Five Film Essays from Mark Rappaport   
    
Director: Mark Rappaport
Year: Various
Rating: Various
The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey (2020) – 7.5




This is an amusing documentary short (15 minutes) that speaks right into the heart I think of those of us who love old movies from the 40's and 50's. When close-ups mattered. When faces mattered. They don't seem to so much on the screen any more. When a close-up of Ava Gardner or Rita Hayworth could rupture your heart (i.e. the Stendhal Syndrome). The director Mark Rappaport talks sadly of how many of those actors who he loves so much are mainly forgotten, their faces captured for eternity on film but now so rarely seen except as he says by admirers. He begins with what he calls the most famous close-up ever of Joan Crawford in Humoresque - listening off stage to the music and having an orgasm though they could not say that back then.

 



But he saves most of his enthusiasm for Turhan Bey who he obsesses over in a way that could be creepy or sexual but mainly comes across as total fan boy though he would hate that term. Haven't we all had someone on the Silver Screen that we have felt that way about, he asks. Turhan was an exotic star in the 40's often appearing in fantasy adventure tales. My mother talked of him a few times though I can't recall the reason why. Son of a Turkish father and Czech mother he came to America to escape the Nazis. And was a star for about a decade. Now forgotten. Those images collecting dust. Not entirely of course in reality - there are still a lot of us who watch the old Hollywood films and remember him. I have seen him in a handful of films and maybe because of my mother I always look for him. The director has made some other Hollywood related short films that I would like to see from their titles - Conrad Veidt - My Life, The Double Life of Paul Henreid, Debra Paget, for Example, I, Dalio, The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk, Becoming Anita Ekberg and a few others. Will have to see if any of them are available on the Internet.






Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna (2020)




From Cole Porter's song Anything Goes:


If Sam Goldwyn can with great conviction

Instruct Anna Sten in diction,

Then Anna shows

Anything goes.


Anna Sten. An actress whose name I vaguely recognized. I looked through my collection and see that I have her in only one film, Chetniks! The Fighting Guerrillas. Have never gotten around to watch it but maybe I will now. She seems rather magnificent from this 26 minute essay on her from Mark Rappaport. He uses a narrator speaking for Anna looking back at her career and its both sad and amusing. She was from Russia and appeared in a few films there, then on to Germany for a few films until Goldwyn spotted her and thought he might have another Greta Garbo on his hands. In those years Hollywood was always looking for the next Garbo. Or at least Dietrich.



MGM spent two years grooming her, teaching her English and publicizing her. Finally, she appeared in a film - an adaptation of Zola's Nana (1934). Nana is a cold-hearted prostitute. That did not go over so well in America. Two more films followed with big male stars - Fredric March in We Live Again and Gary Cooper in The Wedding Night. They both suffered the same fate. The audience never took to Anna Sten. That strange unexplainable chemistry between the image on the screen and the people in the seats. MGM let her go. She went on to make other now forgotten films. I realize looking through her filmography that I saw one - They Came to Blow Up America - and I vaguely recall her in it. A Nazi fanatic.



Later on the lyrics to Anything Goes were changed and she was left out. No one knew who Anna Sten was. A casualty of the audience taste. As were so many. Lovely short documentary from Rappaport about an actress that so few know. An interesting choice. A deliberate one. Not a tragic life by any means. She lived till she was 84. Was married for 52 years. The narrator playing her just seems wistful more than sad. I could have been a star but it wasn't meant to be.




The Vanity Tables of Douglas Sirk (2015)




Here is another film essay from Mark Rappaport. Only ten minutes in length. On YouTube. The focus is on the use of vanity tables and the mirror in Douglas Sirk's films. To foretell what is to come, to show character.  I wonder how often Rappaport must have seen these films to make this connection. I certainly have seen them at least once but never made the connection because I am not that observant and also because I saw the films years apart. For observation and obsession to really work, you have to be obsessed more than I. One gets the sense that Rappaport and obsession for films goes back a long ways.




The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender (1997) - 6.0




Another film essay from Mark Rappaport. The last one I could get my hands on for now. This one is feature length though coming in at around 100 minutes. Perhaps too long. His shorts are exercises in elegant brevity. Tone poems using images from the Golden Age of Hollywood overlaid with a soothing calm narrative. This is amusing but never elegant. It felt forced to some degree and never entirely persuasive. But still at times, definitely. It depends how you look at a film but assuming people back in the 30's through the 50's were not oblivious to homosexuality, there is clearly subtext in many films. But perhaps not so much as they get into here.



The film explores that subtext of men loving men; of sexual attraction in that period, Always unspoken of course and often treated as comedy. In the 1930's you had Edward Everett Horton and Franklin Pangborn - two of my favorite character actors from the time who usually acted gay and in real life were homosexual - and everyone knew it back then. Later there was Cary Grant and Randolph Scott. Rock Hudson and Clifton Webb. This film touches on this but the main thrust is not to out gay actors but to speak about your every day films that had gay subtext. A lot of it focuses on the films of Hope and Crosby, Martin and Lewis and the sidekick in Westerns - in particular Walter Brennan and his relationships in films with Gary Cooper and John Wayne. I just thought this was stretching it. A lot. Hijinks, disguising yourself as a woman and male bonding is not always gay subtext. It is usually just what it appears to be and goes back to Shakespeare. We can't always see what we want to see. An interesting if partly half baked concept with lots and lots of great clips. I think focusing on some gay directors and how this influenced their films may have been more interesting.



Love in the Time of Corona (2021) - NR



If I had any talent whatsoever, these are the sorts of films I would make. Short personal tone poems or cinematic essays that meander from topic to topic like the human brain on a lazy day does but with a point if not a great purpose - less so here than normally. I would not say this is deep but it does get you thinking. Mark Rappaport has made a number of these over the years mixing narrative with imagery, cinema and music. Often his films deal with the movies but this time it is how covid has distanced us from one another, hidden behind our masks, unable to see others fully. It gets weird doesn't it?  Here in Thailand I have rarely seen a face in 18 months of people not friends. One can almost envision that it will always be this way. You see a woman with beautiful mischievous eyes and the rest will always remain a mystery. Only seen by her friends and family. Rappaport also gets into the lack of penises in art and the Belgium painters who drew nude women but men fully in dress. Only 16 minutes long. He offsets the mournful tone with delirious old movie clips of people in masks. Another reason this sort of film would be my preference is you can do it from home and you have to watch a lot of movies to choose your clips. Without a mask.