people talking about?”

Um, no. I think I know what they’re talking about. It makes me feel very old indeed, but no, I kind of get it, because in some sense, these sorts of films are the kind of thing that [Jean-Luc] Godard, 24 years ago, pointed the way toward, with new technology that was not available to me.

Are you talking about “Rock Hudson’s Home Movies” now, specifically, or a different one of your films?

“Rock Hudson’s Home Movies” and “From the Journals of Jean Seberg,” both. The new technologies have made that way of thinking more possible. I’m very glad that I’ve lived to partake in all of these technologies, because before the VHS player, you were kind of at the mercy of your memory and repertory theaters. VHS and subsequently DVDs and Blu-rays and Internet has made [my] kind of reconsideration of our recent past possible, and that’s very gratifying that this stuff can be made, and can be made available very quickly.

When I made “Rock Hudson’s Home Movies,” I had to transfer it to film in order to have it seen, period. And it was very expensive, making the transfer from video to a 16 mm film, and then you had to mail out the prints [to theaters]! Of course now, with the Internet all this stuff is right there, it’s like one-stop shopping. You do it, you click on it, it’s out there, so this is quite amazing.

My parents were a lot older than most people’s parents, and I always wondered how they made the transition from horses to automobiles, from nothing to radio and then to televise, and I feel that I’ve been living on a similar time of the transition technologically, going from TV to means of reproduction where you could have all this stuff in your house—that is to say, your favorite movies on VHS and then DVD, and now at your fingertips, on your two-way wristwatch.

I’ve just watched—I had never seen it before—your short film, “Mark Rappaport: The TV Spin-Off.” That’s from 1978. It starts out with you—I guess you’re just physically leafing through stills—and talking about these images in close-up. And then you start talking about your movies, and it hit me all of a sudden that this is basically the narrated video essay as it is practiced today, except we’re ripping DVDs with HandBrake and ripping them in Adobe or Final Cut Pro or something like that. But you’re just a guy moving pictures around with his hands and talking, and I guess either you or someone else is triggering the music that plays in the background behind you, right?

Yeah.

Is what you were doing in 1978 a more basic approach to the same kind of idea?

Yeah, yeah! Well, I think I’ve always been very limited, I guess we all are—we see things from one perspective and basically we live our lives from that one particular perspective, but I think I was talking to somebody fairly recently. I said, “I re-saw the first movie I had ever made, and everything in that movie is there, and I will draw on it for the future, and things that I made today relate to that movie.” You know, like people against a background of a huge still. And I was just shocked when I realized that, because it was almost fifty years ago that I made that!

One is always a prisoner of one’s own life, in a sense. But that’s a good sense.

If had wished for something 20 years ago, I would have wished for Final Cut Pro, but I am not a visionary, and I could want things, but I couldn’t invent them, any more than I could invent VHS or DVDs or the delivery of movies to your home though the Internet.

Could you walk me through your evolution as a filmmaker in regards to your storytelling devices? Specifically, the point at which you decided to use actors to represent stars, such as Rock Hudson and Jean Seberg? They are not speaking dialogue that is supposed to be Rock Hudson or Jean Seberg as we might think of them in a docudrama.

I have no idea! I don’t remember quite at which point I was going to make “Rock Hudson.” It was always going to be a first-person narrative, and obviously that person is dead and wouldn’t, in all likelihood, have the insights into his life and work that I might’ve had. I don’t know, I think when I had to write stuff up for film festivals, I decided on this format called “the fictitious autobiography.”

Yes, I remember you using that phrase when I interviewed you in back in ’95.

Oh really? [laughs] Oh god, how dull of me.

No no! It just stuck in my mind because it’s a great phrase. I was struggling—I had asked you to help me to describe what you were doing in films like “From the Journals of Jean Seberg” and “Rock Hudson’s Home Movies.” I was writing for a pretty wide readership, most of who had probably never seen anything like the work you were doing at that time. When you watch those movies, you are seeing Rock Hudson and Jean Seberg as you might see them in a biography, but at the same time, they are saying things that those people would never say because Rock Hudson and Jean Seberg don’t have the knowledge of a film historian or a critic.

