Chained Relations (Redux): #9

In the last week a number of things have happened regarding, as Mr. Carney has chosen to call it, “L’Affair Rappaport.”  What has happened is that Mr. Carney has finally come out from behind his veil of silence, and spilled his verbose self onto a new blog of his own making, Inside Boston University.  Here, in his inevitably obsessive and long-winded manner, he excoriates BU, and Mark Rappaport (and in a quasi-aside, myself).  In doing so, he repeatedly pulls the rug out from underneath himself and his myriad and repetitive arguments.  While I can’t in any way prove it, it would appear that this exercise in self-revelation on his part has been elicited by the very public exposure on the internet of his actions of which he complains, and the subsequent pressures applied by Boston University.  Without these it is easy to imagine that he would have sat tight, figuring Mark’s original internet letter would rapidly disappear in the endless chatter of the net and life.  His veil would work. However, that isn’t what happened, as his loud lament about being “cyber-bullied” makes clear.  Instead, his actions and behavior have been revealed, and his employer, Boston University, has in turn also been pressed to deal with the matter, and has brought his behavior under examination within the institution.

In his self-published letter – all 12,000 words of it – Mr. Carney repeatedly contradicts himself, and, in plain spoken English, lies.

In his first deposition, dated July 12, 2012, this is the story which Mr. Carney tells, to a court, for a legal deposition:

On August 27, 2012, to the same court, this is the story Mr. Carney tells, about the same material:

In his self-published blog posting of March 13, 2013, Mr. Carney goes to great lengths to describe the difficulty of his searching for, cataloguing, “archiving” and restoring the materials he claims were “gifted” to him by Mark Rappaport.   Here is a picture of those materials, taken in Carney’s lawyer’s office.

For those unfamiliar with such things, the stack to the left has 3 16mm reels, one in a can which holds a 1,200 foot reel; the two standard fiber boxes appear to contain reels of 800 feet.   The boxes below these might contain papers or perhaps magnetic sound recording tape, probably perforated for mixing.   The stack in the middle has another single reel fiber container for what would appear to be a 1,200 foot single reel, and below it is another fiber case, likely for two 2000 foot reels – a print of a feature-length film.  The three more modern tan plastic cases below it would contain double reels of 16mm film, again features.  The white container has half or 3/4 inch video tape, transfers of Rappaport’s films from 16mm to tape.  You should now be able to figure out what’s in the final stack: some more 16mm reels, a video tape, and another box of either papers or tape.  The entire assortment, arranged slightly differently, would fit in a size 2 x 2 x 2 feet:  8 cubic feet, or something that could readily fit in a rather small closet.

Rappaport’s view from seeing this photo, and from what Mr. Carney has written in these affidavits, is that Carney had never even opened the boxes, and hence had not “catalogued” them until required by the court.   The boxes are the same that the material was sent in.   Mr. Carney’s description of the “chaotic mess” etc. is belied by the evidence; his story of having discarded materials, given some away was belied by the itemized list he finally presented which included everything Rappaport had sent to him for safe-keeping.    For his alleged services in storing, archiving, cataloging and “restoring” these items, Mr. Carney requested a payment of 27 thousand dollars as his price to return Rappaport’s property.

In ordinary English Mr Carney has convicted himself of lying in these two documents; in legal language, as noted above, he has committed PERJURY.  In the context of the American legal system and the context of these depositions, Mr. Carney committed a CRIME.

The nature of this forcefully suggests that Mr. Carney’s cavalier attitude with “the facts” is normal in his life, and that little or nothing that comes out of his mouth can be trusted to be “true.”    In his lectures and his writings on his BU blog, Mr. Carney natters often and at length about honesty, integrity, and such things.    In his letter, while he loudly complains about the lax standards of contemporary journalists, he states, regarding myself, numerous utterly untrue things.  He claims I was married to Teresa Villaverde, the mother of my daughter, Clara Villaverde Cabral Jost.  We were not married.  Hence, also contrary to his claims, we were not divorced.  Clara was kidnapped by Villaverde, from her home in Italy, in violation of Italian law (which legal authorities demanded her return under the Hague Convention on International Child Abduction, which law Teresa Villaverde had also violated).  Mr. Carney seems to think that speaking in public of these things, and attempting to secure my daughter’s safety, and Portugal’s compliance with the law, is something amiss.  Mr. Carney’s version of my view on 9/11 is similarly askew:  I at no time have said or written that there were no “terrorists” involved in 9/11; what I did write is that there is rather convincing evidence that figures in the Bush administration knew the attack was coming and allowed it, to use for their own purposes.  See the PNAC document, along with much other evidence regarding this event.  I am far from alone in having profound doubts about the official story of 9/11.  Disingenuously, Mr. Carney, who used me to post his diatribe on BU, and in process wrote me admiring emails, citing my willingness to speak out in public as a virtue, now inverts this and resorts to ad hominem attacks sourced in his own very false “information.”

Mr. Carney, in his behavior towards Mark Rappaport, and in his false statements, above, and in his ever-so-lengthy posting, has done little but discredit himself, and destroy whatever reputation he once had.  In my view he has utterly disqualified himself as a person who should be teaching in a supposedly first rank university, much less a lowly community college: he is a hypocrite of the first order, and offers no example for impressionable young students.   Were he a person of the least character he would resign his teaching post; and were he a person of inward intelligence, he would seek medical help for the psychological monsters which control him.

On a more pleasant note, I’d like to pass along word that Mark Rappaport’s book, The Movie Goer Who Knew Too Much is available from Amazon. Here’s what Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote about it:

“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

And a few other views:

” And 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