Herbert Rappaport

July 7, 1908 – September 5, 1983

Vienna, Austria

Herbert Rappaport (July 7, 1908 – September 5, 1983), known in the Soviet Union as Gerbert Moritsevich Rappaport, was an Austrian-Soviet screenwriter and film director. Rappaport was born in 1908 in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to Jewish parents from Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine). From 1927 to 1929 he studied law at University of Vienna. Rappaport worked as screenwriter, music editor, and assistant director in Austria, Germany, and the United States from 1928 onward. During the early 1930s he worked as an assistant to Georg Wilhelm Pabst. In 1936 he was officially invited to the Soviet Union to internationalize the Soviet Cinema which he accepted and spent the following 40 years working as a filmmaker there. Among Rappaport's best known films is Cherry Town (1962), an adaptation of Dmitri Shostakovich's operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki. In 2008 the first workshow was initiated outside Russia by the Austrian Filmmuseum and SYNEMA-Gesellschaft für Film und Medien, showing about half of his films.