That’s right. They couldn’t have an overview of their careers before they died.

I was saying “fictitious biography” even back then, when you first interviewed me, because I had written something for film festival catalogues, and they want to know what the artist’s intent is.

They never ask real filmmakers about this, they only ask experimental types. “Tell me what it means, the author’s intent.” Has anyone ever asked Stanley Kubrick, “What does it mean?” I don’t think so.

[laughs] No, probably not.

They would be afraid of getting bitten in half, anyway. “What does the bone turning into the spaceship mean?” I give up. Shrug of shoulders.

Stephen King once said—he was in a particularly grousey mood—something along the lines of, “I’m so sick of people asking me where I get my ideas. The next time someone asks me that, I’m going to tell them that I subscribe to a magazine called, ‘Ideas.’”

[laughs] Yeah, well I get my ideas while watching movies. It’s very relaxing and very stressful at the same time. Gives me a lot of space to think. The worse the movie, the more I think.

Interesting. So during bad movies your mind wanders and you come up with ideas or solve problems?

Yeah. I don’t pluck daises and sniff them. I’m writing reviews at the same time. The first time I saw “Mystery Science Theater 3000,” I said, “Oh my god, this is my life story.” You’re sitting there practically screaming out at the screen, “No no, don’t open that box,” or, “Don’t go in the closet, don’t go in the cellar,” or finishing lines of dialogue before they’re said.

So I think that, in a sense, “Rock Hudson’s Home Movies” and “From the Journals of Jean Seberg” come out of that. I’m yelling back at the screen, but in retrospect.

You’re also at times—or at least it seems to me—you’re entering the movie.

You’re really not altering the dialogue, you’re not altering the lighting, you’re not altering the gestures and the facial expressions of the actors. You are presenting the scene, and all that you are adding is a perspective and a point of view, however jaundiced or far away from the intent of the original makers it may be, but the scene itself, you can’t really argue with it.

Like I was telling you, in most film criticism, certainly before the invention of VHS, everybody would get everything wrong all the time because they couldn’t go back to check it before publication, and one of the real whoppers is Raymond Durgnat describing “Under Capricorn” in his writing, and then Francois Truffaut taking Raymond Durgnat’s description in the “Hitchcock/Truffaut” book and getting everything all wrong. He’s the cousin, not the nephew! He gets everything wrong, and this is in the book. But no critic was able to really verify anything that they said because you saw a movie once, and then you had to wait until next time it came around in repertory theaters or in a 16 mm print in your class. So this is not lying in the sense that I’m presenting a scene that already exists, of course I’m lying a little bit in the angles that I’m approaching it from.

 

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16 of Mark Rappaport’s 28 films

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Casual Relations (1974)
‘I watched Casual Relations just days after seeing Jim Jarmusch’s charming enough Only Lovers Left Alive. It’s an enjoyable film that tries to explore, among many other things, the importance of how we digest art and culture. Like Rappaport’s film, Jarmusch is interested in how his characters respond to art, particularly music in this case, but his film ends up falling short of what Rappaport’s film accomplishes. Jarmusch doesn’t illustrate the link and instead, the film, while quite funny does nothing more than feel like a collection of cultural references used to further the alienation felt by their aging hipster vampire protagonists. Rappaport, on the other hand, has used art and popular culture to help contextualize his protagonist’s feelings. We never really “know” much about them, but that’s kind of the film’s point. Their opaque characterization give us something of a clean piece of paper, and the art and culture we seem them experiencing is used to project and even express their anxiety. Like Stuart Hall, Rapapport has argued on behalf of taking pop culture as the serious, vital phenomenon that it is. Hall himself said that pop culture is “where we discover and play with the identifications of ourselves, where we are imagined, where we are represented, not only to our audiences but to ourselves.” Rappaport’s character are seeking themselves out through popular culture and the arts. This is why the film ends on a character, who we know very little about, intensely studying a painting.’ — Cinema Talk

