BREATHLESS — Jean Seberg & Jean-Luc Godard dress down film and fashion

In 1959, a brash critic-turned-filmmaker named Jean-Luc Godard cast movie star Jean Seberg in his first film, BREATHLESS. You probably know it revolutionized movies, but it also had a big impact on fashion, onscreen and off—by seeming like it wasn’t even trying. With the help of historians and critics, host Rico Gagliano decodes Seberg’s “French Girl” style…and also gives you a peek into his ’70s disco wardrobe.  Seriously.

Season 5, titled Tailor Made, dives deep into the worlds of film and fashion. Each episode tackles a landmark movie that captured a major fashion look of an era, and then decodes what that look meant—to the culture that spawned it, the people who wore it, and the audiences who watched it on screen.

BREATHLESS is now streaming on MUBI in Italy and Turkey. Also, check out First Films First, our series of directorial debuts that launched the careers of some of cinema’s finest auteurs. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

Links to the books and video essay mentioned in the episode: BREATHLESS edited and with an introduction by Dudley Andrew, JE NE SUIS PAS PARISIENNE by Alice Pfeiffer, and the LILITH DVD that includes the extra “The Many Faces of Jean Seberg” featuring Pamela Hutchinson.

Finally, Rico's disco look in all its resplendent glory 🤩

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

Heads up: 0:04

this episode includes adult themes, mention of self harm, spoilers, and as is my custom when we start a new season, a few minutes of nostalgia. When Paramount Pictures released the movie <i>Saturday Night Fever</i>, I was seven years old. It was rated R, my parents never took me to see it. But they didn't have to.<i>The original soundtrack music of Saturday Night Fever.</i> Before the movie even hit theaters, its disco tunes were already monster hits.<i>Including the number one hit single:</i><i>How Deep is Your Love?</i> And when it actually came out, I mean, the images were everywhere.<i>Do you know the tango hustle?</i><i>- Yes, yes.- Here let's try it.</i> There was John Travolta dancing in clips from the movie on Siskel and Ebert's TV show <i>Sneak Previews</i>. John Travolta dancing on the cover of my parents' Time Magazine. John Travolta dancing in the pages of my humor comic book Mad Magazine in a parody called'Saturday Night Feeble'. Just he was inescapable.<i>In Italian your name is the past participle of the verb travolgere</i><i>which means to sweep away.</i><i>Did you do that research?</i><i>To overthrown, or if you happen to be John Travolta,</i><i>the name means 'to take by storm'.</i> I thought it was all so cool. Travolta. His movie, its music and... his outfit. Even if you're like seven year old me and you've never seen <i>Saturday Night Fever</i>, you know the outfit. He's wearing it right there on the movie poster: three piece suit, white vest, white jacket with huge lapels, white flared trousers. It is the seventies on a coat hanger, and it was instantly iconic worldwide. I mean, I was there. I danced at the opening as a kid of <i>Saturday Night Fever</i>. Can you imagine my disco mood? That is director Baz Luhrmann telling me about his youth in Australia, in an interview we did back in 2013. I had it, I had the white suit. I was about 15 and I had this sort of cheaper Australian company made the shoes. Now me, I was too young for a whole suit, but it was clear if you wanted to pledge allegiance to<i>Saturday Night Fever's</i> disco vibe, and in 1978 who didn't? You wore something flashy and white. So I lobbied my folks for flared white polyester pants and a satiny white polyester shirt with a hang glider collar. There's a shot of me wearing this ensemble to my cousin's wedding in '79. Hit pause check the show notes of this episode and gaze upon me... resplendent. Now I wasn't a popular kid. In fact, at school, I'd say I was the least popular kid. So I wore that shirt whenever I could for like a year. It was so hip. Surely it would help? And finally one day in '79, one of the cool girls stopped by my desk in home room. She was smiling and she says, "Hey,"you like disco, huh?" I said, "Yeah." And her face went suddenly hard and she goes, "That figures."Disco... sucks."<i>Disco sucks!</i><i>Disco sucks!