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Jean Cocteau, the first French writer to take cinema seriously, was as old and young as cinema itself; he made his first film in 1925 and completed his last film when he was 70. This book first deals with the issue of the type of film maker that Cocteau was: as a auteur, as a collaborator, as an experimenter, and as a theorist. It takes the pulse of Cocteau's cinema by examining in detail his ground-breaking first film Le Sang d'un poète', and argues that the film offers a vision of the potential of film for Cocteau. The book traces the evolution of realism and fantasy in Cocteau's work by introducing a main element, theatre, and assesses the full gamut of Cocteau's formal inclinations: from the legend and fantasy of L'Eternel retour to the spectacular fairytale of La Belle et la bête; from the 'film théâtral' of L'Aigle à deux têtes to the domestic melodrama Les Parents terribles which 'detheatricalises' his original play. In Le Testament d'Orphée, all the various formal tendencies of Cocteau's cinema come together but with the additional element of time conceived of as history, and the book re-evaluates the general claim of Cocteau's apparently missed encounter with history. The book considers whether the real homosexual element of Cocteau's cinema surfaces more at the most immediate level of sound and image by concentrating on the specifics of Cocteau's filmic style, in particular camera angle, framing and reverse-motion photography.
was Marais who subsequently encouraged Cocteau to return to the cinema as a director after their spectacular success together on Delannoy’s L’Eternel retour (1943), a film that had transformed Marais into one of French cinema’s first male sex symbols. The achievement of La Belle et la b ê te three years later proved that he could play three different parts simultaneously and, as the Beast, potentially be anything
degrees and intensities. We shall now trace this complex evolving process by examining six major films in groups of two, each group constituting a specific set of problematics. The first film of each cluster represents the extreme of a formal tendency, the second functions as its virtual resolution, albeit provisional. We begin with L’Eternel retour (1943), directed by Jean Delannoy, and Cocteau’s second major work for the
d’’ un poète , 1930–32. Room 23 at the Hòtel des Folies-dramatiques: a reclining half-human, half-drawn hermaphrodite with, to the left, a rotating spiral. This is composite mise en scène as a form of montage 3 L’Eternel retour , 1943. Patrice and Nathalie I find unity in death in
Delannoy’s L’Eternel retour (1943), and Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (1944) – L’Eternel retour proved the most successful, both artistically and commercially. Indeed, with this escapist fantasy and period melodrama starring Jean Marais, Cocteau imposed himself in the 1940s as one of France’s most bankable directors. Cocteau openly acknowledged the diffuse and often ungraspable nature
work, whether literally, as in the case of the evil dwarf Achill in L’Eternel retour spying through prohibited doors, or conceptually, as in the highly intimate close-up framing of the characters in Les Parents terribles. This process also recalls F. W. Murnau’s later practice of Kammerspiel with its claustrophobic environments and enclosed frames where victims are visibly caught in their fate despite the amount of
perpétuelle’: telle est la tragédie, et c’est le contraire de l’Éternel Retour, cette figure nietzschéenne de la reprise. Le sujet choisit un acte dont il peut supporter, dont il peut désirer qu’il revienne indéfiniment. Le sujet décide: il est actif, donc puissant. Au contraire, dans la tragédie, le héros se laisse ensevelir … 12
realistic décor is reminiscent of Renoir’s adaptation of Madame Bovary (1933) (Chevrie 1985 : 6). In interview, Rivette suggested that ‘Le principe de l’adaptation, c’est celui de l’éternel retour’ 11 (Rivette 1985: 94), borrowing the Nietzschean concept of eternal return to explain how a story from eighteenth-century Yorkshire can be transposed to nineteenth-century Mexico by Luis Buñuel, and then to
after his death and which, as we have seen, is eventually replayed in forward motion at the end of the film. Such moments might be said to correspond to those other forms of the grotesque and base matter played out at the level of character and emotion in Cocteau’s films, most notably la Bête in La Belle et la b ê te but also the evil dwarf Achille in L’Eternel retour , the vengeful Présidente in L’Aigle à
’Atalante (1934), yet it also takes us back to the small boat in L’Éternel Retour (1943) (scripted by Cocteau, directed by Jean Delannoy), which Madeleine Sologne (Nathalie I) bestrides when returning across the water to save the dying Patrice (Jean Marais). By reinventing the boat as a literally sink or swim French-Tunisian business enterprise, Kechiche is similarly reclaiming the motif from Delannoy/Cocteau’s aesthetically intense fairy-tale based on the Tristan legend, which was both admired and reviled when released during the Occupation due to its Teutonic look and fascist