A Parisian artist of indomitable creative output, Jean
Cocteau was a master of the avant-garde, surreal, and Dadaist art schools. He
brought his unique brand of whimsy, heavily indebted to mythology and symbolism
to a wide variety of disciplines. Not only did he write novels, poetry, plays,
films, librettos, he painted, worked as a designer and illustrator, flirted
with journalism, but he’s best remembered for the small handful of films he
made in the 40s and 50s.
His diverse works began pouring out in the
middle of WWI, but he wouldn’t go near film-making until 1930 with the first
entry in his loose connected Orphic trilogy, The Blood of a Poet. The Blood of a Poet is surreal, artistic film that moves and breathes like a
piece of diegetic poetry and synthesizes mythology. The film builds itself
around an artist’s creativity and the myth of Orpheus, chops itself into four
chapters, and a series of oneiric images add disorientating flavor. This film
may lack the anchor that later Jean Cocteau films like Beauty and the
Beast would contain to provide a grounding reason for the
hallucinatory and beautiful images, but it’s still a knockout of a debut.
At
times it can feel as though the images are a flurry of strangeness that signify
nothing so much as mere peculiarities, but that is a surface reaction to the
film. Yes, sometimes the images and their connection to the loosely defined
narrative are incomprehensible to anyone but Cocteau, but I wouldn’t trade
their strange beauty for anything else. Much of The Blood of a Poet is
circular in its logic and storytelling devices creating a closed circuit of
logic in its feverish ramblings of divine inspiration and madness.
The
first section concerns the artist trying to erase a drawing, only to find the
mouth he’s erased affixed to his hand. He then transfers this mouth to a statue
in his room, and the statue compels him to enter a mirror. Once in the mirror,
things go even more topsy-turvy as the crawls across the doorways and peaks in
on various odd happenings in different rooms. This underworld compounds an ever
escalating series of weird events to increasingly unhinged and dream-like
images. Somewhere along the way it all makes an odd sense as you watch, but
it’s near incomprehensible to adequately describe to someone else. This is its
own type of virtue and beauty.
I gleam
the interior struggle to create art and bits and pieces of the Orphic myth, a
story that would possess Cocteau enough to create a trilogy around it. This
sense of mystery will either wrap around in comfortingly beguiling terms, or
keep you at an arm’s length in intellectual frustration. This is a weird film
with relatively few straight scenes, and possibly the most avant-garde of his
films without a strong tether to a more coherent through line. The
Blood of a Poet is deeply unusual, but it’s staggeringly gorgeous and
a clear glimpse into Cocteau’s psyche. He paints with off-kilter images, light,
and Enrique Rivero’s sensual body and expressive face. It is an imperfect
viewing experience, but no less essential for these hindrances.
Sixteen years would separate Cocteau’s first
film with his follow-up, Beauty and the
Beast, one of the great cinematic treasures made under tremendous
adversity. If adversity and strife make for great art,
then that perfectly explains why Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast is
one of the towering greats of cinema. As the rubble and dust settled from WWII,
Cocteau created this pristine and immaculate piece of fantasy cinema to rouse
the collective spirit of the country, spurred on by the encouragements of his
muse and lover Jean Marais. The film stock was hard to come by, causing certain
scenes to look rougher than others were while maintaining the dream-like
disorientation that permeates throughout. Cloth was harder to find, and several
morning the crew and cast would go to set to find the bed sheets stolen
overnight. And Jean Cocteau was gravely ill midway through production, and his
condition required continuous breaks to take painful injections.
Now
watch the film again and look for where the bleeding sutures from these tears
in production show. You can’t find them, but you will find a movie of
uncompromising beauty, grace, imagination, and poetry. Beauty and the
Beast is equally soulful and fragile, ephemeral and tactile.
