Directed by Rappaport
A Soviet filmmaker from Vienna
April 17 to 28, 2008
The only (Austrian) emigré with a veritable filmmaking career in the Soviet Union was born as Herbert Rappaport in Vienna in 1908 and died in Leningrad in 1983 bearing the name Gerbert Moricovic Rappaport. Initially assistant to G. W. Pabst on the German and French masterpieces of the early 1930s, Rappaport was officially invited by the Soviet Union in 1936 to internationalize their anti-Nazi and entertainment cinema. He accepted the invitation, and spent the next 40 years traversing the many landscapes of genre film: from resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, Japanese spies in Manchuria and Partisan uprisings in Yugoslavia to war comedies and musicals, whodunits and Zhivago-style epics of the Revolution.
On the occasion of his 100th anniversary, a comprehensive homage to Herbert Rappaport will take place for the first time: a rediscovery which also offers glimpses into Russian cinema beyond the names in the official canon. Whether in the early film Professor Mamlok (1938) or the late East German co-production about the bread of the revolution, Black Dried Crust (1971), whether in shorts such as Van'ka or A Hundred for One (made for the legendary war almanacs) or in Rappaport's best-known film, the gloriously colourful Shostakovich adaptation Cheryomushki (1963) with its tremendously amusing choreography: film for him always equals craft times conviction times skill times experiment. It is a métier of collective endeavour and one whose history is sometimes driven forward beyond the categories of auteur filmmaking. If Rappaport had ended up in Hollywood like his old school chum Fred Zinnemann, he might have secured for himself a place in the hearts and minds of the world's cinephiles long ago.
This show, curated by Barbara Wurm and Olaf Möller, is a joint project of SYNEMA, the Austrian Film Museum and the Diagonale, in cooperation with the 60-year anniversary of Gosfilmofond, Moscow. On this occasion, SYNEMA will produce the first German-language publication on Herbert Rappaport.
