Old Hollywood

Jean Seberg in Breathless (1960, dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

“I don’t know if I’m unhappy because I’m not free, or I’m not free because I’m unhappy.”

∞ Sep 5th, 2009 at 11:46 am

[On Hollywood] “I never knew until I came here that somebody could be really nice to you for years and really hate your guts. Happens all the time here.”

-Jean Seberg (via getty)

∞ Sep 27th, 2009 at 4:10 pm

Jean Seberg

Jean Seberg in Saint Joan (1957, dir. Otto Preminger, adapted from Shaw’s Saint Joan )

“I will never take a husband. A man in Toul took an action against me for breach of promise; but I never promised him. I am a soldier: I do not want to be thought of as a woman. I will not dress as a woman. I do not care for the things women care for. They dream of lovers, and of money. I dream of leading a charge, and of placing the big guns.”

-George Bernard Shaw, Saint Joan

Big guns aside, this is one of the least impressive films made of Joan of Arc’s life, though it’s a good example of the different cultural sensibilities & perspectives European & American filmmakers have brought to the story - European films primarily concern themselves with Joan of Arc the martyr; it is on her persecution and death that Robert Bresson & Carl Dreyer concentrate. In American productions, she is a rebel & a woman of action, and it is this side of her that most interests Otto Preminger & Victor Fleming (director of the 1948 film starring Ingrid Bergman as Joan).