Excerpt

 

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Mozart in Love (1975)
‘Funnier and altogether more assured than its predecessor, Rappaport’s second feature respectfully lays waste to the inflexibility of grand opera. WA Mozart’s casual/ intense relations with the three Weber sisters are the pretext; Mozart’s own arias are the soundtrack; the actors wear costumes, stand in front of backdrop projections, and mime to perfection. Inspired.’ — Time Out (London)

Excerpt

 

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Local Color (1977)
‘What are the things that make us sad, that disappoint us? The things that make us cover our faces because we’re exhausted and long for a bed to fall asleep in and hide from everything else? It might be failed relationships, the rent, hating your job, not having a job, paying the rent, or even death. Sometimes it’s none of these things, sometimes it’s just the crushing weight of our daily routines This sounds like a rather heavy and ominous way to introduce a film, but Mark Rappaport’s Local Color is a study of that kind of exhaustation. Calling it listlessness seems like an understatement, for as much as Rappaport’s characters live and breathe in an exciting and functional world, it is that same world that severely limits their movements and censors their happiness.’ — Cinema Talk

Excerpt

 

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The Scenic Route (1978)
‘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. Tolkein 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: The art direction on a Rappaport film (by Lilly Kilvert this time) is as important as the script or direction. n his new “The Scenic Route”, he gives us three primary characters: Two sisters, Estelle and Lena, and a young man named Paul who lives first with Estelle, then with Lena, and then with both. Lest this sound like a steamy scenario, I should point out that Rappaport’s characters rarely move very much, and tend to find themselves in formal tableaux.’ — Roger Ebert

the entire film

 

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Impostors (1979)
‘In Impostors, Chuckie is played by Charles Ludlam, founder of the celebrated Ridiculous Theatrical Company and a superb mimic, continually trying on fresh faces, voices, and stances. Mikey is played by Michael Burg. He performed in the original off-Broadway production of The Passion of Dracula for a year and a half, and he is proving to be an effective partner in this unusual black comedy team. A note on the characters Chuckie and Mikey in Rappaport’s script — written with Ludlam and Burg expressly in mind — specifies that their constantly shifting relationship “must be played like an amalgam of the Marx Brothers and Peter Lorre, the Three Stooges mixed with Dostoevski. There is also a broad streak of amiable Mel Brooks vulgarity running through it. In short, they are always playacting But underlying it all is a menacing dead seriousness that is unsettling — two psychopaths, refugees from trashy horror films, on the loose.”’ — Jonathan Rosenbaum

Homage to ‘The Imposters’

 

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The TV Spinoff (1980)
‘In this short film, Mark Rappaport begins musing on “the movies” and then quickly turns to the subject of “his movies” in this raffish introduction to his work up to the late-1970s.. Hiding behind a beard, sunglasses and a fedora, he offers fleeting insight into his means (credit cards) and methods (“a kind of mix-and-match theory of creating”). But mostly, he presents Filmclips from films few broadcast viewers have heard of — let alone seen — including his early features, MOZART IN LOVE, LOCAL COLOR, THE SCENIC ROUTE and IMPOSTORS.’ — CADL

the entire film

 

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Chain Letters (1985)
‘I still tend to think that best films are the ones surrounded with a certain mystery that never reveals itself – you could easily put this film to the category of Robert Altman (Short Cuts or Three Women), Edward Yang (The Terrorizers), Jacques Rivette or Patrick Tam. This also reveals us the fact that 80s is belittled by only those who have no clue about anything. Even American cinema is ready to offer surprises that no one or rare has heard about every now and then – of course Rapport has reputation but Chain Letters seems to be one of his little seen films. The paranoia intertwines with the strange web of chance (nothing seems to be fate or destiny here), people are more or less familiar to each other and even when they are completely stranger, there is something in their presence or traits that leaves an impression. Everyone is terribly lonely but the city also feels like an alienated outer-space – machomen and Vietnam vets rule this landscape, everything is filmed with minimalist precision; actually the whole film feels like a painting in its progress of slowly opening or not opening at all. Eventually it explodes to our faces while at the same time hiding its true feelings.’ — Valtteri Lepistö

the entire film

 