</i> Yeah, unbeknownst to me that summer, a disgruntled rock DJ named Steve Dahl had actually blown up a crate of disco records between games of a baseball doubleheader at Chicago's Comiskey Park. Triggered a riot and launched a nationwide anti-disco movement which some will tell you was fueled by racism, homophobia and misogyny because disco culture had started in gay clubs and celebrated a lot of black female artists. Suddenly anything that represented disco,<i>Saturday Night Fever</i> or disco radio formats or my satiny shirt had to be attacked. I just wanted to fit in. But for months... I had been branding myself as an outsider. There's a lot to take away from that story, but here's a couple of things. First, movies can totally change what people wear, even movies they haven't seen. And second, what people wear can really, really matter. I'm Rico Galiano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service, the champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. Today we launch season five, we're calling it 'Tailor Made' and it's a deep dive into fashion on film. Something I'll be honest, I haven't always taken seriously. I mean, it's associated with frivolity, right? Clothes. But I think it's really so much more than that. That is Stacey Battat setting us straight. She designed the costumes for Sophia Coppola's last five movies. Clothes, they are our feathers, they're our coat, they're armor. You know, there is something that allows you to be identified as belonging to a certain group, or not belonging to a certain group. They're a visual representation of the image we want to project to the outside world. OK? So with that in mind, every episode, this season, we're going to dig into a movie that captured a major fashion look of an era. And then we're going to decode that look, figure out where it came from, what it meant to the filmmakers and what it meant to audiences once it hit theaters. Fashion, in this film, really resonates with the young people at the time. They're seeing themselves on the big screen. When I was watching this film I thought "That girl is so cool." We showed Quadrophenia and it gave us a template for life. So let's do it. For the first half of this season. We'll look at movies from three fashion capitals, New York, London, and we're starting today fittingly in Paris with Jean Luc Godard's 1960 flick, <i>Breathless</i>. A cornerstone of the <i>Nouvelle Vague</i>, the French New Wave, and a movie that changed fashion on and off screen by seeming like it wasn't even trying. Yeah, the actors were absolutely wearing their own clothing for this film and it looks like they just showed up to set. Among the results, what's now called'French girl style', a kind of fashion attitude that made star Jean Seberg into an icon, became a symbol of liberation, and now for some... exclusion. It was maybe liberation. But then it turned out it was liberation of upper class women. So pull on some capri pants and grab a pack of Gauloises as we rip open the seams of <i>À bout de souffle</i>,<i>Breathless.</i> I've watched <i>Breathless</i> every few years since it blew my mind back in my first week of film school. And every time I managed to be a little surprised when I remember the biggest star in this landmark French film, the woman who became a poster girl for French style wasn't French. Anyone who's seen Jean Seberg from <i>Breathless</i> that they would never guess her origin story. It's so sort of wholesome and American. That's critic Pamela Hutchinson. On top of her work for The Guardian and Sight and Sound she's the central interview of a short doc called <i>The Many Faces of Jean Seberg</i>. She's from Marshalltown, Iowa and she was very young. She'd been doing summer stock when she auditioned to play Saint Joan in this new film that was going to be made by Otto Preminger.<i>St Joan</i> was Preminger's epic about Joan of Arc. It was going to be his first flick since 1955. A year he directed two Oscar nominated movies. It was a big deal. And it got bigger when he announced he was going to hold a worldwide talent search to cast the title role.<i>My name is Jean Seberg.</i><i>Where were you born?</i><i>Marshalltown, Iowa.</i> You can see the footage of her audition and you see this sunny smile and this woman, the young woman, young teenage woman who really wants to become an actress, and she's very sincere.<i>- That makes you what age?- Seventeen</i><i>and 11 month.</i><i>A single month, almost 18.</i><i>And do you want to be an actress?</i><i>Very badly.