Cocteau, Jean

COCTEAU, Jean

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Nationality: French. Born: Maisons-Lafitte, near Paris, 5 July 1889. Education: Lycée Condorcet and Fenelon, Paris. Career: Actor, playwright, poet, librettist, novelist, painter, and graphic artist in 1920s and throughout career. Directed first film, Le Sang d'un poète, 1930; became manager of boxer Al Brown, 1937; remained in Paris during the Occupation, 1940. Awards: Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, 1949; member, Academie Royale de Belgique, 1955; member, Academie Française, 1955; honorary doctorate, Oxford University, 1956. Died: In Milly-la-Foret, France, 11 October 1963.

Films as Director:

1925

Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma (+ sc) (neg lost?)

1930

Le Sang d'un poète (originally La Vie d'un poète) (+ ed, sc, voice-over)

1946

La Belle et la bête (+ sc)

1947

L'Aigle à deux têtes (+ sc)

1948

Les Parent terribles (+ sc, voice-over)

1950

Orphée (+ sc); Coriolan (+ sc, role); a 1914 "dramatic scene" by Cocteau included in Ce siècle a cinquante ans (Tual) (+ sc)

1952

La Villa Santo-Sospir (+ sc)

1960

Le Testament d'Orphée (Ne me demandez pas pourquoi ) (+ sc, role as le poète)

Other Films:

1940

La Comedie du bonheur (L'Herbier) (co-sc)

1942

Le Baron fantôme (de Poligny) (sc, role as Le Baron)

1943

L'Eternel Retour (Delannoy) (sc); La Malibran (Guitry) (narration + role as Alfred de Musset)

1945

Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Bresson) (co-sc)

1946

L'Amitie noire (Villiers and Krull) (role and narration)

1947

Ruy Blas (Billon) (sc)

1948

La Voix humaine (Rossellini, from Cocteau's play); Les Noces de sable (Zvoboda) (sc, voice-over); La Légende de Sainte Ursule (Emmer) (role and narration)

1949

Tennis (Martin) (role + narration)

1950

Les Enfants terribles (Melville) (sc); Colette (Bellon) (role + narration); Venise et ses amants (Emmer and Gras) (role + narration)

1951

Desordre (Baratier) (role + narration)

1952

La Couronne noire (Saslavski) (co-sc); 8 x 8 (Richter) (role + narration)

1953

Le Rouge est mis (Barrère and Knapp) (role + narration)

1956

A l'aube d'un monde (Lucot) (role + narration); Pantomimes (Lucot) (role + narration)

1957

Le Bel indifferent (Demy, from Cocteau's play)

1958

Django Reinhardt (Paviot) (role + narration); Le Musée Grevin (Demy and Masson) (role + narration)

1959

Charlotte et son Jules (Godard, from same play as Demy 1957 film)

1961

La Princesse de Cleves (Delannoy) (co-sc)

1963

Anna la bonne (Jutra, from song by Cocteau)

1965

Thomas l'imposteur (Franju) (co-sc)

1970

La Voix humaine (Delouche, from Poulenc and Cocteau opera)

Publications

By COCTEAU: books—

L'Aigle à deux têtes, Paris, 1946.

Diary of a Film [La Belle et la bête], New York, 1950.

Cocteau on the Film, New York, 1954.

Jean Cocteau par lui-même, edited by André Fraigneau, Paris, 1957.

Le Sang d'un poète, with drawings, Monaco, 1957.

Le Testament d'Orphée (filmscript), Paris, 1961.

The Eagle with Two Heads, London, 1962.

The Journals of Jean Cocteau, edited by Wallace Fowlie, Bloomington, Indiana, 1964.

The Difficulty of Being, London, 1966.

Two Screenplays [The Blood of a Poet and The Testament of Orpheus], New York, 1968.

Beauty and the Beast, edited by Robert Hammond, New York, 1970.

Professional Secrets: An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau, edited by Robert Phelps, New York, 1970.

