Film Screening: From the Journals of Jean Seberg (Mark Rappaport, 1995)

Please note: the event begins with a wine reception at 18h15. Film screening begins promptly at 19h, followed by a Q&A with the director.

From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995) is a profoundly illuminating exploration of Jean Seberg’s career from the brilliant filmmaker Mark Rappaport. Mary Beth Hurt portrays Jean Seberg, who reflects on her life as it is illustrated through her work. It follows her as she is plucked from obscurity to star in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan (1957), to the critical drubbing that followed, her resurrection as a star in Godard’s Breathless (1960) and through her death in 1979. From the Journals of Jean Seberg is a revelatory interrogation of film history, and women’s place in it, that examines Seberg’s involvement with the Black Panther Movement while also touching on the careers of Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, and Clint Eastwood.

“Rappaport’s stylistic approach in this film is fascinating. He takes whatever is at hand, presses it to his needs, makes up what he doesn’t know, and relies heavily on the technique of showing us movie clips while telling us what to see in them. 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.”
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

Mark Rappaport, after making more than a half a dozen shorts in the 60s and early 70s, made five features in the 70s—Casual Relations (1973), Mozart in Love (1975), Local Color (1977), the Scenic Route (1978) and Impostors (1979). Chain Letters followed in 1985. The Scenic Route won The British Film Institute’s Sutherland Award as “the most imaginative and innovative film of the year.” In the 90s, Rappaport began working in video with Postcards (1990) a video narrative. Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992), Exterior Night (1993) – another experimental video narrative, From the Journals of Jean Seberg (1995), The Silver Screen/Color Me Lavender (1997) and the short, John Garfield (2002) followed.

Rappaport has also been writing fiction and essays about films for over twenty years. Several of his pieces, written for the French film magazine, Trafic, were published in France in 2008 in the collection, The Moviegoer Who Knew Too Much (Le Spectateur qui en savait trop). That collection, plus three other collections of his writings, (F)au(x)tobiographies, The Secret Life of Moving Shadows (Part 1 & 2) are now available in English on Kindle from Amazon.

Rappaport also makes photomontages and has had shows in New York, Spain, Rotterdam, Nantes, Ghent, and Paris.