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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.
Documentaire. Interminable … (The Author in Le Sang d’un poète) The genesis of Le Sang d’un poète (1930–32) is the stuff of film legend. In the winter of 1929, the rich aristocratic patrons, the Vicomte Charles de Noailles and his wife Marie Laure, gave Cocteau and Luis Buñuel a million francs each to
1 Le Sang d”‘un poète , 1930–32. Animating the inanimate, or the art of metamorphosis: the Poet will suffocate the broken plaster figure with the live mouth (caught in his right hand while drawing) and so wake it into being 2 Le Sang
with gloves, such stylised kinky images of transgression associate sex with violence and death and can be understood, according to LaValley, in terms of sadomasochism. The slow pace of Le Sang d’un poète , LaValley argues, may be viewed as ‘a kind of sado-masochistic ritual, probing into the self with religious and sexually taboo overtones that yield a peculiar form of erotic intensity in its very rhythms’ (unpublished text
great cinematographic genres, from the early avant-garde with Le Sang d’un poète (1930–32) to fairytale fantasy with La Belle et la bête (1946), historical melodrama with L’Aigle à deux têtes (1948), domestic bourgeois drama and vaudeville with Les Parents terribles (1948) (regarded by Cocteau himself as his greatest success), detective thriller and mystery with Orphée (1950), to finally the
asynchronous with their period: Le Sang d’un poète bucked the prevailing trend of surrealism, La Belle et la bête appeared during the heyday of Italian neorealism, L’Aigle à deux têtes arrived during the psychoanalytic boom, and Orphée , released some nine years before Marcel Camus’s explosive take on the Orphic myth set in the Rio de Janeiro Carnival, Orfeu Negro (1959), entered directly into a
to know how to create cinema we must return to Méliès, and for this a good number of Lumière years still lie ahead of us.) With its combination of documentary, theatre and fantasy, Le Sang d’un poète established the formal parameters of Cocteau’s film work. The films that followed developed these three formal strands in a multitude of ways and to varying
pathos. This is part of Cocteau’s general aesthetics of pain focused in his film work around the male body and dating back to that first vision in Le Sang d’un poète of his own prosthetic body wrapped in bandages. The many fainting, limping, wounded or prostrate male figures in Cocteau’s cinema are all avatars of that originary image. As another critic Daniel Gercke has confirmed, Cocteau’s films positively sway under their
-held camera. This shot undoubtedly mimics the same set-up in the coffin-carrying sequence of La Chute de la maison Usher, for which Buñuel served as Epstein’s assistant. Similarly, in Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un poète (1930), 30 seconds after the beginning of the fourth episode, Cocteau inserts a very short (less than one second long) but critical MCU of Dargelos’s face out of focus, while the background is in focus. This device again recalls the key shots of Roderick’s out-of-focus face in CU with the background in focus. While neither Buñuel nor Cocteau has claimed
Cocteau’s strategy in Le Sang d’un poète of revealing the inadequacy of mainstream illusionistic cinema so as to privilege poetry and painting. In both films, therefore, Cocteau is deliberately and very carefully processing and fine-tuning cinematic form. This is developed further in Orphée with the caricatural representation of Orphée as a successful bourgeois writer: his home is stuffed with objets d’art (including