Social & External
A video essay by Mark Rappaport, which spans René Magritte and Michelangelo to Bonnie & Clyde. Let’s mask up to rob a bank! But make sure that you are home before the curfew.
Dedicated to the Children of Ukraine, victims of the brutal Russian invasion...Let everyone ask themselves and the leaders of their countries: what else has to happen, what arguments are needed that Ukraine is finally given the necessary military aid for Victory?
A short documentary that emerge at the center of round table debate, participating in it there's three students from the Superior School of Arts and Design, Caldas da Rainha - Portugal. This conversation go along with a video essay about Afrofuturism and Pop Culture. Also, during the debate, an interview with another student gives some real example of how afrofuturism can be applied when it comes to in taking control of the colonial narratives into a black person perspective.
An experimental video essay which uses circles and waves to explore neurodivergent experience.
YouTuber Jeffiot goes digging for the origins of skull trumpet / doot doot / mr skeltal, and ends up taking a trip to the early web heyday of animated gif art, and ruminating on creativity and legacy.
The film follows journeys of observational tours solicited by the Palestinian Museum and conducted by two professors from Birzeit University to collect photos of and information on the Palestinian Flora. The title is adapted from a collection of 123 images (circa 1900 to 1920) of wild flowers in Palestine found in the Matson Collection in the Library of Congress. Despite the tendency to trace the wild plants, the text in general aims at questioning the territorial extension of what is meant by the term “Palestinian”, while standing on insignificant topographical features of the (postcolonial) landscape in West Bank. Furthermore, it addresses photography as a practice and a tool of distributing and restricting information at once.
A fictional biography of Hollywood actors Martin Kosleck and Hans Heinrich von Twardowski, both of whom fled Hitler-era Germany to live a long-lasting relationship.
A psychotic filmmaker named Philip summons a manifestation of Stanley Kubrick into his apartment to confront him on the depiction of mental illness in his filmography. Kubrick's obsession with 'crazy' characters who meet an untimely death disturbs Philip, who wishes he could see Kubrick characters who manage their illness. The two directors go on a journey into Kubrick's films to understand insanity in our modern era.
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.
What could have happened – what should have happened – if two giants in film history, like Greta Garbo and Sergei Michajlovič Eisenstein, could have declared their love for each other? The world's most famous actress, an honorary Russian citizen of cinema for her many performances; the world's most radical director, who could have immortalized her face in one of his famous close-ups? Sphinx Garbo did not want to be alone: she just wanted to marry the great Sergei. Perhaps she could have played Trotsky or Pancho Villa in one of his films. Perhaps their friends Charlie Chaplin, Walt Disney and Josef von Sternberg would have approved their love. Maybe they could have had a child together. Maybe all this could still have happened, in a Mark Rappaport film.
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.
A fictionalized biography on John Dall who was in two great movies - Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950).
This visual essay sets clips from Robert Bresson's "A Man Escaped" to a reading of "Functions of Film Sound," a chapter from David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson's book "Film Art." The chapter analyzes the sound design of Bresson's masterpiece as a means of discussing the use of sound in film.
A desktop documentary that focuses on the Golden Record that NASA sent into space in the late 1970s. The piece reflects on issues such as the power of scientific discourse to produce revisions of the world, the evolution of the concept of the archive and the resignification of borders in the rhetoric of space colonialism.
This documentary looks at Black people's interest in comics, cosplay, and more and asks whether this is a new phenomenon or something not highlighted.
Letter to My Tribe started with a question: Why don’t more Jews and Israelis speak out about Palestine? Over many years my mother, who represents a more messianic perspective, and I have had numerous arguments, some recorded, some not. These form the backbone of this video essay in which Israelis and Jews, journalists, activists and a rabbi are interviewed, and in which documentation of actions on the ground, in the West Bank, are woven with more personal family histories and journeys to Iraq and to Poland.
"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." A 7 day vlog during the summer of 2023, a story of dreamers and drowners.
Joan Crawford's close-up in Humoresque. Michelangelo's David and Boticelli's "Birth of Venus". Stendhal was overwhelmed by the cultural overstimulation in Florence, which Graziella Magherini described scientifically in 1979 as Stendhal syndrome. Mark Rappaport describes his fascination for the Austrian actor Turhan Bey, who made a career in exotic roles in Hollywood in the 1940s. A very personal essay about the effect of close-ups, the canvas idols of the dream factory and the role of their admirers and fans.
