Jean Seberg's story, from her Cinderella-like rise to celebrity in Otto Preminger's SAINT JOAN in 1957 to her equally precipitous fall after the movie was released, through her resurrection as a star in Godard's BREATHLESS to her death, officially labeled a suicide, in 1979, is examined through clips from a wide range of her films and other films of the time. But FROM THE JOURNALS OF JEAN SEBERG is hardly a conventional "bio-pic". A political and emotional casualty of the '60s, Seberg's life and work is recast in a political context. Portrayed by Mary Beth Hurt in a fictitious autobiography, Seberg herself re-examines her roles and assesses her place and that of people with whom she worked in a larger context of film history which, as she says in the film, is "a very, very long gossip column." The result is a meditation on the artifice and conventions of cinema, as well as the contradictions inherent in all modes of cinematic representation.