</i> So when she got cast, it was huge news. This young Midwestern girl got the part in the big 1957 movie. It was a bit like when Vivien Leigh got cast as Scarlett O'Hara, it was that kind of thing. There was all this expectation on her, and she wasn't very good in the film. Yeah, Seberg's time on the set was miserable. Preminger was a tyrant. Definitely not the guy to take a newbie by the hand and coax out a great performance. So her work wound up being not so epic.- Did it hurt much, being burnt?- I think it did at first.<i>But then it all got mixed up.</i><i>I was not in my right mind until I was free of the body.</i> Her performance just doesn't really feel natural. It doesn't fit what we expect from such a truly sort of iconic historical character. She's still basically, you could see the Iowa girl shining through Joan of Arc. Yeah. And you know, in some ways, all the publicity around her being cast was capitalizing on this golden sunshine girl. And so nothing was going to fit from there on. She couldn't be the star that people wanted and the character that the film demanded at the same time. So she'd had all the hype around being this young discovery and she just didn't in anyone's eyes live up to that. Her career starts with sort of this huge false start. But here's the thing, most actors would try to erase all memory of that kind of flop, pretend it never happened. But Seberg, and the kind of gutsy move that would characterize her whole life, did the opposite. She took Joan of Arc's defining feature and wore it like a badge. The cropped haircut that she wears in <i>Saint Joan</i>, most young women trying to start in Hollywood would not want to cut off their most sort of prized asset, their hair because it's considered, you know, very precious to have this flexibility and versatility, let alone the fact that having longer hair looks much more feminine, classically, and she makes herself look like a startled little boy with this really cropped haircut. But of course, it actually really suits her. It makes her look incredibly modern. It makes her look like a beatnik. It makes her look hip. It might be associated with her sort of humiliation being in <i>Saint Joan</i> but she realizes that this is her calling card, and she doesn't look like anyone else in Hollywood. It was her first step towards the style and the attitude that was gonna capture imaginations for decades.<i>Cecile!</i><i>Aren't you interested in anything?</i><i>- Yes, I'm going someplace else.- Where?</i><i>I don't know.</i> This was her second step. The film <i>Bonjour Tristesse</i> another Otto Preminger joint. But this time featuring Seberg as the opposite of a saint. It's set in France she plays this spoiled daughter who's interfering in her father's affair. She's in almost every scene and she's so much stronger in this film and this haircut goes from being the sort of the symbolism of the martyr into the marker of a young modern confident woman.<i>- Thank you.- And how does little Cecile</i><i>feel about her naughty old father getting married?</i><i>Little Cecile feels like having a great big drink...</i> when she wears that haircut in <i>Bonjour Tristesse</i> she looks chic and she looks bold. She looks very fashionable and yet there's just a hint of that vulnerability, the sort of shaven headed look. For Seberg it was a total reset, playing a character who goes from jet-set <i>ingénue</i> to conniver, and ends up a kind of broken cynic. And this time movie-goers, well, mostly still didn't care.<i>Bonjour Tristesse</i> sadly was not a success in America, not financially, the critics didn't like it, but was admired in France, which is where it had been filmed and it was in Paris that the critics who are about to burst onto the world with the <i>Nouvelle Vague</i> were absolutely besotted with her performance in <i>Bonjour Tristesse</i>. Including two critics in particular who were about to stop just writing about movies and start making them. Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Jean-Luc Godard was definitely a character. He was the least social of the group of boys, the fraternity at <i>Cahiers du Cinéma</i> the film magazine that began in 1951. Dudley Andrew has taught and written about cinema for half a century. He edited and wrote the intro to one of the go to books about <i>Breathless</i>, called Breathless. And he hung around Francois Truffaut who was his closest friend in so far as he had any close friends. He was a difficult person, very spoiled, I think. And had been wealthy whereas Truffaut, for instance, was extremely poor when he grew up. They were an odd couple, but as critics at <i>Cahiers du Cinéma</i> and then at a magazine called Arts, they shared a lot in common, especially a hatred of the big period dramas that dominated French movies at the time. And a love of films that were as the local philosopher, Jean Paul Sarte might have put it: authentic. OK. The word authenticity was on everyone's lips. It had been for quite a long time because of Sartre who made such a thing of it. So that was just the calling card word for things that were true to yourself. This is the way you existentially make your life valuable to yourself. You just do things that are personally in tune with who you are, who you want to create for yourself. Being yourself, no matter how hard society tries to make you conform. Alfred Hitchcock making his perverse thrillers, he was authentic. Film noir directors who turned b-movies into works of existentialist art. They were authentic. And Jean Seberg in <i>Bonjour Tristesse</i> with her mysterious tomboy sex appeal you just didn't expect from a Hollywood talent contest winner. She was authentic. So in 1958 I suppose it's because of Truffaut, they put Jean Seberg's picture on the cover of <i>Cahiers du Cinéma</i>. The film had not done that well in the United States, but Truffaut was ecstatic about it and he-- his great review of it comes out in Arts Truffaut famously said, you can't take your eyes off her. She's fantastic. Godard agreed, and she was still on their minds a year later when they dreamed up what turned out to be<i>Breathless</i>. On paper it doesn't seem like the makings of a revolutionary piece of filmmaking. In fact, the plot reads like a 1940s film noir set in the modern day. That was by design. The idea for<i>Breathless</i> came from Truffaut having noticed a newspaper story of this man who had killed a policeman, and had gone on the lam, and had gone to Paris and had run into some women. And I think he thought it was very similar to one of the films that all these guys loved, which was <i>They Live By Night</i> Nicholas Ray's first film. And also a little bit like <i>Detour</i> another film noir from 1949. And when Godard turned Truffaut's story into his debut film, it did have all the trappings of a noir. There is indeed a tough antihero named Michel Poiccard played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. Who does shoot a cop and go on the lam in Paris. While he tries to scare up money to flee to Italy he holes up with an old flame Patricia, an American student and wanna be journalist played by... Jean Seberg. And in the end, as expected for a film noir spider woman, Patricia sells him out to the cops, and Poiccard gets what's coming to him. The movies even shot in noir, black and white. It's just that everything else about <i>Breathless</i> was totally unexpected. It was an homage to noir and a critique of it. A frantic movie, with a 20 minute conversation in the middle of it. A movie about death that was as alive as could be, and the way it was made from day one of shooting, it was clear that was gonna be on Godard's terms. 100% authentic. You know, Godard and Truffaut both had an idea that filmmaking should not be a routine. He once called out Jean Delannoy who was a very important regular filmmaker. He said I saw him coming up to the studio and he had a briefcase in his hand. What kind of director would ever walk out of a car and go in at nine in the morning, or eight in the morning, into his office with a briefcase. He's not a filmmaker. So Godard had a different idea. He had an idea of this filmmaker as poet. He talked about that frequently. Rimbaud would have been a filmmaker and he would have shot films the way I do. He would say just whenever the whim hit him, he would do it. It's true, Godard shot when inspiration struck, sometimes wrapping for the day when he just wasn't feeling it. In some scenes, he used the camera like a poet's pen while his actors performed. He had his cameraman sit in a wheelchair and he would roll him around himself and invent almost, design the shot as if they were alphabetical letters in cursive. Meanwhile, instead of studio sets, Godard famously shot on actual Paris streets, permits be dammed. Casting the whole unwitting city as itself. He does put the camera inside a kind of mail bag basket that's got canvas on its sides, cut a little hole out for the camera so that the cameraman could sit in the basket, be wheeled along and shoot with nobody recognizing that there was a film being