I rented this video essay because I was recently reminded of this great independent American director, many of whose works I saw a decade ago and loved, and started a fairly useless thread about him that got few replies on an IMDb forum. Apparently, he is still awfully underground and unknown.
I don't know if this would change things even if I could magically get a bunch of people to see it. Basically, it's a 100-minute deconstruction of the late American actress Jean Seberg's career, with Seberg "played by" narrator Mary Beth Hurt, who (as stand in for both author/director Rappaport and the dead actress) offers a withering feminist critique of the roles, both on and offscreen, that naive small-town Iowa girl Seberg found herself thrust into from the moment she first auditioned for Otto Preminger's film of Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan in 1955 at the age of 17. Questioning the way in which male directors dominate and abuse female stars, the casting by so many men of their wives as whores and cheats, the pornography of suffering in every rendition of Joan and the choices that women - but not men - get pushed into making as they age, this is a wide-ranging look at both Hollywood and European morality in the film industry, at the politics of the late 60s and how they impacted Seberg and other star actresses like Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, and much more.
A provoking and pointedly subversive and subjective document, rather than a "documentary", this is I think essential viewing for anyone interested in the politics and sociology of stardom, and for fans of Seberg, Preminger, Jean-Luc Godard and Clint Eastwood in particular. Those interested in Seberg's films should be warned that the endings of "À bout de soufflé", "Lilith" and "Bonjour Tristesse" are given away. I can imagine that many would find the approach here irritating and even offensive, particularly those more wedded to traditional documentary styles, but to me it is a masterpiece and not far off the level of Chris Marker ("Sans Soleil") and Orson Welles ("Filming 'Othello'") in this fairly rare cinematic form. Mark Rappaport is not after and probably doesn't believe in some kind of absolute "truth", some specific answer as to why Seberg's career and life ended the way they did, indeed he is willing to place some of the blame on the actress herself; he is interested in provoking discussion and thought, and in that he succeeds entirely.
I don't know if this would change things even if I could magically get a bunch of people to see it. Basically, it's a 100-minute deconstruction of the late American actress Jean Seberg's career, with Seberg "played by" narrator Mary Beth Hurt, who (as stand in for both author/director Rappaport and the dead actress) offers a withering feminist critique of the roles, both on and offscreen, that naive small-town Iowa girl Seberg found herself thrust into from the moment she first auditioned for Otto Preminger's film of Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan in 1955 at the age of 17. Questioning the way in which male directors dominate and abuse female stars, the casting by so many men of their wives as whores and cheats, the pornography of suffering in every rendition of Joan and the choices that women - but not men - get pushed into making as they age, this is a wide-ranging look at both Hollywood and European morality in the film industry, at the politics of the late 60s and how they impacted Seberg and other star actresses like Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, and much more.
A provoking and pointedly subversive and subjective document, rather than a "documentary", this is I think essential viewing for anyone interested in the politics and sociology of stardom, and for fans of Seberg, Preminger, Jean-Luc Godard and Clint Eastwood in particular. Those interested in Seberg's films should be warned that the endings of "À bout de soufflé", "Lilith" and "Bonjour Tristesse" are given away. I can imagine that many would find the approach here irritating and even offensive, particularly those more wedded to traditional documentary styles, but to me it is a masterpiece and not far off the level of Chris Marker ("Sans Soleil") and Orson Welles ("Filming 'Othello'") in this fairly rare cinematic form. Mark Rappaport is not after and probably doesn't believe in some kind of absolute "truth", some specific answer as to why Seberg's career and life ended the way they did, indeed he is willing to place some of the blame on the actress herself; he is interested in provoking discussion and thought, and in that he succeeds entirely.