Today we remember American actress Jean Seberg who was born on this day in 1938. Seberg isn’t a household name, but her iconic turn as an unlikely femme fatale in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless made her a screen immortal even if her activism and the FBI harassment it attracted proved she was all-too-human.
Here’s Roger Ebert‘s take on this fascinating, impressionistic documentary about the actress, From the Journals of Jean Seberg…
If it is true, as Jean-Luc Godard once said, that “cinema history is the history of boys photographing girls,” then one task of movie historians should be to find out what happened to the girls in the process. Mark Rappaport, who uses the Godard quote in his new film “From the Journals of Jean Seberg,” takes it to heart in a unique way. He presents Seberg as the narrator of her own life.
Seberg died in 1979, hounded to suicide by the FBI, which planted poisonous items about her in a gossip column. Since she was not available to play herself, Rappaport uses the actress Mary Beth Hurt (who looks a little like Seberg might have) to play her. And the movie’s narration is all spoken by “Seberg,” in the first person.
Some of it may be based on things she said or thought. Most of it, incon women in the movies, politics, and her fellow actresses, is invention. Rappaport’s mixture of fact and fiction is more audacious than Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” – but the movie makes it perfectly clear that it is using both history and imagination, and the result is a tough, intelligent look at the grueling job of being one of those girls photographed by the boys.
Here’s the film…
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