The
film opens up with Cocteau, stars Jean Marais and Josette Day writing their
names on a chalkboard, announcing a certain level of self-reflection and
theater at play here. Then Cocteau breaks down the fourth wall further with a
written prologue by imploring the audience directly to suspend their cynicism
and open their minds to a child-like sense of belief and wonder. Beauty
and the Beast is perhaps the most revealing and personal of Cocteau’s
handful of films.
Cocteau
was an artistic polymath, with a dizzying number of novels, poems, plays,
librettos, drawings, and paintings created by him. He is best remembered for
his films and this one in particular. By tapping into the sexuality in the
fairy tale, and his own queerness in a roundabout way, Cocteau created the
greatest film interpretation of a fairy tale and the definitive example of a
monster-in-love.
The frustrations
of repressed love are palpable in the Beast’s earliest interactions with
Beauty. He carries her across the threshold, places her in her bed, and she
recoils in terror when she first sees him. Humiliated, as he often will be in
these early awkward romantic encounters, he turns from her and demands that she
never look him in the eyes. These failed attempts at coitus come to a head when
Beauty decides to take a stroll with the Beast in the woods, and the scene of
him drinking from her hands is achingly romantic and erotically charged. Name
me one queer kid who won’t identify with the abject terror Beauty and
the Beast demonstrates in its earlier scenes at burgeoning sexuality
and its confusion (Beauty’s bed in Beast’s castle opens up its own sheets, and
she flees in terror/horror before fainting).
Yet it
wasn’t just his own queerness that Cocteau tapped into here, but the scarred
psyche of all of France. Beauty’s home life, a wasting bourgeoisie with a dying
patriarch and divided loyalty within its unit, can be read as writ large of
France’s immediate national id in the wake of the Nazi Occupation. The happy
ending of Beauty and the Beast doesn’t declare itself with a
strong period, but a more wistful ellipsis. Beauty’s disappointment in the
Beast’s transformation from leonine to handsome prince is unmistakable, and
this ending while optimistic is not declarative or definitive in any way.
It taps
into much of Cocteau’s work, a deep love of the artifice and aestheticism.
Surface textures, ornate costuming, proudly arcane special effects, and a
pervading sense of romanticism merge with the ways he contorts our
expectations. We expect Beauty to be an ethereal creature, one defined by her
goodness and self-sacrifice, but Josette Day plays her with subtler shadings.
Day excavates a dancer’s grace in Beauty’s movements even when she performs
mundane tasks, and a weakness that borders on the hermetic. She’s doomed to a
life of servitude towards her vain sisters, ineffectual father, lout brother,
and the aggressive romantic advances of his best friend (Jean Marais, in one of
his three roles). Day’s transformation from this oppressed creature to romantic
figure is startling when you think about the trajectory of the character, but
she does it with tremendous ease that you never see her sweat.
But
this is as much Jean Marais’ masterpiece as Cocteau’s, and Marais plays his
triple role with grace and confidence. He’s a portrait of toxic masculine
aggression as Avenant, the beautiful but morally and emotionally empty friend
of her brother’s. He’s poised and regal as the handsome prince with his stiff
body carriage and posh manners. Yet these two performances are mere adornments
to his work as the Beast, one of cinema’s greatest and most essential
performances. His Beast is eternally at war with the regal prince trapped
inside and the predatory exterior. The makeup job on him is extraordinary, but
it’s the way that it frames and highlights his eyes that truly makes it
special. Marais’ eyes are his primary means of expression for a long time,
along with his hands that frequently signal his suppressed rages or demonstrate
an uncommon grace. Beauty and the Beast is made-up of several
great artists bringing their highest operating levels to this project, and
Marais’ gesticulations, wounded eyes, and erotic screen presence cannot be
praised enough here.
