Jean Cocteau 9781526141514

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Jean Cocteau

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FRENCH FILM DIRECTORS

DIANA HOLMES and ROBERT INGRAM series editors DUDLEY ANDREW series consultant

Jean-Jacques Beineix PHIL POWRIE Luc Besson SUSAN HAYWARD Bertrand Blier SUE HARRIS Robert Bresson KEITH READER Leos Carax GARIN DOWD AND FERGUS DALEY Claude Chabrol GUY AUSTIN Jean Cocteau JAMES S. WILLIAMS Claire Denis MARTINE BEUGNET Marguerite Duras RENATE GÜNTHER Georges Franju KATE INCE Jean-Luc Godard DOUGLAS MORREY Diane Kurys CARRIE TARR Patrice Leconte LISA DOWNING Louis Malle HUGO FREY Georges Méliès ELIZABETH EZRA Jean Renoir MARTIN O’SHAUGHNESSY Coline Serreau BRIGITTE ROLLET François Truffaut DIANA HOLMES AND ROBERT INGRAM Agnès Varda ALISON SMITH Jean Vigo MICHAEL TEMPLE Alain Resnais EMMA WILSON

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FRENCH FILM DIRECTORS

Jean Cocteau

JAMES S.WILLIAMS

Manchester University Press

MANCHESTER

Copyright © James S. Williams 2006

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The right of James S. Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester Ml 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available ISBN 978 0 7190 5884 4 paperback First published by Manchester University Press in hardback 2006

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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In memory of my father

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Detail of Cocteau on the set of Le Sang d’un poète, 1930–32

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Contents

LIST OF PLATES SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 1

His name was Jean

page xi xiii xv 1

2 All is possible: Le Sang d’un poète

35

3

56

The tricks of the reel;

L’ Eternel retour/La Belle et la bête L’Aigle à deux têtes/Les Parents terribles La Villa Santo-Sospir/Le Testament d’ Orphée 4 In the Zone: Orphée

110

5

136

Cocteau, Jean Marais and collaboration

6 For our eyes only: body and sexuality in reverse motion 7

En route

FILMOGRAPHY SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

157 186 197 209 214

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List of plates

Frontispiece Detail of Cocteau on the set of Le Sang d’un poète, 1930–32 1

Le Sang d’un poète, 1930–32 (photo: Sacha Masour)

page 29

2 Le Sang d’un poète, 1930–32

29

3

L’Eternel retour, 1943

30

4 La Belle et la bête, 1946

30

5

La Belle et la bête, 1946

31

6 L’Aigle à deux têtes, 1948

31

7 Les Parents terribles, 1948

32

8 Les Parents terribles, 1948

32

9 Orphée, 1950

33

10 Orphée, 1950,

33

11 Le Testament d’Orphée, 1960

34

12 Le Testament d’Orphée, 1960

34

All illustrations reproduced courtesy of the British Film Institute

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Series editors’ foreword

To an anglophone audience, the combination of the words ‘French’ and ‘cinema’ evokes a particular kind of film: elegant and wordy, sexy but serious – an image as dependent on national stereotypes as is that of the crudely commercial Hollywood blockbuster, which is not to say that either image is without foundation. Over the past two decades, this generalised sense of a significant relationship between French identity and film has been explored in scholarly books and articles, and has entered the curriculum at university level and, in Britain, at A-level. The study of film as an art-form and (to a lesser extent) as industry, has become a popular and widespread element of French Studies, and French cinema has acquired an important place within Film Studies. Meanwhile, the growth in multiscreen and ‘art-house’ cinemas, together with the development of the video industry, has led to the greater availability of foreign-language films to an English-speaking audience. Responding to these developments, this series is designed for students and teachers seeking information and accessible but rigorous critical study of French cinema, and for the enthusiastic filmgoer who wants to know more. The adoption of a director-based approach raises questions about auteurism. A series that categorises films not according to period or to genre (for example), but to the person who directed them, runs the risk of espousing a romantic view of film as the product of solitary inspiration. On this model, the critic’s role might seem to be that of discovering continuities, revealing a necessarily coherent set of themes and motifs which correspond to the particular genius of the individual. This is not our aim: the auteur perspective on film, itself most clearly articulated in France in the early 1950s, will be interrogated in certain volumes of the series, and, throughout, the director will be treated as one highly significant element in a complex process of film production and reception which includes socio-

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xiv

SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD

economic and political determinants, the work of a large and highly skilled team of artists and technicians, the mechanisms of production and distribution, and the complex and multiply determined responses of spectators. The work of some of the directors in the series is already known outside France, that of others is less so – the aim is both to provide informative and original English-language studies of established figures, and to extend the range of French directors known to anglophone students of cinema. We intend the series to contribute to the promotion of the informal and formal study of French films, and to the pleasure of those who watch them. DIANA HOLMES ROBERT INGRAM

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank first the series editors Diana Holmes and Robert Ingram for their excellent patience and guidance at all stages of this project; Matthew Frost and Kate Fox at Manchester University Press for their help and advice; the Comité Jean Cocteau; the staff at the BIFI in Paris, the BFI in London, the San Francisco Public Library and the Pacific Film Archive at Berkeley for their aid and expertise; the Arts and Humanities Research Board for its generous Research Leave Scheme which allowed me to complete the project; Berg Publishers for granting permission to reproduce in Chapter 6 some material published in an earlier form in ‘For Our Eyes Only: Body and Sexuality in Reverse Motion in the films of Jean Cocteau’, in A. Hughes and J. S.Williams (eds) (2001), Gender and French Cinema, 77–106; Michael Temple and Michael Witt for their general support and for inviting me to talk on Cocteau for their French Cinema Day series at the National Film Theatre, London; Susan Williams for her superb work on the index; Trace Hollenbeck for his technical assistance; Agnès Calatayud for her enthusiasm and serendipity; and finally Marc Ramey for his love and encouragement throughout.

