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Saturday, May 21st

Upstairs at 8:30 PM

Rock Hudson's Home Movies
 
Rock Hudson - Trailer
Rock Hudson's Home Movies
(1992, 63 min)

Country: U.S.

Director: Mark Rappaport

Studio: Kino Lorber

Language: English

SYNOPSIS:

Originally released in 1992, Rock Hudson's Home Movies is a provocatively entertaining and hugely influential film essay from Mark Rappaport (From the Journals of Jean Seberg, The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender). It uses a collage of film clips from throughout Hudson's career, and a winking performance by Eric Farr as a Hudson stand-in, to highlight the homosexual subtext in his work. Subversive, hilarious and profoundly enlightening, its use of video became a model for the future of film criticism as it mutated on YouTube, TikTok and beyond.

Kino Classics is also including some of Mark Rappaport's other brilliant investigations into film history on this disc. Included are Blue Streak (1971), an expansion of what a "blue movie" really means; John Garfield (2002), a concise portrait of the pugnacious actor, Sergei/Sir Gay (2017), an exploration of Sergei Eisenstein's sublimated desires; and Conrad Veidt: My Life (2019), an in-depth examination of the anti-Fascist actor who was famous for playing a Nazi in Casablanca.


REVIEW:

“Rock Hudson’s Home Movies,” one of the most original of all essay-films, is a retrospective of the director Mark Rappaport’s work. The film was made in 1992, seven years after Hudson died, of aids, and the ensuing public disclosure that he was gay. It’s mainly composed of brief clips from a copious selection of Hudson’s films—including melodramas by Douglas Sirk and comedies that co-star Doris Day and Tony Randall—which, as revealed by Rappaport's incisive analyses, display coded behavior ranging from subtle cruising to blatant homoeroticism, at a time when Hudson’s sexual orientation was an open secret among his peers but carefully hidden from the public. Rappaport adds to these clips a fictional monologue, performed by the actor Eric Farr, who plays Hudson speaking posthumously about the ironies on which his conventionally manly screen persona was based, and the agonies of his double life. This touch of fiction turns the clips of Hudson’s performances into virtual documentaries of his inner self, of Hollywood’s winking mores, and of the repressive times.

-- Review by Richard Brody, The New Yorker(http://wwww.newyorker.com)