And
if Beauty and the Beast is best remembered for anything, it’s
the never-ending cascade of surreal, painterly images of magical
occurrences. The Blood of a Poet had a few of these, but
nothing prepares for the transportive powers of Beauty and the Beast’s
sequences. There’s the scene where Beauty cries diamonds, one where she emerges
from a wall after putting on a magical glove, she floats above the ground in
Beast’s castle, and in yet another her clothing transforms from plainclothes to
an elaborate gown by entering a doorway. This is but a handful of them, and
sights that are even more wondrous as the film goes on. I’m quite fond of the
quick glance of spilled pearls creating an elaborate jewel in the Beast’s palm
myself.
If only
more fantasy films would borrow the lyrical, imaginative tone on display here.
It never shies away from the darker elements at play in the fairy tale, and it
takes great relish in examining what we desire and fear. It’s romantic, it’s
mature in its emotional life, it has an indomitable ability to make the
fantastical feel as real as the poverty of its earliest scenes. Fuck
Disney, Beauty and the Beast is the definitive film document
of a fairy tale, and as close to cinematic nirvana as we can get.
After
the storied highs and artistically daring work of Beauty and the Beast,
this follow-up is something of a drastic comedown and a minor work. It’s the
odd man out in his small canon. There’s no flights of poetic lyricism, no
smoke-and-mirrors special effects that enchant with their hands-on approach.
It’s a claustrophobic and stage-bound film, and incapable of removing itself
from its origins.
There’s
a strong sense of romanticism here, like many of Cocteau’s films, in the
traditional sense. Not only is it sweepingly emotional, with melodramatics that
thunder from the mountaintop, but there’s a potent sense of tragedy and danger
lurking around. This is romanticism in a literary sense, with the emotionally
turmoil reflected in the weather, atmospheric castle, and baroque clothing that
swallows up the cloistered characters.
Even
better is how effective the two leads are in engaging in their dance with love
and death. Jean Marais again does multiple parts, but this time one of them is
a spectral role that is only mentioned and felt but never seen. The late king
and his poetic anarchist bear a striking resemblance to each other, one of
these roles is only glimpsed in paintings that lurk in the background. The king
haunts everything in the castle walls, and Marais’ poet occasionally seems
possessed by his spirit.
But The
Eagle with Two Heads is a clear showcase for Edwige Feuillère as the doomed Queen. She delivers a
twenty-minute monologue to a mute Marais that is just astounding for the sheer
emotional control and dexterity she brings to the material. She manipulates the
actions with subtle control, and navigates the elevated quality of Cocteau’s
cinema with ease and comfort. There’s a scene where she’s dressed like a fairy
queen come to vivid life with stars placed in her flowing hair. It’s a damn
shame that Feuillère never worked with Cocteau again in another film.
For all
of the sustained atmosphere and wonderful acting from the leads, The
Eagle with Two Heads doesn’t add up to very much in the long run. The
queen and the poet bicker, fall in love, and drive each other towards
inevitable tragedy. This tragedy is a mythology of their own making, a meeting
of the bourgeoisie and the rebel to dance with death. It’s very French,
enchanting in its own way, but slightly formulaic in its court-bound intrigue.
It’s a little shocking to see Cocteau go so routine with his material even if
its deeper implications and meanings are baffling among all of the fluttering
and loud emotional proclamations.
“A legend is entitled to be beyond time and place.”
So says Jean Cocteau in a written prologue for his most
direct wrestling with the Orpheus myth. Here, he makes not only edits and
additions, but entirely new wrinkles and full scale revisions to the myth,
these add layers of strangeness, poignancy, and the hint of autobiography. It
towers over other fantasy films for the ways it grounds these elements in a
solid structure. Cocteau managed to make something that was not only a personally
revealing art film, but also a raucous piece of pop entertainment.
Orpheus reconfigures its narrative from a
story about a musician seducing the gods with his art into the story of a poet
chasing his inspiration in the face of popularity, a eternally petulant
teenager that becomes enamored with the idea of death’s obsession with him as
much as he is with his art, his image, and his dwindling inspiration. Cocteau
was clearly working through, and poking fun, at some of his own failings and
egocentric personality defects here. Orpheus could easily stand in for the
artist, a man driven to near insanity to chase his creative expression at the
clear detriment of those closest to him, with Eurydice here cast as an amalgam
of every long-suffering wife of a great man.
