Casual Relations

Born in Brooklyn, NY and residing in Paris since the early 2000s, Mark Rappaport is known as a trailblazer of the video essay form, thanks to his decades-long career creating painstakingly assembled works that interrogate the cinematic medium through his striking juxtapositions. Rappaport’s career began with the 1966 short MUR 19. After making more than a half-dozen shorts in the 60s and early 70s, he made six narrative features in the 70s and 80s—CASUAL RELATIONS, MOZART IN LOVE, LOCAL COLOR, THE SCENIC ROUTE, IMPOSTORS, and CHAIN LETTERS, a series of eccentric, surprising narrative films, stuffed with cinematic references and formal experimentation. 

CASUAL RELATIONS (1973)
In Rappaport’s dazzling and bizarre feature-length debut, he focuses on states of imaginative possession and dispossession, demonstrating how impossible it is to separate fantasies, dreams, and realities.