The High Solitude of a Rare Bird
2008; Issue: 75 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2562-2528
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoDuring all the years I have lived in daily contact with Jean Seberg, I have regained from her some of that brave candor you need to win by losing. -Romain Gary Once upon a time, there was an actress called Jean Seberg who lived her life. You might have heard of her. Despite her small stature, she was a beautiful creature who captivated everyone in the room. Once on screen, her big blue eyes stared right at you from the enhanced Technicolor screen. Her closely clopped hair, blonde and perfectly sculpted, was chic and modern, novelty and iconic all at the same time. This year, come September 8, marks the 29th anniversary of her prematurely tragic death. The year was 1956, the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema, of dreams and glamour. Otto Preminger--the big-time Hollywood director of Viennese-origin--while looking for an unknown to play Jeanne d'Arc for his screen adaptation of Saint Joan, discovers Jean Seberg from Iowa's farmlands, and introduced her to the blinding Californian sun. Jean was still a teenager then. A fair maiden just like Jeanne d'Arc when she drove the English out of French soil and crowned Charles VII at Rheims. The publicity surrounding Preminger's search for his Jeanne d'Arc on every remote corner of America--hitherto unheard-of, not since David O. Selznick cast Vivien Leigh in Cone with the Wind--made this Jean out of Iowa an instant worldwide star even before Saint Joan was released. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As was custom in those days, upon Herr Preminger's request, Jean was contracted, and later made a prisoner of Columbia Studio. Thus, she was given the role of Jeanne d'Arc as was promised to her under his watchful eyes. If you were an actor back in that day, you had no freedom. Led by camera flashes, they hopped from hotel suites to press conferences, then to movie premieres with their dates fixed by the studio. That was the rules of the game: if you were an actor, you simply had to obey what the studio told you. And the maiden out of Iowa was fed up under the Californian sun; she was fed up with Preminger's constant harassing and his insults, calling her a terrible actress. Fed up, because this Preminger did not understand her; he merely used her as a puppet and cared only about his overall enterprise. Only on rare occasions when he told stories about Vienna, did the old Austrian treat her well. Sometimes after the shoot, Jean had to sit politely in a restaurant and listen to his stories. And it was always the same: Mozart, Freud, Klimt, Schnitzler... To see out her contract, Jean, biting her lip, underwent another tormenting shoot with Preminger, appearing in Bonjour Tristesse. The only consolation during the shoot was playing the rebellious character of Cecile, with whom jean could at least identify. If you are unhappy ... if someone's always pulling you down by the ankle, you can't fly ... this rare bird Jean ... out of Iowa ... Then the year 1959 arrived--the end of the decade, the end of the Golden Age. At last freed from her captivity in Hollywood, Jean took off to Paris to work with the then-unknown, young and charismatic Jean-Luc Godard. For his first film Breathless, Godard had given her the role of Patricia, an aspiring American writer with a big dream, making her living in Paris selling New York Herald Tribune on the trendy Champs Elysees. In her role as the girlfriend of Jean-Paul Belmondo, an ocean apart from the Californian sun and the Faustian Preminger, Jean blossoms as an actress under Godard's freewheeling, youthful, and hectic direction. She must have been what? 21 years old? 21 years old and American, her first time living alone overseas. Jean had arrived in Paris with no translator, no agent, nothing--just a suitcase and a little bit of confidence in herself. just imagine how free Jean must have felt, speaking her lines in American-accented French, to the applause of Quartier Latin intellectuals. …
Referência(s)