This mid-point of the Orphic trilogy follows our
modern-age poet (well, modern-age for 1949 France) as he meets the sleek
personification of death, follows her into her realm, comes back to ours, and
begins chasing rabbit holes looking for her and her strange realm once more.
The bones of the Greek myth are all there, but they play now in starkly
different beats and to different ends. Cocteau was quite possibly cinema’s
greatest interpreter and exploiter of mythologies, using them to explore our collective
psyches and as excuses for knockout visual trickery.
The love story between Orpheus and Eurydice is there, but
it’s expanded to an continually shifting geometric pattern, something far
beyond a love triangle. There’s Orpheus and death, Eurydice and Heurtebise,
death’s chauffer, and the conflict between Orpheus and Cegeste, a youthful poet
that is an object of jealousy for Orpheus whose premature death is the catalyst
for all of these events. Orpheus descends into the abyss, returns, and spends a
great deal of time trying to return. His eventual return is both for Eurydice
and for death, for a chance to gain some of the divine inspiration he
witnessed, and the slow dawning horror of what he has allowed to transpire.
But it wouldn’t be a Cocteau film without a healthy dose
of visual wonderment. Cocteau keeps the reality of the corporeal realm solidly
melodramatic, with any supernatural occurrences clearly called out for their
aberrations in the docility of domesticity. It is when we escape into the Zone
that things go completely bonkers. The Zone is filmed in the bombed out ruins
of France, a smart enough visual cue, and Cocteau has made no effort to clean
up any of the ruins so the interiors of the buildings are eternally
dilapidating and a stench of rot and decay. In one scene, Orpheus and
Heurtebise crawl along the sides of a building only for Orpheus to be whisked
along the side into the oblivion that waits.
Unlike Beauty and the Beast, which parading a
continually series of visual tricks, smokes, ornate costuming, and stealth
carnality, Orpheus is obsessed with a pervading of impending
tragedy. The Zone could easily be read as an existential wonderland, a place
where an artist could find eternal inspiration and eternal damnation in equal
doses, or as one long elaborate metaphor for Cocteau’s opium addiction, or
maybe it’s just his film’s variation of the underworld. Orpheus invites
any of these readings, and each of them has a valid argument depending on deep
you want to excavate the material and its echoes to Cocteau’s own life.
This pervading sense of tragedy extends beyond Orpheus
and Eurydice, who end up getting their happily ever after here, but to death
and Heurtebise, who sacrifice themselves to set things right. Despite giving
our two main lovers as happy ending, this doesn’t translate to the rest
of Orpheus. This ends the film with something that feels closer a
flustered mixture of emotions. It’s elusive and exciting precisely because it
refuses to wrap things up with a proudly declarative ending, much like Beauty
and the Beast’s puzzling journey to a castle in the clouds.
Cocteau’s personality and obsession are woven into the
fabric of Orpheus and his ensembles of actors play their parts
beautifully to expand upon this journey into self-destruction. Jean Marais’
Orpheus is the poet-as-rock star, the idol of a gaggle of giddy teenage girls,
and a man stuck in permanent teenage emotionality. He seems capable of only one
feeling at the time, and it is at its largest volume of feeling at that given
time. For instance, as Eurydice dies, Orpheus is perturbed that he’s being
interrupted from his important work, then he’s disgusted with what he has
allowed to play out, then possessed with the idea of return to the Zone to
right things. Marais’ Orpheus is how deftly played and wonderfully played as
his Beast.
