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204 Riddles of a Sphinx From the Journals of Jean Seberg Reviewing Rock Hudson’s Home Movies three years ago, I assigned all of the movie’s writing credits to writer-director Mark Rappaport, while including Rock Hudson himself, in addition to Eric Farr (the actor hired to represent Hudson discussing his own life), as a cast member. In the case of writing credits, I reasoned that even if Rock Hudson’s Home Movies used some of Hudson’s own statements made in interviews, as well as movie dialogue (which was written by others) from numerous clips, it was Rappaport’s editing choices as well as his own text that determined the final meaning of the material. At the same time, because we saw so much of Hudson as well as Farr in this film I felt it ‘‘starred’’ both of them, though Hudson made no decision to appear in it. The same reasoning applies to Rappaport’s From the Journals of Jean Seberg, an even richer work. It’s composed of the same sort of basic materials as its predecessor—an actor (Mary Beth Hurt) who plays Seberg and is seen almost always in juxtaposition with the real Seberg, commenting on Seberg’s life while we look at clips from her features. (The commentary periodically moves beyond Seberg to take in the lives and careers of Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave, two contemporaries who, like Seberg, have been associated with radical politics.) In spite of certain methodological and stylistic similarities between Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992) and From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), the new movie is by no means a spin-off, but a substantially different work with a mood and feeling all its own. A new kind of movie, and a highly entertaining one, it has created more of a buzz at festival screenings than anything else Rappaport has done in three decades of independent work (in a career now encompassing eight features and a dozen shorter works)—a response few would have predicted given the relative obscurity of its subject. Many critics are referring to this movie as a documentary, a label I strenuously object to. However unorthodox the terms ‘‘fictional biography’’ and ‘‘fictional essay’’ appear, they come much closer to describing what Rappaport is up to. To call From the Journals of Jean Seberg a documentary is to imply that Seberg herself is speaking to us through it—a conclusion one can reach only if one subscribes to the pseudoknowledge proffered by pop journalism about movie stars. (For the record, Rappaport’s principal source, apart from films, is a single OTHER CANONS, OTHER CANONIZERS 205 book, David Richards’s 1981 Played Out: The Jean Seberg Story—the only Seberg biography, written by someone who never met her.) A suicide at forty, Seberg was hounded to death in 1979 by the FBI because of her work with the Black Panthers. When she became pregnant, J. Edgar Hoover planted a fallacious story in Newsweek that the father was black. The baby died, and many nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts followed. Part of what made Seberg’s life and career so heartbreaking was that her early fame as a teenager seemed to carry so much promise. Her well-publicized debut in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan—after a nationwide talent search that screened thousands of applicants before she was discovered in small-town Iowa—was followed by her freshfaced roles in Bonjour Tristesse (1958) and Breathless (1959), which catapulted her to icon status, her close-cropped hair becoming a central fashion reference. She also acted in films by Philippe de Broca and Claude Chabrol but got her only chance to do something interesting in an American picture called Lilith (1964); after that she was repeatedly wasted in mediocre French movies (four of them directed by her first three husbands) and Hollywood efforts like Paint Your Wagon and Airport, where she was usually miscast. In Rock Hudson’s Home Movies—which was speculative but less obviously so— one could feel that Rappaport was adopting the convention of speaking for Hudson in order to speak about him. But in this film he is speaking for Seberg in order to say many things about many subjects. Seberg the biological individual is only one of these subjects, and only in a limited and somewhat problematic fashion. On the other hand, ‘‘Jean Seberg’’ as what certain academics would call a text or a textual trace—a cluster of signs and assigned...

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