THE FILM career of Jean Seberg, a unique and hauntingly attractive actress born in the State of Iowa in the US in 1938 and died in 1979 of an overdose of barbiturates — probably an intended suicide — is a good example of how the screen appearance of an actress/actor can leave a beautiful visual impression which contrasts sharply with their complex roles and eventual traumatic/tragic life. Though Seberg’s screen career really only took off with her second film, ‘BONJOUR TRISTESSE’ of 1957, directed by one of Hollywood’s renowned directors, Otto Preminger, of fabulous classic films about stunning female characters, films like ‘LAURA’ 1944; ‘DAISY KENYON’ 1947; ‘CARMEN JONES’ 1955, or of couples, like  ‘PORGY & BESS’ 1958, Seberg’s first film, an immature Preminger direction of the George Bernard Shaw play, ‘Saint Joan’, in retrospect seems to cast significant light on the stubbornly erratic and mentally anxious development Seberg’s real-life off-screen would increasingly take.
Preminger’s film, ‘SAINT JOAN’, was about Joan of Arc, the 15th Century French girl who was burnt at the stake at age 19 for heresy, witchcraft and sorcery, the trumped up charges of those times for European women suspected of anti-conventional habits.
Joan of Arc was certainly special in an extremely un-feminine way. Though intellectually precocious for her young age, she was somewhat of a megalomaniac; messianic and belligerently religious; war-like, nationalistic, embracing martyrdom, also masculine and pragmatically un-romantic, dying a virgin.
How much did such a role for which Seberg, a college freshman at the time, was chosen out of hundreds, uncannily suggest or project this actress’s real-life interests, or preoccupation in later years? Director Preminger had a knack for spotting the possible relation of the role to an actress’s surmised psychological makeup; and Seberg seems no different from Joan Crawford, Gene Tierney, or Dorothy Dandridge in this respect in other Preminger films.

‘Bonjour Tristesse’
Seberg’s second film, ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ — also directed by Preminger, adopted from the excellent first novel by French teenager, Francoise Sagan, that became a runaway bestseller in several languages — was perfect for her, since it offered the theme of female defiance and youthful emotional egotism that would begin to pulse like a major artery in Seberg’s emerging roles.
Seventeen-year-old Sagan had written ‘Bonjour Tristesse’ after failing her exams at the Sorbonne, finding her true profession, which resulted over the coming years in a succession of colourful and audaciously perceptive novels about the egos of men and women.
Preminger must have thought the novel’s text on a bright teenage girl’s jealousy of the attractive new woman in her bachelor playboy father’s life connected with Seberg’s personality. But something else was brought by the actress to her role; and that was the cultured fashion of her boyish hairstyle, beatnik clothes, intellectual affectations, and most noticeable of all, the flaunted sexual qualities of her short, shapely body. These beautiful qualities began to contrast sharply with Seberg’s subsequent brooding, complex, contradictory roles of mental competition and advantageousness.

‘Breathless’
Seberg’s popular claim to fame, which rests with ‘BREATHLESS’ of 1959 — Jean Luc Godard’s first film, which made his name in film history indelible — seems predictable if we take note of her intellectual yet fashionable style of acting.
With ‘Breathless’, Seberg firmly established the beatnik New-Wave female look, again with her boy-cut, striped  boat-neck jersey, dark shades, peddle-pushers, and shorts.
Was this style only the result of director Godard’s demands?
Hardly, since Seberg was known to identify with beatnik culture, and her role in ‘Breathless’, a subtly moral film, is a criticism of American Film Noir stereotypes, as glorified by Jean-Paul Belmondo, the charming French gangster she picks up with in Paris, and eventually betrays to the police, thereby negating a tendency in America and elsewhere to sensationally associate beatnik culture with petty criminality because of its unpretentious lifestyle, its association with literature, visual art, acting, Jazz, and intimacy with Blacks in the arts.
Seberg was one of many outstanding celebrity artists, such as Eartha Kitt, Marilyn Monroe, Ava Gardner, Shirley Maclaine, Francoise Sagan, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift, Frank O’Hara, etc, who were part of beatnik culture.

‘Moment to Moment’
Godard, however, accented the contradiction of Seberg’s physical attractiveness juxtaposed with the mental distaste of her role in ‘Breathless’. It could have been this director’s insight into this actress’s development on screen, where her physical beauty and sensuality struggles with a brave obsessive intelligence. Her role in Robert Rossen’s brilliant film, ‘LILITH’ of 1964, as the sensual schizophrenic girl who captivates and seduces her male therapist  proved Seberg’s ability to exemplify roles of such contradictory qualities.
In 1966 came one of the best films of her career, ‘MOMENT TO MOMENT’, where, in this rare and touching mature rendition of a married woman’s infidelity on the French Riviera, she left the screen a resolved example of passion and visual beauty possible with movies.
‘Moment To Moment’ remains one of Seberg’s best films, hauntingly unforgettable for its integrated instrumental theme and song sung by Matt Monroe, which added the perfect touch of sentiment to its visual surprises.
Seberg’s subsequent films with directors (some her husband), especially in Europe, affected a life gradually shattered by pressure for her social radicalism, a nervous breakdown, and a miscarriage. Yet, like a fertile text, her films achieved more than their intended and obvious content. We are left her screen creations which preserve that unfathomable magic of visual surface beauty captured like a reprieve after the accumulated pitfalls of her real life.