made. In those days that was really quite stunning that you could get the naturalness of the actors and of the situation in which they find themselves. But maybe most stunning of all, at least to Jean Seberg was how natural, how authentic Godard wanted her to look. I remember Seberg saying he was the opposite of Preminger, especially in treating her. Where Preminger controlled her every move, including all of her publicity had makeup people all around her, getting rid of the blemishes on her face, which she actually always had, definitely giving her clothes that she would dress up in both on set and off. Godard didn't want any of that. He gave her no makeup. I think it's mentioned that the makeup girl used to come and put a little bit of powder on her nose when Godard wasn't looking. He didn't want anything on her. And as far as having her costumes designed. There truly was no costume designer. It's kind of generally accepted that yeah, the actors were absolutely wearing their own clothing for this film. That is Raissa Bretaña. She teaches about fashion and film at the Fashion Institute of Technology and she says this just wasn't done in movies headlined by a Hollywood star, then or now. I'd say even contemporary films today, even though they're wearing shopped for purchased clothing, there is still usually a veneer of this- is-a-Hollywood production to it. And Jean Seberg clothing in <i>Breathless</i> looks like she simply rolled up to set, and that is what she was wearing that day. That is kind of the antithesis of what I normally think of as film costume. And clothes Seberg chose for herself? Those felt groundbreaking too. From the first moment she appears on screen hawking newspapers on the Champs-Élysées.<i>New York Herald Tribune!</i> When you first see her, she is wearing a New York Herald Tribune shirt with cigarette pants and flat shoes. And it's so unexpectedly chic. It's kind of hilarious that that has become the iconic look from this film because it is essentially her work uniform. But in 1960 it's this flashpoint where you see this young liberated woman, she's completely done away with kind of all of the fripperies of the 1950s. Normally, when you think of 1950s style, you think of, you know, the bullet bras and the nipped waistlines and all of the hair is fastidiously coiffed. That entire era in fashion was all about hyper femininity. And so to see Jean Seberg be so gamine and androgynous and casual is kind of jarring when you compare it to everything that had come before this moment. There's a moment in that scene where Jean-Paul Belmondo buys a paper off Seberg, then just hands it right back."I don't want it." He says,"No horoscope.""What's horoscope?" asks Seberg."The future." He says,"I want to know the future.""Don't you?""Me too." She says<i>New York Herald Tribune.</i> But off screen, according to Dudley Andrew, she actually didn't envision much of a future for <i>Breathless.</i> When Seberg saw the first, string out of the film and they cut it down to a reasonable amount that they thought they could use. She said"They're never going to distribute this movie.""I guess I had a good time. I made my 12,000 bucks,"but it's never gonna come out."I've never seen anybody make a movie like this. It's not how they do it."That's not how you make a movie!" How little did she know.<i>Breathless</i> casually takes the film and fashion world by storm. Coming up in just a minute, stay with us. All right, everybody MUBI is the curated streaming service that champions great cinema, wherever we find it from any country, whether it's made by legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers, we have always got something new for you to discover. And actually let's talk about first time directors since <i>Breathless</i> was Godard's debut, right? At this moment on MUBI US viewers can watch Wes Anderson's first outing <i>Bottle Rocket</i>. Which I still remember seeing in theaters when it came out. It was marketed kind of like a heist comedy, which I guess it is, but I was expecting a Tarantino, pulp kind of thing which everyone was making at the time. Imagine my surprise when I got an eyeful of Anderson's drollery, if that's a word. If you haven't seen it it is everything you love about Anderson's humor and style, but on a budget and with a little less whimsy. Still hilarious though and still lovely. Subscribe at MUBI.com to check it out. And while you're there, take a look at our collection called 'First Films First' where you will find first features from Christopher Nolan, Lars von Trier, Barry Jenkins, Kelly Reichardt. Speaking of Tarantino, some countries have<i>Reservoir Dogs</i>. To find out which of those are playing in your country check the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. So it's late 1959 Jean-Luc Godard's directorial debut is in the can and now he switches on his other great talent, something he picked up from working as a press agent for film studios and for his own producer, Georges de Beauregard. Getting publicity.