Revisiting Mark Rappaport's Rock Hudson Collage Film For Home Movie Day

ERIC FARR AND ROCK HUDSON IN MARK RAPPAPORT’S ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES (1992). SOURCE: GARTENBERG MEDIA ENTERPRISES.

Today, October 21st, is Home Movie Day. As noted on the celebration’s official website, Home Movie Day was started in 2002 by a group of film archivists concerned about what would happen to home movies shot on film during the 20th century. The first Home Movie Day happened on August 16th, 2003, and “has grown into a worldwide celebration of not only amateur film, but also home movies on analog or digital videotape, as well as newer forms of personal documentary and expressive media… HMD screenings focus on community and personal histories in a meaningful way.”

An essential work in the “home movie” genre is Mark Rappaport’s 1992 collage film ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES, currently available for North American institutional acquisition, as both a DSL file and DVD, from GME. Fitting for both Home Movie Day and LGBTQ+ History Month, Rappaport’s piece — originally shot on video and later transferred to film — combines archival footage of Hudson and excerpts from his movies to re-engage with the actor’s image and body of work in the light of what everyone knows about him now: that he was gay and died of AIDS.

Rappaport notes:

Hudson is a unique paradox — the paradigm of manhood on the screen that happens to be a homosexual. The fictional construction of Hudson turns into a text to be read or re-read in many different ways — but all roads lead to Rome. Rock Hudson was a prisoner as well as provider of a strategy and sexual stereotypes. It is a prism through which one can explore the questions of sexuality, the coding of the genre, the sexual role-play in Hollywood movies and, by extension, America in the fifties and sixties.

Hudson is a fascinating figure in Hollywood and queer history. As someone who was closeted his entire life, he proves an antidote to openly gay figures and activists working in the film world, like Vito Russo (whom GME remembered earlier this week). Yet, his diagnosis of (and death from) AIDS brought the disease into the public consciousness in a way it had never been before.

It was a shock that a major celebrity like Hudson, who wasn’t openly gay, and who was the embodiment of “strength” and “manhood” in so many major motion pictures, could be susceptible to this disease. While Hudson kept his sexuality a secret for much of his life, there was no concealing his diagnosis and subsequent passing, a reality Rappaport confronts in his film. In one particularly moving scene, actor Eric Farr, playing Hudson post-mortem, tells the audience: “When I died of AIDS in 1985, everyone was so shocked that the lesser shock, that I was gay, was more easily absorbed.”

J. Hoberman, writing for Village Voice, praised ROCK HUDSON’S HOME MOVIES as “first-rate film criticism, as well as a reanimation that invests ‘Rock Hudson’ with a passion and pathos barely evident the first time around.” Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader was similarly praiseworthy: “[With this film, Rappaport] suggests that we don’t have to be million-aires or commandeer a television network to enter into a dialogue with the crushing Hollywood machine.”

Learn more about Rappaport’s film by visiting the official listing on our site, and head to Home Movie Day’s website to learn more about this yearly celebration.