Marie Dea plays Eurydice as the exemplary supportive,
long-suffering wife, as if she knows she’s always be the second choice to his
art and career. She puts up with Orpheus’ mercurial moods, his descents into
callous and cold behavior, and forces him to glance upon as an act of
self-sacrifice and love. While Maria Casares portrays death as an ice queen
slowly thawing, she is a dominating and haunting presence. Some find her
performance wooden or lacking in some way, but I find her a coiled figure that
wanders around the outskirts of the frame even when she is not present, always
ready to descend on our characters and turn them into her playthings on a whim.
She has a fun chemistry with Francois Perier as Heurtebise. She titters on the
brink of appearing as fetishistic figurehead while he plays the emotionless
straight man to her diva tantrums.
Orpheus entwines between melodramatic love
and inky desiccation, between reality and a heightened fever-dream, between
autobiography and classical mythology. Only an artist as expansive and poetic
as Cocteau could look at the myth and see it as a defining archetype to build a
career. This is equally as potent as his prior Beauty and the Beast,
and no less of a great, towering achievement.
A 16mm
documentary of sorts made at the titular villa, a beloved vacation spot owned
by one of Cocteau’s primary benefactors, that surface textures is all about his
“tattooing” of the walls but actually provides a glimpse into his artistry and
process. Many of Cocteau’s works contained this aura of autobiography and
self-reflection on art and how it is made, but La Villa Santo Sospir is
nakedly about these subjects.
The
blurred line between artifice and reality was a popular conceptual ideal for
Cocteau, and that gets the full workout here. Most notably, there is an
extended sequence where Cocteau restores several destroyed flowers to their
original vibrancy and beauty by running the film of their destruction
backwards. The artist is breathing life into dead things, creating an
experience from a mere idea, and this section is possibly the best, simplest
demonstration of the wondrous and dream-like beauty of Cocteau’s film work.
The
best reason to watch this film is to see the variety of paintings and drawings
that Cocteau produced at the villa. Not only did he “tattoo” the walls with a
series of images that dip into the religious and mythological, and the space
between them, but we also see various canvas paintings that he produced. The
myth of Orpheus was a consistent obsession, and there’s no less than five or
six paintings detailing the myth here. A personal favorite is Orpheus’ head
resting upon his lyre.
Thirty-seven
minutes is a tad self-indulgent for this material, but Cocteau keeps it mostly
light and ever moving. There’s a few detours into pretentious artistic musings,
but it’s hard to be mad at them. They reveal many personal eccentricities and
artistic themes from one of the great creative polymaths of the 20th century. La
Villa Santo Sospir is as essential a viewing experience as any of
Cocteau’s other films, all the more so for how limited a number of films he
directed between 1930 and 1959.
A
collaboration between Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau, 8
x 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements is a quirky, avant-garde glimpse of
a bunch of premiere artists having a lark. Shame that they didn’t invite the
audience along with them. The title reveals the structure, a chessboard is
arranged 8 squares high and 8 squares long, and so the film is broken into
eight vignettes of surreal nonsense.
With
the pedigree involved 8 x 8 has a few moments of sublime
incoherence, but much of it is baffling and tiresome. The most cringe-worthy
segment of the film is the score which pounds throughout, frequently clownish
and overly intrusive. While the film may be a series of images that vary in
interest with no uniform style, this score never marries to any of the images
and undermines a few of them. Case in point, a king, queen, and knight run
about the woods battling each other, and a sub-par Renaissance Fair song
thunders in the background.
Despite
being of only mild interest as a complete work, 8 x 8 is still
worth watching only for the top-shelf names attached to it. It was intended as
a fairy tale for grown-ups, made up of equal parts Lewis Carroll and Sigmund
Freud (according to Richter and the opening prologue), and even when it proves
impenetrable it’s still intoxicating in some strange way.
A
culmination of sorts of an artistic life, and the most deeply personal and
revealing film that Jean Cocteau ever made. Testament of Orpheus is
the final film in his Orphic trilogy, only this time Cocteau is Orpheus and the
underworld is his own mind as we examine both the birthplace of his creativity
and his memories. It’s nearly impossible to discuss the film on its own as so
much of it depends on a familiarity not only with Orpheus, but with
Cocteau’s entire body of work, including the films and paintings.