<i>Breathless</i> immediately got, got picked up for distribution. And one of the reasons is that Godard spent a lot of effort pre-publicizing the film. And of course, he is a master of images. He's interested in what people like to look at and he's often critical of it, but he really understands it. So he had all kinds of pre-release, newspaper stories about the difficulties that the actors were having with his way of making the film, and with Beauregard's anger at his not working every day, and at various ways in which the film looked like it was not going to be able to come in that budget. So that when the film came out, people were already attuned to the fact that Godard was making something that was out of the ordinary and doing it in a completely new way that nobody had ever seen before. He also made sure the guest list at the premiere was stacked. People were favorably impressed Jean-Paul Sartre came to the screening, André Malraux, the Minister of Culture came to see it. He had high placed people coming to watch the film, writing good things about it. So, you know, he couldn't lose. And he didn't. You may think of <i>Breathless</i> as an arthouse flick, but in Paris, it opened in a chain of commercial cinemas, sold hundreds of thousands of tickets, supposedly earned 50 times its budget and blew a lot of minds, particularly in a certain corner of the French audience who took one look at Jean Seberg and recognized themselves. She's clearly somebody of the new age and that's the other thing that can't be forgotten that there's a new demographic, a new way of culture. There's a whole lot of kids born that are now coming up through the existentialist moment, they're reading philosophy, listening to new kinds of music, including jazz and bebop and they're going to movies and they want to see a newer kind of movie. So <i>Breathless</i> is showing them the kind of movie that they really need or at least the kind of spirit that they ought to have. And for a lot of them, the look they ought to have. The movie was very well received and kind of the lore of women in Paris cropping their hair after seeing this movie really lives on. Women in Paris and beyond. Like in the UK, the blossoming Mod subculture fell in love with French New Wave films. So it's probably no accident that by the mid sixties, bam you've got UK supermodels wearing Seberg-esque pixie cuts. I think Twiggy comes in as a fashion model about four years later and I happen to live close enough that I got to see Mia Farrow sometimes you know where I grew up and she took on the Seberg look, many people say. When you see women getting that haircut even today, there's always kind of a harkening back to this moment. Seberg's outfits still resonate too alongside folks like Picasso, she is now forever associated with a classic French breton striped shirt because she wears them for like half the movie. And Google, New York, Herald Tribune T-shirt and you'll find hundreds for sale from cheap homespun replicas on Etsy to the$125 version that fashion house Rodarte dreamed up for the film's 50th anniversary. But really what lasted from Seberg's <i>Breathless</i> look? Something a little more ephemeral. I think it's less so about the actual clothes and kind of the specific style details or the cut. I think a lot of it is really just the attitude with which the clothing was worn, which is this effortlessness. There's this distinct flavor of French nonchalance. It's the epitome of cool in that way. It sort of says look at how elegant I am. But also I'm not trying to make you look at me. And she walks up and down the street and she doesn't think anything of wearing her boyish clothes and her boyish hair and defying the conventions of her home, back in America. It looks like she wears this every day. Because of course Seberg actually did wear this every day and was being shot by a director who went to great lengths to make her look natural.

