This is a collection of fictions and essays about movies by filmmaker Mark Rappaport. His films include The Scenic Route (1978), Impostors (1979) and, more recently, Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) and From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995). The Moviegoer Who Knew Too Much is a genre-defying book; part speculative fiction and part memoir. It re-imagines the lives of people who made the movies and how they revealed themselves on the screen. From Sergei Eisenstein to the actor who played The Creature from the Black Lagoon, secret and sometimes invented histories are explored and put into contexts which they never dreamed possible. Several of these pieces appeared in various international magazines, especially in the French film journal Trafic. This collection was originally published in a French translation in 2008. Now it is available for the first time in English.
Here’s what world-renowned writers have said about it—
Art is proof of Bishop Berkeley's dictum, that to be is to be perceived. The vast crews responsible for the creation of a film, from director to assistant's assistant, need, in order for their creation of shadows to exist, the eye of the beholder. Mark Rappaport's extraordinary gift is not only that he is able to see creatively, to bring critically into being what he sees, but to be able to put this vision into words, so that we too, on the other side of the page, can perceive what he, on this side of the screen, has so keenly perceived. The ancients knew that we require guides when venturing into the realm of shadows. Mark Rappaport is one of these rare enlightened and enlightening spirits.—Alberto Manguel
Mark Rappaport has created a new and very personal form of film criticism in which fiction is a driving force. The world of cinema becomes a place of constant permutations and improbable encounters: Marcel Proust's path crosses Alain Resnais' in Marienbad; the actor in Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible and the star of von Sternberg's The Scarlet Empress, Marlene Dietrich, become lovers during the filming of Ivan at the studio. Cinema itself undergoes a metamorphosis and is re-born in these imaginative essays.
These essays, some originally published in the film journal, Trafic, are not merely a collection but are actually a book. —Raymond Bellour
It’s very exciting as well as gratifying to see the continuing of Mark Rappaport’s cinema by other means. Many of the roots of that cinema can be found in art and literature, and The Moviegoer Who Knew Too Much contrives to return them front and center to the intricate pathways proposed by his highly original form of cinephilia. Until now, this superb collection of metafictions, meta-essays, and cine-imaginings has been available only in a handsome French edition (Le spectateur qui en savait trop, P.O.L, 2008); on the flyleaf of my copy, Mark wrote, “Maybe next year en anglais.” Five years later, that dream is fulfilled, and those who’ve been able to sample this wonderful book in magazines like Film Quarterly and online locations such as Rouge can now have access to all of it. —Jonathan Rosenbaum
