Rappaportmanteau

A little bit of Escher, a trifle Jung and a whole lotta radar missing - when it comes to one of the best directors you probably never heard of - Mark Rappaport. This in itself should be considered a cardinal sin, given the Brooklynite auteur has got more chops than a southern Sunday dinner.
If at all you have been privy to his work, it would more than likely have been the hagiographa 
he helmed; in such efforts as From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995) and Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1992).Works that would clearly underline the fact that this was not your grandma's filmmaker.

Although as a director, his resume only boasts thirteen titles, but as quality far supersedes quantity in any given medium, there is no exception to this rule when it comes to 1977's Local Color, he
has in his possession, the finest of bullshit detectors as he escapades through a gloss-free New York City, and parades the psyches of it's disillusioned denizens, in the likes of an octet of characters that you won't soon forget. In fact, if you watch the film right now, and revisit it in 2025, your memory
of this celluloid moment will still be securely intact. I find his films to be the ultimate cinematic Rorschach, as I scour through from frame to frame, in observational abandon, I am whisked away by
all the delectable references of Beckett and his bessy mate Joyce too. The candid candor that could even learn Woody Allen a thing or two. Rappaport knows how to get to your center and he gets there via SST.

            And what do you see in this picture?



In 1985's Chain Letters, which stars character actor du jour Mark Arnott, the director conveys about ten different genres at once and in a flash, it is veritably undefinable, but yet it still manages to make sense. Rappaport is the archetypal alchemist, he can make the incongruous quite congruous and in zero to sixty and well under four. In one of my classes that I taught a few moons ago, I assigned this film to my astute students, and they all each had such disparate responses, in a sense I had never experienced with any of the other films in that particular class's syllabus. They were all astonished and wondered themselves where had this stellar fellar been all their lives?

       And sometimes art imitates art.


Okay, yes I am gushing and in severe danger of breaking yet another objectivity rule. I almost don't want to write about this man, and savor this hidden treasure all to myself, but I also feel honor-bound, being he is an artist of Herculean proportions, he deserves a little more embrace, than the occasional anthology series shown at four in the morning in some obsolete arthouse that people use as their collective makeshift ashtrays and fling their
Lucky Strikes at.