Voila: 26:37

an American from Iowa became one of the first icons of what came to be called 'French girl style'. I should say that was not a phrase used at the time. I really do think it's a more modern invention. It's us looking back at these films and dubbing it'French girl style'. With the emergence of social media and Tik Tok and all of these aesthetics that come in and come out. Everything has to have a name, everything has to have a hashtag and so I feel like we're kind of retroactively codifying things. So what modern fashion sort of extracted from New Wave film is this idea of effortless chic supposedly perfected by well French girls. And it could actually be a liberating idea, an alternative to beauty norms and elitism. Like on one hand, you got Jean Seberg in <i>Bonjour Tristesse</i> wearing a fabulous high fashion Givenchy dress at the Paris nightspot, Maxine's.<i>May I take her to the races tomorrow?</i><i>I'd love to go, thank you.</i> But on the other there's her'French girl style' in <i>Breathless</i> where she looks equally cool, lounging around her tiny apartment in just her boyfriend, Belmondo's oversized dress shirt. In other words, Seberg's <i>Breathless</i> look announced elegance could be simpler, cheaper, more accessible, gender fluid. Liberation in all directions. But some will tell you in today's France, the style doesn't always work that way. Because with new liberations comes new norms, you know, with new deconstructions comes new reconstruction. So, it was maybe liberation. But then it turned out it was liberation of upper class women. Alice Pfeiffer is a Franco-British fashion journalist for magazines like Elle and Vogue. Her latest book is called <i>Je ne suis pas Parisienne</i>'I am not a Parisian'. A critique of a look she says marketers have sort of morphed French girl style into. The Parisienne style. The Parisienne style has become the one face of what French femininity is. The style is interesting because it inherits from different feminist movements. So it's ample cuts. It's a lot of menswear, it's practical cuts, it's things you can actually move in. But then there's small amounts of restrictions and implications that actually show it's a very limited range of women. The same French white women. Take, for instance, one of the <i>de rigeur</i> Parisienne garments so called 'boyfriend jeans'. They're basically cut like 501 Levi's and they're a men's cut. So it's actually faux menswear aimed at women to look slender inside menswear. And it only works if you're tiny inside it. It's like wearing a man's shirt that you, you wouldn't be able to fill up because you're so fragile inside it. In other words, it's effortlessly chic unless you have a curvy figure. And of course, boyfriend jeans implies you have boyfriends. So I'm interested to know how like what's a queer Parisienne? A lesbian Parisienne? What does she look like? What does she wear? Like if the boyfriend is out of the picture? Does-- do the clothes evolve? How is it not white Parisienne? How is Parisienne of color? How is a not thin Parisienne? because it's, it's fine as a style. But who is it actually for? I'd be interested to know how it can be twisted like any culture or style of subculture how it can be twisted or reinterpreted to be more inclusive, given how, how mixed France is. So I really wanted you to hear that last part. Because when I listened to Alice Pfeiffer there, I think Jean Seberg would have been really into this conversation. So throughout the sixties Jean Seberg is becoming a slightly more outspoken and actually putting her money where her mouth is when it comes to the causes that she supports. She's very much in favor of the civil rights movement and she goes on to support the Black Panthers. Social justice had always been her style. At age 14, she had joined the NAACP. A move her dad warned her would get her marked as a communist in the middle of the red scare. She wasn't afraid. She's talking a lot about being a feminist and her embrace of androgyny as well. But it's this political support of the Black Panthers that worries certain high ranking officials in the American government and the FBI start surveilling her, which is really sort of the beginning of the end of the Jean Seberg story. Yeah, they launched a smear campaign against her that she battled for years. You probably know it ended in tragedy. So I'm just going to end the story here. Because it's enough to show just how right Truffaut and Godard were about Jean Seberg. She was authentic. A revolutionary inside and out. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us this season for more stories about the power of film and fashion. Next time we dig into a movie all about the clothes obsessed UK kids who loved the French New Wave, the Mods. Everyone looked the same. And then after <i>Quadrophenia</i> they didn't, they looked original and different. Guests include <i>Quadrophenia</i> director Frank Rodham and fashion legend Anna Sui. Follow us so you don't miss it. Meanwhile, this episode of the MUBI Podcast was written hosted and edited by me Rico Gagliano. Ciara McEniff is our producer, Stephen Colon mastered it. Our beautiful original music was composed by Martin Austwick except the disco track<i>Nostalgia</i> by Ben Fox. Extra thanks this week to Rachel Yang, Mark Dezzani, Abi McNeil, Nico Rivers, Michael Jinno and especially Corrina Lesser. The series was executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review, wherever you listen. Also, if you've got questions, comments or photos of your new pixie cut, email us won't you at podcast@mubi.com And of course to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast. Just head over to mubi.com to start watching. Thanks for listening, be safe, and may all your movie outings be worth dressing up for.