LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Jean Seberg: Films
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Jean Seberg succumbed to severe bouts of depression, and was hospitalised several times. On every subsequent anniversary of her child's death she attempted suicide. In 1978 she even survived an attempt during which she threw herself under a train on the Paris Metro. Following this attempt she seemed more at ease, and even planned a return to filmmaking in 1979. However, she was reported missing in Paris later that year, and despite public pleas for her to return home, her legions of fans feared the worst. She had been missing for two weeks when she was found dead in the back seat of her car in a Paris suburb on 7th September 1979.
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A Bout de Souffle examines the last hours of Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo), his relationship with Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg) and his attempt to escape the police net tightening around him. On the surface the plot is that of a not very original thriller, but Godard made it completely his own in conception and execution. All the rules of conventional film making are scorned: the camera is rough and unrefined and the script and editing are jumbled, rambling, repetitive and inconclusive, full of irrelevance and abruptly changing moods. Godard’s debt to American “B” picture mythology is obvious but the interest comes from the way Godard handles his material.
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Godard works it very skilfully, the fusillades of close-ups of Jean Seberg's head having a Miles Davis feel. Some fine 'classical' effects occur, notably in the killing of the cop, where cutting wonderfully expresses reflex, panic, switched fate. The Griffithian iris-ins evoke lost purity. The looks and direct address into camera, far from inducing Brechtian alienation, or spectator guilt over 'voyeurism', suggest sincerity (even via insolence)... intensifying spectator identification. The subtitle dedicating the film to Monogram is a vague gesture, or ploy to amaze critics, excuse cheap flaws, plead unpretentiousness, and underline this film's enormous differences from Monogram's notoriously, and really dull dim product.
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The last-ditch attempt to make Seberg a Hollywood commodity was "Paint Your Wagon." During shooting she became involved with co-star Clint Eastwood, an affair that added to her emotional scars. The Eastwood screen phenomenon ... comes under the magnifying glass, with a fanciful line traced from Russian formalism of the silent period (Gary's father was a Soviet film star of the time) through the French New Wave to the Man With No Name.
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In 1974, Seberg managed to complete a short called BALLAD OF A KID, directed, written by, and starring herself. It was about the meeting of two myths: the movie queen and the outlaw. There are obvious parallels between the film and her life.
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It is important to qualify this "autobiography" of the unforgetable actress Jean Seberg as an cinematic essay by the incisive experimental filmmaker Mark Rappaport. He works in a style known in filmmaking as "camera-stylo," or "using the camera as a stylus or pen." There is less experiment here than reportage, and he finds a lesson in the life of the actress that reflects on a tragic intersection of celebrity and politics with sobering effect. Rappaport has produced the best documentary ever made about an actress; Mary Beth Hurt brings to it a heartbreaking honesty.
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