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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.
actually rising?); waves crash irregularly into themselves (or is it really back on to themselves?). The particular erotic valency of such moments which could, it seems, be repeated ad infinitum is something we shall explore in detail in Chapter 6 . This ‘documentary which is not one’ is to be directly compared with Le Testament d’Orphée made nine years later and which transplants some of the same scenes of reverse motion
In his valedictory film Le Testament d’Orphée , Cocteau cut a solitary figure. Searching for traces of beauty and poetry after finally breaking out of the chrysalid of his Louis XV costume, he meandered in the same buckskin jacket and tie through space-time, lost in the metallic, spectral light of his memories, subject to the vagaries of chance and for ever separated from others. He portrayed
11 Le Testament d’Orphée , 1960. ‘Don’t ask me why!’ From behind and without touching, Cégeste motions forward the Poet who is clutching the ‘unreasonable’ hibiscus flower, emblem of his destiny 12 Le Testament d’Orphée , 1960. ‘Pretend you are crying, my
’étais cet homme’ (‘If a man having passed through Paradise dreams that he received a flower as proof of his journey and that upon waking finds the flower in his hands what is there to say? I am that man’). In Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée (1960), the Poet (Cocteau) is given a photograph by gypsies of the poet Cégeste, whom he had left behind in his Orphée (1950) in a world between the living and the dead, the price paid for the immortality of Orphée, the ‘other’ poet to Cégeste in that film. Cocteau tears up the photograph of Cégeste he receives in Le Testament and
conceived as a homage to Charlie Chaplin. His last, Le Testament d’Orphée , was completed in 1960 when he was 70. Between the two, he directed only five major films and a couple of shorts: Coriolan (1950) (never released) and La Villa Santo-Sospir (1951) (also never released though recently made available). Indeed, Cocteau’s run of continuous work in the cinema lasted only ten years, from 1942 to 1952. Yet this slim corpus of
hibiscus flower in Le Testament d’Orphée substitutes finally for the disembodied mouth/ wound of Cocteau’s first film, and that this logic is fetishistic, that is to say, marked by the conspicuous disavowal of an absence (Gercke 1993 : 11). Another critic, Naomi Greene, has examined such images of pain from the particular perspective of masochism, specifically the masochistic aesthetic proposed by Gilles Deleuze. 1 The
Poet in Le Testament d’Orphée) We saw in the previous chapter how Cocteau’s films invite readings of masochism on account of their weak, even emasculated male protagonists confronted by formidable, phallic female figures: the gun-toting, whip-lashing, all-round active Queen in L’Aigle à deux têtes , the imperturbable and statuesque Léo in Les
1898 when Cocteau was 8, and so on – critics have felt justified in constructing vast theories that build on the film’s all too evident Orphic dimensions. Alfred Springer, for example, places Le Sang d’un poète in the context of Cocteau’s other autobiographical films Orphée and Le Testament d’Orphée to argue that it charts the process of sublimation of the lowest sexual instincts. Peter Weiss sees the film as a form of
Hollywood, in Val Lewton’s unit at RKO studios in the 1940s. (Interestingly, Jean Cocteau is not included, although La Belle et la bête , Orphée and Le Testament d’Orphée earn Cocteau a place in most dictionaries of the fantastique. ) The CinémAction entry illustrates very well how Franju’s reputation as a director of the fantastique rests mainly on two films, Les Yeux sans visage and Judex , which are described as