video essay

The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey

Thu, 31 Dec 2020

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.

Functions of Film Sound

Tue, 26 Mar 2013

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.

Daedalus

Wed, 17 Jul 2024

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Shot in just seven consecutive days during the summer of 2023, it concludes the first volume of Bliss, a playlist of sounds and shapes. Daedalus delves into the perilous dance between striving for something and the suffocating pull of stagnancy. This chaotic structure bridges the warnings and epiphanic thoughts of 20th-century thinkers with the lives of today's dreamers.

Rebuild of Evangelion Series Analysis

Invalid Date

Rope’s End

Sat, 21 May 2022

A fictionalized biography on John Dall who was in two great movies - Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope (1948) and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950).

The Marriage of Greta Garbo and Sergei Eiseinstein

Sun, 28 May 2023

Last Year in Dachau

Fri, 10 Jul 2020

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.

Letter to My Tribe

Sat, 28 Sep 2024

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.

HIPERTEXTO

Sat, 28 May 2022

Lullaby of Ukraine

Mon, 24 Oct 2022

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?

Swimming, Dancing

Sat, 30 Sep 2023

Swimming, Dancing examines audiovisual representations of the Yangtze (1934–present), from silent film to video art to the contemporary vlog. Inspired by the city symphonies of the 1920s, Swimming, Dancing pieces together a “river symphony”, evoking the images, sounds and contradictions that make up the river’s turbulent history.

Love in the Time of Corona

Tue, 08 Jun 2021

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.

Martin und Hans

Fri, 20 May 2022

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.

Sankofa

Invalid Date

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.

CARA-B

Sat, 15 Apr 2023

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.

Referred Pains: the Necessity of the (Minor) Malignant Violation in Slapstick Comedy

Sat, 06 May 2023

An extension of the Benign Violation theory of comedy developed by Tom Veatch and A. Peter McGraw and Caleb Warren. Source: The Cure (1917) Dir. Charles Chaplin and Edward Brewer

Money, a Mythology of Darkness

Tue, 17 Nov 1998

In a nightmarish world, dominated by the decline and degradation of Man , Christ resurrected wandering, across three different eras of human history.

The Present Situation

Invalid Date

The Present Situation is a half narrative, half video-essay film about a small group of “extremely online” budding revolutionaries who kidnap a hedge-fund manager. Peppered throughout the narrative is a spectacle of video clips from a wide variety of sources (PBS documentaries, YouTube explainer videos, TikToks, old and current News Magazine programs, etc.)

A Weak & Panicked Animal

Sat, 11 May 2024

Enclosed by a civilised landscape, society reduces the problem of human survival to a minimum. The sidewalk, the fence, the clearing, demarcate a treaty between man and nature whereby neither one of us shall pass these thresholds lest we become subject to the law of the other.

reminiscence on the garden

Mon, 25 Apr 2022

A gentle and confused home movie in search of a lost space - my grandmother's garden, where I spent my childhood. There is nothing to testify to that place and my time there. There are memories pollinated by the pollen of garden poppies the warmth of my hands, toiling in the sunshine and the stories of adults about the big world. Summer, reveries, childhood, prejudices, the realities of the noughties, a small town - shimmering images that can never manifest, but endlessly manifest themselves. The intimate experience is torn by externalised reality: the formerly Latin poppy becomes a threat to gardeners and gardeners, bugs represent terror and flowers represent death.