Preceded by short:Pool Boy (Emily Breer, Joe Gibbons, U.S., 1997). Hanging with Brian Wilson surely must be better than skimming leaves in the hot sun. (1 min, 3/4" video, From the artists)Jean Seberg was a Hollywood has-been at age nineteen, rage of the nouvelle vague at twenty-one, and a suicide by forty. The tragedy of her life is but one strand in this complex meditation on cinema as the sum of its strange interconnections. The insightful re-staging of Seberg's life-refracted through films as ill-fated as she-is handled by Mary Beth Hurt whose tightly shorn head and flattened delivery evokes a weary wisdom. Set against dozens of shrewdly edited film clips, from her disastrous debut in Preminger's Saint Joan, through her iconic performance in Godard's Breathless, to her nadir of notoriety in Paint Your Wagon, a Hurt Seberg tells us: "I was the first actress who returned the hard stare of the camera lens." The vacant presence, the gaze, the cut, all things filmic, soon give way to a theory that places gossip at the center of cinema. Barbra Streisand as a Jewish Saint Joan, a fleeting affair with Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda's fabulous buns all become elements in a semiotics of celebrity.-Steve Seid