Cocteau on the Film, New York, 1972.

Jean Cocteau: Three Screenplays [The Eternal Return, Beauty and the Beast, and Orpheus ], New York, 1972.

Le Testament d'Orphée; Le Sang d'un poète, Monaco, 1983.

Past Tense, Volume 1: Diaries, London, 1987.

Souvenir portraits: Paris in the Belle Epoque, translated by Jesse Browner, London, 1990.

Erotica: Drawings, London, 1991.

Correspondance: Jacques-Emile Blanche, Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1993.

Les parents terribles, translated by Simon Callow, London, 1994.

By COCTEAU: articles—

Interview with Francis Koval, in Sight and Sound (London), August 1950.

"Conversation," in Sight and Sound (London), July/September 1952.

"Cocteau," in Film (London), March 1955.

Interview in Film Makers on Filmmaking, edited by Harry Geduld, Bloomington, Indiana, 1967.

"Four Letters by Jean Cocteau to Leni Riefenstahl," in Film Culture (New York), Spring 1973.

"Aphorismes cinématographiques," and "Cocteau face a La Belle et la bête," in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July/September 1973.

"Encuento con Chaplin," in Cine Cubano (Havana), no. 126, 1989.

On COCTEAU: books—

Crosland, Margaret, Jean Cocteau, London, 1955.

Dauven, Jean, Jean Cocteau chez les Sirènes, Paris, 1956.

Pillaudin, Roger, Jean Cocteau tourne son dernier film, Paris, 1960.

Fraigneau, André, Cocteau, New York, 1961.

Fowlie, Wallace, Jean Cocteau: The History of a Poet's Age, Bloomington, Indiana, 1968.

Lannes, Roger, Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1968.

Sprigge, Elizabeth, and Jean-Jacques Kihm, Jean Cocteau: The Man and the Mirror, New York, 1968.

Gilson, René, Cocteau, New York, 1969.

Armes, Roy, French Cinema since 1946: Vol. 1—The Great Tradition, New York, 1970.

Steegmuller, Francis, Cocteau, Boston, 1970.

Evans, Arthur, Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity, Philadelphia, 1977.

Anderson, Alexandra, and Carol Saltus, editors, Jean Cocteau and the French Scene, New York, 1984.

de Miomandre, Philippe, Moi, Jean Cocteau, Paris, 1985.

Keller, Marjorie, The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell and Brakhage, Cranbury, New Jersey, 1986.

Peters, Arthur King, Jean Cocteau and His World: An Illustrated Biography, London, 1987.

Knapp, Bettina L., Jean Cocteau, Boston, 1989.

Mourgue, Gérard, Cocteau, Paris, 1990.

Marais, Jean, L'inconcevable Jean Cocteau, Monaco, 1993.

Soleil, Christian, Jean Cocteau: Le Bonheur Fabriqué, Le Chambon-Fuegerolles, France, 1993.

Tsakiridou, Cornelia A., editor, Reviewing Orpheus: Essays on the Cinema and Art of Jean Cocteau, Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, 1997.

On COCTEAU: articles—

Lambert, Gavin, "Cocteau and Orpheus," in Sequence (London), Autumn 1950.

Oxenhandler, Neal, "On Cocteau," in Film Quarterly (Berkeley), Fall 1964.

Durgnat, Raymond, "Images of the Mind—Part 13: Time and Timelessness," in Films and Filming (London), July 1969.

Amberg, G., "The Testament of Jean Cocteau," in Film Comment (New York), Winter 1971/72.

"Cocteau Issue" of Image et Son (Paris), June/July 1972.

"Cocteau Issue" of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), July/September 1973.

Renaud, T., "Retrospective: Jean Cocteau. Un cineaste? Peut-etre. Un auteur? Certainement.," in Cinéma (Paris), December 1973.

Gow, Gordon, "Astonishments: Magic Film from Jean Cocteau," and "The Mirrors of Life," in Films and Filming (London), January and February 1978.

"Cocteau Issue" of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 1 May 1983.