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Postcards (1990)
‘A long-distance love affair is prolonged through a series of postcards in Mark Rappaport’s extraordinary short film, one of the director’s first experiments in video. The “deliciously ironic” (according to the Los Angeles Times) POSTCARDS tracks a romance played out entirely on assorted mailings written by a separated couple. American tourist spots on one side; heaving romance, misunderstandings, paranoia and sadly-fading passions on the other. Mass-produced souvenirs have never seemed so romantic, nor as tragic.’ — Jason Sanders

the entire film

 

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Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992)
‘The subject of the film is, needless to say, Rock Hudson, the iconic actor who serves as Jane Wyman’s co-star in the Sirk picture. Having died of AIDS complications in 1985 — an event which brought public attention to his homosexuality — Rappaport’s essay film is, in many ways, an attempt to show the true tragedy of Hudson: an actor who was forced into an image of hypermasculinity while only ironically revealing his true identity through these films. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies is still one of the most ingenious video essays ever assembled, using a barrage of now-standard techniques to examine the private life of a man through his public persona, in addition to deconstructing Hollywood’s own codes and conventions. Lasting a brief 63 minutes, Rappaport’s film is told via an actor (Eric Farr) playing a persona of Hudson from beyond the grave while VHS clips of his films play in the background. (One may lament that Criterion and / or Rappaport did not use better restorations for the often-shoddy VHS rips, it is all-too-suited for this underground film meant for private viewing; as Rappaport’s notes on the film explain, Home Movies needed the invention of VHS to exist.) Farr’s Hudson asks, “Who can look at my movies the same way ever again?” Rappaport’s selection of clips are what, now, ring as incredibly obvious moments: Doris Day asking Hudson in Lover Come Back why he’s in another man’s apartment; a clip of Hudson and Tony Randall comically sharing a bed; and Hudson’s anxiety over marriage, as pressured by an older, naked man taking an awfully keen interest in him. And, of course, there’s his role in Howard Hawks’s oddball comedy, Man’s Favorite Sport?, where Hudson plays a supposed fishing expert who, secretly, has never fished in his life, and must fake it through the film.’ — The Criterion Collection

Trailer

Excerpt

 

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From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995)
‘Jean Seberg, a miscast mess at 17 in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan, a sensation in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless at 20 and a suicide at 40, never kept any journals. Writer and director Mark Rappaport makes up for the oversight in a mock documentary that is alternately hilarious and heartbreaking. Actress Mary Beth Hurt, who was born in Seberg’s hometown of Marshalltown, Iowa, stands in for Seberg as Rappaport orchestrates a guided tour of her life through film clips and historical footage. At one point, Hurt watches a scene of Seberg as Joan of Arc and groans: “I was too short, too girlish — and that voice. Enough!” It took a series of bad movies, abusive husbands and J. Edgar Hoover — enraged at Seberg during the 1960s for her involvement with the Black Panthers and black men — to throw this Joan on the barbie. He gives Seberg her due as an actress in Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse and Robert Rossen’s Lilith, and laughs — as Seberg would — at the idiocies of Airport and of Paint Your Wagon, in which Seberg had an ill-fated fling with co-star Clint Eastwood. Hurt puts a wry sting in the barbs about the mistreatment of women in Hollywood, which reflected far beyond. Rappaport proves himself an astute social critic in a hypnotic film that blends fact, gossip and instinct to arrive at its own kind of truth.’ — Rolling Stone

Trailer

 

