A continuation of the approach to the biopic that he’d advanced with Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, Mark Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg is at once a tribute and deconstruction of Jean Seberg’s life and the various studio systems that employed her. Seberg (Mary Beth Hurt, playing the actress at an age that she never reached) breaks down her career and life while simultaneously unpacking how Hollywood lost its cultural monopoly on cinema.
Where Rock Hudson’s Home Movies circled around the subject of Hudson’s closeted sexuality, here the overriding subject is the misogyny that Seberg faced throughout the entirety of her all-too-brief career. As Eric Farr did playing Hudson in Rappaport’s earlier film, Hurt functions as both narrator and curator of Seberg’s life, constantly situated in front of screens playing clips from the actress’s films.
Famously plucked from obscurity by Otto Preminger to portray Joan of Arc in her film debut, Seberg seemingly achieved the dream of every aspiring star. However, Hurt’s Seberg is quick to portray the experience as a nightmare in which she was set up to fail thanks to the circus of media hype that put all eyes on an untrained actor in a major role, leading to excoriating reviews. And where Preminger might have felt that he was acting nobly in seeking out an unknown to capture the spirit of the historical figure and her rise from nowhere, in practice it gave him a timid, terrified young girl that he could tyrannically rule over.
Seberg’s deference to Preminger set a precedent for her supplication to male directors. Indeed, subsequent putative star-making roles or comeback attempts were plagued by domineering men who at best condescended to her and at worst used her. The most despicable of the latter is Romain Gary, a novelist and director more than 20 years her senior who cast her in a series of roles as debased, eroticized past or present sex workers, in a reflection of his feelings toward her and indeed all women. The Seberg of Rappaport’s film struggles to explain how she kept falling into parts that demeaned her, particularly as her personal politics became more radical: “Maybe I wasn’t that smart, maybe that was it. Or I didn’t know how to read scripts. How else to explain why I was so complicitous in my own degradation.”
The exception to this tour of depressing exploitation was Seberg’s turn in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, which receives an extended exegesis in Rappaport’s film. Here, both Hurt’s Seberg and the film around her brightens with real excitement as she recalls the polar-opposite approach that Godard took to filmmaking compared to Seberg’s Hollywood collaborators, and the way that the film benefitted from her limited range to convey its themes. Here, Rappaport really lets his inner critic loose, offering numerous insights and observations through Hurt’s voiceover, including a rejoinder to the Nouvelle Vague’s reputation as a parade of jazzy cool in how it points out what a nerdy, naïve loser its Bogart-aping protagonist really is.
From the Journals of Jean Seberg unpacks Godard’s first feature, but its own formal techniques of video collage and poetic juxtaposition of archival clips hew closer to the French auteur’s later, essayistic work. Rappaport’s film begins by using clips referenced in Seberg’s monologue, but soon the imagery begins to be used in a playful, free-associative way, whether through superimposition or aurally riffing off on an element in the frame.
Nonetheless, the film’s assessment of Seberg’s life is thoroughly morose, an account of a woman who, not unlike Marilyn Monroe, had her humanity stripped away in favor of being recast publicly as a symbol and privately as a plaything. Rappaport simultaneously celebrates Seberg for becoming arguably the first star of a new, more radical cinema in the ’60s and laments that she never had control of her image nor her fate.
Image/Sound
Kino Lorber’s standard-def presentation of From the Journals of Jean Seberg shows a great deal of low-res fuzz and artifacts, though much of this can be attributed to the film’s copious use of VHS clips from other movies. You can see the green screen halo around Mary Beth Hurt’s body when these clips are projected behind her, which only deepens the film’s metatextual layers. The sound is relatively clear save for the frequently poor quality of the archival material, which does contain moments of hiss and inconsistent channel balance.
Extras
The disc comes with three recent Mark Rappaport shorts: Becoming Anita Ekberg, which probes the nature of fame as a public construct; Debra Paget, For Example, which deals with the extensive coaching involved in forging and presenting stars in Old Hollywood; and Anna/Nana/Nana/Anna, which focuses on how various starlets were groomed by studio systems. All three shorts tie into the feature they accompany as accounts of the ways that cinema has long exploited and controlled female actors.
Overall
Mark Rappaport’s poetically evocative, thematically harsh account of one of cinema’s great anti-stars finally comes to home video thanks to Kino Lorber.
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