"Cocteau Supplement," in Cinéma (Paris), May 1983.

Milani, R., "Cocteau dell'immaginario," in Filmcritica (Florence), June 1984.

Combs, Richard, "Dream work," in Listener (London), 29 May 1986.

Spiess, E., "Ein schillernder Paradiesvogel verirrt sich in eine Ruinenlandschaft. Eine Betrachtung zu Jean Cocteau," in Filmfaust (Frankfurt/Main), vol. 13, July-September 1989.

Prudenzi, A., "Cocteau poeta dell'illusione," in Immagine (Rome), no. 13, Winter 1989–1990.

Gauteur, C., "Cocteau contre Cocteau," in Revue de la Cinémathèque (Montreal), no. 464, October 1990.

"France's anti-Cartesian," in The Economist (London), 9 May 1992.

Perry, Joseph, "L'enfant Terrible: The 'Cinematographic' Poetry of Jean Cocteau," Filmfax (Evanston, Illinois), no. 36, December-January, 1992–93.

Beylot, P., "Premières images," in Focales, 1993.

Vajdovich, G., "Uralom az idö felett," in Filmkultura (Budapest), vol. 30, December 1994.

* * *

Jean Cocteau's contribution to cinema is as eclectic as one would expect from a man who fulfilled on occasion the roles of poet and novelist, dramatist and graphic artist, and dabbled in such diverse media as ballet and sculpture. In addition to his directorial efforts, Cocteau also wrote scripts and dialogue, made acting appearances, and realized amateur films. His work in other media has inspired adaptations by a number of filmmakers ranging from Rossellini to Franju and Demy, and he himself published several collections of eclectic and stimulating thoughts on the film medium.

Though Cocteau took his first real steps as a filmmaker at the very beginning of the sound era, his period of greatest involvement was in the 1940s, when he contributed to the scripts of a half-dozen films, at times dominating his director (as in L'Eternel Retour ), at other times submitting to the discipline of contributing to another's vision (as in his dialogue for Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne ). In addition, he directed his own adaptations of such diverse works as the fairy tale La Belle et la bête, his own period melodrama L'Aigle à deux têtes, and his intense domestic drama, Les Parents terribles. But Cocteau's essential work in cinema is contained in just three wholly original films in which he explores his personal myth of the poet as Orpheus: Le Sang d'un poète, Orphée, and Le Testament d'Orphée. Though made over a period of thirty years, these three works have a remarkable unity of inspiration. They are works of fascination in a double sense. They convey Cocteau's fascination with poetry and his own creative processes, and at the same time display his openness to all the ways of fascinating an audience, utilizing stars and trickery, found material and sheer fantasy. The tone is characterized by a unique mixture of reality and dream, and his definition of Le Sang d'un pòete as "a realistic documentary of unreal events" is a suitable description of all his finest work.

Crucial to the lasting quality of Cocteau's work, which at times seems so light and fragile, is the combination of artistic seriousness and persistent, but unemphatic, self-mockery. For this reason his enclosed universe, with its curiously idyllic preoccupation with death, is never oppressive or constricting; instead, it allows the spectator a freedom rare in mainstream cinema of the 1930s and 1940s. In technical terms Cocteau displays a similar ability to cope with the contributions of totally professional collaborators, while still retaining a disarming air of ingenuousness, which has sometimes been wrongly characterized as amateurism.

Reviled by the Surrealists as a literary poseur in the 1920s and 1930s and distrusted as an amateur in the 1940s, Cocteau nonetheless produced films of lasting quality. In retrospect he is to be admired for the freedom with which he expressed a wholly personal vision and for his indifference to the given rules of a certain period of French "quality" filmmaking. He was one of the few French filmmakers of the past to whom the directors of the New Wave could turn for inspiration, and it is totally fitting that Cocteau's farewell to cinema, Le Testament d'Orphée, should have been produced by one of the most talented of these newcomers, François Truffaut.

—Roy Armes