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The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender (1997)
‘Mark Rappaport’s The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender is a quirky investigation of the subtle and not-so subtle revelations of homosexuality in movies of the past. Each genre had its closeted messages, from the prissy aunties played by treasurable character actors like Franklin Pangborn, Edward Everett Horton, Rex O’Malley and ‘King of the Queens’ Clifton Webb, to all those westerns that featured ‘The Walter Brennan Syndrome,’ i.e., that crusty, asexual geezer who always made the coffee and never seemed to have a life of his own, save as eternal sidekick to the younger, hotter hero. Rappaport finds shady secrets in a ’40s potboiler like Desert Fury, which has ineffably butch Lizabeth Scott bewildered by the lack of attention she receives from either John Hodiak or Wendell Corey. The reasons are made hilariously clear in a scene in which Hodiak dreamily describes meeting Corey: ‘It was in the automat off Times Square at two in the morning. I was broke. He had a couple of dollars. We got to talking. He ended up paying for my ham and eggs. I went home with him that night. We were together from then on.’ (Rappaport’s description of the ubiquitously ‘unpreposessing, uncharismatic’ Corey, a real blight on women’s films of the ’40s and ’50s, is, incidentally, right on.)’ — Film Journal

the entire film

 

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I, Dalio (2015)
‘The great French actor, Marcel Dalio, who has the lead role in Jean Renoir’s THE RULES OF THE GAME, also appears in Renoir’s GRAND ILLUSION. In both films he plays a character who is Jewish, as Dalio was in real life. In fact, in most of the French films he’s in the 1930s, he almost always plays shady characters, informers, blackmailers and gangsters. In other words, he is always “the Jew.” When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, he fled to America and appeared in CASABLANCA and TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT. In America, he was no longer the Jew but The Frenchman. He became, in dozens of films, America’s idea of a typical Frenchman. His film career has these two strands in which he has two different identities. Are you defined by other people and their perceptions of who you are? Are you always a creation of the way people want to see you? Or can you exist outside of the arbitrary boundaries which are placed on you?’ — Fandor

Excerpt

 

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Max & James & Danielle (2015)
‘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 Ophuls projects but were never together in an Ophuls movie, although they should have been. What might that movie have been like? It’s anybody’s guess (but cinephiles can dream, can’t they?). Somewhere between a historical essay and a speculative one.’ — Letterboxd

Watch the film here

 

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The Empty Screen (2017)
‘“The screen is a two-way street. It watches the audience as the audience watches it.” Trust Mark Rappaport to always come up with idiosyncratic ways to illuminate the very nature of the film experience. This video essay published by Talkhouse is no exception. It takes meta-movie moments and scenes as its starting point for ruminations on the relation between the viewer and the viewed, between the illusion and the enchanted. The Empty Screen or the Metaphysics of Movies is vintage Rappaport, applying the highly personal contemplation of the essayist to a breadth of knowledge of film history. He frequently steps into the shoes of the characters in the films he discusses, voicing their imagined thoughts, then segues effortlessly back into a more classic, detached voice over.’ — Film Scalpel

the entire film

 

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Conrad Veidt – My Life (2020)
‘What is left of a film star with over 100 films? At Conrad Veidt it is the cornerstone of his career? In Conrad Veidt’s screen life, Mark Rappaport opens up a network of connections to the film industry in Germany and to exiles in Hollywood.’ — MUBI

Excerpt

 

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Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna (2020)
‘A tribute to actresses, approaching their presence in and out the screen, humanizing the icons. From the Ukrainian Anna Sten to the French Anna Karina, we can see some close-up faces that marked the history of the cinema, and whose demand is more relevant than ever.’ — MUBI

the entire film

 

 

