The Stendhal Syndrome or My Dinner with Turhan Bey

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.

2020-12-31 | en

Lullaby of Ukraine

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?

2022-10-24 | uk

Wild Plants of Palestine

Wild Flowers Plants of Palestine 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.

2018-04-05 | en

Last Year in Dachau

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.

2020-07-10 | fr

reminiscence on the garden

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.

2022-04-25 | ru

Daedalus

"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.

2024-07-17 | en

The New Nerd

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.

2020-02-21 | en

Functions of Film Sound

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.

2013-03-26 | en

Sankofa

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.

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Love in the Time of Corona

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.

2021-06-08 | en

Andrei Tarkovsky: WATER

A visual and interpretative journey through the filmography of Andrei Tarkovsky, in search of the hidden meaning behind the recurring presence of water — a central and mysterious element in his work. This video essay analyzes the scenes in which water appears, organizing them by theme: from everyday actions to metaphysical moments. An attempt to understand whether, behind the poetry of natural elements, lies a deeper message from the russian filmmaker.

2024-06-19 | it

HIPERTEXTO

2022-05-28 | pt

Rope’s End

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

2022-05-21 | en

Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna

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.

2020-06-30 | en

Swimming, Dancing

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.

2023-09-30 | en

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

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

2023-05-06 | en

Ten Lives of a Cat: A Film about Chris Marker

Ten years after the death of iconic French filmmaker, Chris Marker. A filmmaker, hoping to rediscover that unique sensibility against the uncertainty of the new century, returns to the places synonymous with those incomparable and unforgettable films-- From the cat cemetery of Sans Soleil, to the mausoleum of The Last Bolshevik; The caves of Level Five to the rooftops of The Case of the Grinning Cat. A biographical portrait of one of the 20th century's greatest and most misunderstood filmmakers.

2023-10-31 | en

Letter to My Tribe

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.

2024-09-28 | en

A Brief History of Circles

An experimental video essay which uses circles and waves to explore neurodivergent experience.

2024-02-10 | en

CARA-B

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.

2023-04-15 | ca