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 feeling of déjà vu as if we have already been there - and sometimes we have.

A separated couple try to keep in touch through postcards of typically "American" sights: motels, monuments, parks; but their postcards cross in the mail. Misunderstandings arise; passion subsides; romance fades... Yet the postcards keep on coming.

As a teenager, Sergei Eisenstein signed his drawings with "Sir Gay". Mark Rappaport sees clear signs of his sexual preferences throughout the Russian’s film oeuvre. Numerous asides illustrate how Hollywood productions likewise frequently played with nods and winks and typical motifs from gay culture.

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.

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.

What do vampires, Hollywood melodramas, porn films, the countdown of golden oldies, and drives down the highway with Mick Jagger on the radio have in common? Casual Relations knows. 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. The point is that we are all vampires–or being vampirized. We are all obsessed–or the object of someone else's obsession. We are all under somebody's thumb–to quote the Jagger lyric Rappaport uses–if we're not thumb-wrestling ourselves and pinning ourselves down. The short film within a film, A Vampire's Love, is one of the most brilliant (and hilarious) brief sequences in all of Rappaport's work. -Ray Carney

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 in an artificial world with a limited point of view? Or is it a gateway to the past and the future, and a distorted but nevertheless real vision of the roles that woman are forced to play in society? It's an exploration of the texts and subtexts of commercial films and the subterranean and complicated ways that they affect us and can be read.

BECOMING ANITA EKBERG is an exploration of how the construct of "Anita Ekberg" became an internationally famous sex goddess 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. It's an exploration of the texts and subtexts of commercial films and the subterranean and complicated ways that they affect us and can be read

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 later, did the magic still work? Did sparks still fly? The movie business, a machine that manufactured romance and desire at the same time that it documented the process of aging. A meditation on youth and beauty, aging and box office.

罗克·哈德森（1925┄1985）是好莱坞五六十年代的电影明星，以其粗犷硬朗又不失羞涩的小生形象令广大女性影迷如痴如醉，曾经连年被观众们评为“最具男子汉气概的演员”。他是英俊的代名词，拥有宽阔的肩膀、健美的身材、多情的眼睛和磁性的声音。虽然在银幕上扮演着不折不扣的异性恋男子形象，生活中的哈德森却是个地地道道的同志。1985年被确诊感染艾滋，同年10月2号在加州去世。本片算是罗克·哈德森借由自己主演的30多部影片向世人坦白自己同志身份的真情告白吧。 英文简介： Eric Farr speaks to the camera as if speaking Rock Hudson's words from a posthumous diary. Film clips from more than 30 Hudson films illustrate ways in which his sexual orientation played out on screen. First we see tenuous and unresolved relationships with women, then clips of Rock with men, cruising and circling. Next comes pedagogical Eros: Hudson with older men. We see Rock with his sidekicks, often Tony Randall. We look in depth at comedies of sexual embarrassment and innuendo: films in which Hudson sometimes plays two characters, "macho Rock and homo Rock." He's masculine yet vulnerable, a hunk who needs taking care of. Last come cinematic reflections on death.

Using extensive rear projection to remarkable effect (actors, in color, against black and white backgrounds and all photographed in high definition), Mark Rappaport evocatively plays with the themes of noir while contemporizing the stakes involved. In EXTERIOR NIGHT, there is no past. There is no present. There is only the inevitable now

In Mark Rappaport: The TV Spin-off, the filmmaker conducts a guided tour of his work that explains everything... and nothing. Rappaport shows himself to be the cinematic equivalent of Penn and Teller. The more he explains, the less we understand. The more the veil is lifted, the deeper the mystery gets.

A portrait of American actress and dancer Debra Paget, under contract for 20th-Century Fox during the 1950's.0925

A video essay tribute to actresses from Anna Stein to Anna Karina. A tribute to actresses, approaching their presence in and out the screen, humanizing the icons. From the Ukrainian Anna Stein 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.

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? Written by Fandor

Classic screen stars James Mason and Danielle Darrieux each starred in several Max Ophüls projects but never appeared together in an Ophüls movie. The film poses the question of what could have been

An experimental drama that spins the tale of a woman, her sister, and the man who completes the triangle. Told through such fertile sources as grand opera, classical painting, and Victorian melodrama.

Near Munich, in Bavaria, Germany, is the Schleißheim Palace, where French filmmaker Alain Resnais shot his film Last Year at Marienbad in 1960. Nearby is the Dachau concentration camp, where thousands of people were killed between 1933 and 1945. An essay about the present and the past, beauty and horror, life and death.

An unmistakable master of the intersection between documentary and narrative, Mark Rappaport easily ranks among the great filmmakers of our time. As Jonathan Rosenbaum noted in the introduction to his Cineaste interview with the director from 1996, "Rappaport virtually invented a new form of film criticism in ROCK HUDSON'S HOME MOVIES, a melange of clips and commentary..." FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG builds impressively on that remarkable accomplishment. With Mary Beth Hurt portraying the actress, Rappaport's "fictional essay" arrive at places that conventional documentaries are largely unable to reach.