Testament
of Orpheus begins with the
concluding scenes of Orpheus, where death (Maria Casares) and
Heurtebise (Francois Perier) carted off while Cegeste (Edouard Dermithe)
watches on helplessly. Right after this, Cocteau appears and begins speaking
directly through the camera to the audience. This will be the primary mode of
the film, hallucinatory images surrounded by Cocteau’s musings about his life,
art, and the reflexive introspection. Some may find this self-indulgent and
precocious, but I found his collage of surreal images, poetic musings, and the
ethereal score by an enthralling, entertaining cinematic hodge-podge.
But Orpheus isn’t
the lone film that Cocteau cannibalizes here. His short documentary, La
Villa Santo Sospir, gets threaded back through this tone poem. Not only do
we glimpse many of the paintings he displayed there, but a section of the film
uses that villa as a shooting location. Once again Cocteau destroys and
reassembles a flower, and the effect is not diluted here. If anything, given
the context of the film, the artist-as-God symbolism of that image hits just a
bit harder. Eventually the flower will become a reoccurring motif throughout
the film, but that first sequence is still powerful for the pureness of
Cocteau’s aesthetic it displays.
As a
self-made elegy, Cocteau could have not conjured up a better farewell. A few
years after making this Cocteau would die from a heart-attack, and he
frequently wanders the frame with a placid face, one that reads as a man making
peace with the life he’s about to leave. Cocteau seems possessed with death and
decay, with where our legacies will leave us, and how art grants its creator
immortality. That last point would seem irksome from another artist, but
Cocteau blessed the world a small number of films, many of them among the
greatest works of cinematic art, and the point seems valid.
There’s
also the behind-the-scenes drama where Cocteau was desperate to make a final
grand artistic statement and he had trouble finding the funds. The younger
generation of film-makers that named him as an influence came to his rescue,
primarily Francois Truffaut who donated money earned from The 400 Blows to
this project as a thank you. Cocteau also brought along his longtime muse/lover
Jean Marais for a brief cameo, close friends like Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso
show up, and his current lover, Dermithe, guides him through a vast chunk of
the film, working as both soothing spirit guide and the luscious
personification of death.
Do I
know exactly what all of these elusive images and epigrammatic phrases mean?
No, but the film functions as a dizzying series of moving hieroglyphics that
one will either groove along with or keep at an arm’s length. I found it
absorbing for what it reveals about Cocteau as a human, his deep belief in
these musings and the transportive power of art and ideas, his confrontations
with his creators and how they rebel against their creator, and his personal
style of painting and drawing.
If you
chose to merely look at Testament on a surface level, there’s
plenty of off kilter beauty to keep you engaged. But I suggest trying to dig
through the rubble, as there’s plenty of meanings to be mined from this
material. Cocteau clearly doesn’t want to lead you to any one solid conclusion,
but present a wide platter of ideas and loaded symbolism for you to wrestle
with. This last will functions as much as a mirror to Cocteau as it does for
the audience. Cocteau’s particular brand of whimsy would disappear with his
passing in 1963, but we’ll always have his essential films to return to.
I love
getting lost in Cocteau’s world of make-believe, of smoke and mirrors, of grand
pronouncements and sumptuous imagery. To dub Testament of Orpheus as
self-indulgent would not be an incorrect assessment, but it somehow feels like
it’s missing the mark. The logical progression of Cocteau’s work would lead us
to the artist himself taking the center stage at some point, and there’s no
more fitting a moment than his final work. It’s a surreal film, a chance for
Cocteau to enthrall us once more, and a fitting tribute to a landmark career
all at once. Even with all of its faults, I cannot deem Testament of
Orpheus as anything less than an essential viewing experience.
Beauty & the
Beast
Orpheus
Testament of
Orpheus
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