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p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! The year is still our oyster. And inevitably the people who spout their every take on everything on social media day in and out tend to have the most obvious, duh opinions. But I suppose that’s interesting in a way. You’re welcome about the 10 million. Oh, and tax free, I think I neglected to mention. Happy to see that Mugshot is still alive in you. To quote an upcoming slave I just found (spoiler alert) Love ‘came to my house🏠 Played games🖥️ Drank beer🍺 Ate Pho🍜 Dressed him in rubber🖤 Fucked/filmed him⏳ Uploaded it to the internet📲 Live long and prosper🖖🏻’, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, You’re back in Black. Lucky you (about the exiled smoking habit, but also about being in black). Oh, no, feel much better, my friend. Take what you need to take. ** alcyon, Hi, alcyon. I’m good, thanks. I remember you, yes. My memory is almost famous. Thank you for the introduction. A poet, very noble, cool. Until dawn? Wow. Tell me more. Yes, I’m here for at least the next part of the winter, working on a film that keeps me here. Let’s meet, yes. When’s good for you? You can write me at my email if you want: [email protected]. Yes, I smoke, so I’m very familiar with those little scare tactics. Nice try. Thanks for returning. I hope to see you soon. ** Kyler, Hi. Is that where words are? Okay, I guess that makes sense, although where were my words before I started smoking then? Hm. Oh, man, don’t blame me. If quitting didn’t make me unable to concentrate for months and months, hence no writing and no blog, I would quit, but I shan’t. I’m a just-under-a-pack-a-day smoker, so not too, too many more than you. ** Darby 🫁🚬, That cigarette emoji is going to turn that lungs emoji black. I do want to know something you read yesterday. And what you read is total news to me. I don’t think I’ve ever  known anyone who had rabies. Although I have known people who have erections all the time, so who knows. You? A passport is an imperative have, I think. Traveling changes everything. Amsterdam, sure. You probably know this, but I went to Antarctica one. Wow. What a place. Mornings … I make coffee, I look at the blog comments, I drink coffee and surf around the net, and once I’ve finished my first cup of coffee, I let myself smoke my first cigarette, then I do the p.s. while I’m drinking my second cup of coffee, and after that the cigarettes make the decisions, or, wait, my lungs do. I usually take one cigarette break during the p.s., or sometimes two of there are a lot of comments. What do you do when you wake up? I said hi to Andrei, and he did something in return that possibly could be interpreted as saying hi back to you. ** Steve Erickson, What do I know, but I definitely think cigarettes focus your concentration. Making you smarter seems pretty pipe dream-y. There are three instances of cigarette smoking in our new film. I hope the important meeting is indeed important in the good way. ** Mark, Happy 2024 to you, Mark. I’ve decided I’m not going to quit smoking unless something absolutely forces me too. I’m down to two vices now: smoking and caffeine. Surely, that’s not asking too much of my body. Surely. Nice, rich holidays you had there. Beats mine by a mile or I guess a kilometer. I have about a week until I hopefully go back into full time film work, and I plan to visit France’s first ever, newly opened Krispy Kreme Donuts, maybe see ‘Poor Things’, see a friend who’s departing for the UK, write, find a new Ethiopian restaurant because my favorite one closed, and surely a plethora of even better things. Surely, Paris Ass will take you. They’d be insane not too, and they don’t seem insane. ** Nick., Hi. HNY to you and yours! I’m a believer in things happening as they’re supposed to. I’m with you: being around drinking -> drunk people is down there with my least favorite things to do. I haven’t cried in a while, so that sounds nice. I haven’t done so much really. New Years: kept awake all night by a neighbor’s loud drunken party. Ate? Mm, rice with shredded seitan and pea mash and crumbled falafel and mushroom sauce stirred into it. It’s raining and blah here today, but I will endeavour to do something the could tickle your fancy once gussied up with appropriate but decorative language. Keep it up, my friend. ** Okay. I decided to restore the blog’s old Mark Rappaport Day because it was full of dead imbeds and quite out of date. Unless you live in a big city or are an experimental film buff like me, you might not know Rappaport’s work apart from maybe his most famous film ‘Rock Hudson’s Home Movies’, so why not get his stuff imbedded in you brain pan? It won’t do you no harm. See you tomorrow.