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1 His name was Jean

[R]emuer cette grande machine de rêves, se battre avec l’ange de la lumière, l’ange des machines, les anges de l’espace et du temps, voilà une besogne à ma taille. (J. Cocteau) (To move this great engine of dreams, to do battle with the angel of light, with the angel of machines, the angels of space and time, this is work to my measure.)

Jean Cocteau (b. 5 July 1889, d. 11 October 1963) was, as he often liked to point out, as old and young as cinema itself. The first French writer to take cinema seriously, he made his first film in 1925, a 16 mm short now lost, entitled Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma 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 extraordinary and utterly unique films, along with his other multiple interests in the cinema as a writer of screenplays, dialogues, commentaries and voice-overs, actor, editor, festival organiser and judge, established Cocteau as one of the supreme film directors in France, above all in the eyes of Nouvelle Vague directors such as JeanLuc Godard and François Truffaut who considered him an auteur complet. He covered most of the 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

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success), detective thriller and mystery with Orphée (1950), to finally the unclassifiable Le Testament d’Orphée which, with its blend of classical legend, science fiction and self-mythologising, constitutes one of the most original self-portraits ever recorded on film. Of the four screenplays or sets of dialogue Cocteau wrote during the Occupation – for Marcel L’Herbier’s La Comedie du bonheur (1940), Serge de Poligny’s Le Baron fantôme (1942) (in which he played the eponymous role of Baron Carol), Jean 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 of his film work which pursued a multitude of directions and, as we shall see in this study, even reversed itself mid-track (‘Une œuvre doit être “un objet difficile à ramasser”’, he once aptly-remarked (Cocteau 2003: 25) (‘A work of art must be “a difficult object to bring together”’)). Beyond the major works already mentioned, he collaborated on over fifteen other films, either full features or shorts, most notably those where he adapted material or provided dialogues: Ruy Blas (1947) directed by Pierre Billon, Les Enfants terribles (1950) by Jean-Pierre Melville (inspired by Cocteau’s 1929 novel of the same name), La Princesse de Clèves (1960) by Jean Delannoy, and Thomas I’imposteur (1965), by Georges Franju, made after Cocteau’s death. Also included in this list are texts and commentaries for Jiri Trnka’s The Emperor’s Nightingale (1951), Denise Tual’s Ce siècle a cinquante ans, a documentary about key moments in the cultural history of the first part of the twentieth century (Cocteau took the period of 1914), and a short by Paul Paviot entitled Pantomimes (1956) featuring Marcel Marceau. In addition, Cocteau acted or appeared in six other films, ranging from Sacha Guitry’s La Malibran (1943), where he plays the ageing poet Alfred de Musset, to Hans Richter’s compilation film, 8 x 8 (1952) (a short sequence of reverse-motion photography by Cocteau entitled ‘Queening the Pawn’) and Yannick Bellon’s Colette (1950), where Cocteau pays simple tribute to his friend, the great French writer Colette. There is also the strange and little-known case of a short Cocteau made in 1963 just before his death entitled Jean Cocteau s’adresse à l’an 2000, with the express intention that it not be seen until the year 2000 (we shall consider this film separately in Chapter 7).

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Hence, even though all of his films, scripts and other interventions bear the indelible mark of their creator, it is often difficult to talk of a clear evolution in Cocteau’s film work, still less of a narrative of professional mastery which in any case he always disclaimed. In fact, to appreciate Cocteau’s cinema fully in its myriad forms and contours we will need to place it within the context of his prolific career as a whole. Cocteau’s film work is arguably the summation of his artistic project because it integrates all the previous and still evolving aspects of his practice, from writing (poetry, theatre, novels, essays) to painting, design, graphic art, sculpture, music, dance, choreography, ballet and performance. Quite simply, the cinema is where Cocteau is most absolutely Cocteau. Moreover, his films bring together many, if not all, of the images and obsessions of his earlier literary work which is itself littered with allusions and stylistic nods to the cinema, for example, in his major collections of poetry such as Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance, Plain-Chant and Opéra, and in his 1930 essay, Opium, journal d’une désintoxication, an account of his treatment for opium addiction which refers directly to films by Buster Keaton, Chaplin and Eisenstein. In addition, his 1923 novel Le Grand écart is edited almost like a classic film with sequences of deep focus, long focus, and close-ups. Cocteau went so far as to describe his novelistic method in Thomas I’imposteur (1923) as that of a ‘film modèle’’. Cocteau’s career was a series of turning points and transformations. Born in Maisons-Laffitte outside Paris into the old and gradually vanishing artistic world of the fashionable high bourgeoisie, he made his debut in the capital in 1908 as a brilliant salon poet, a selfstyled ‘prince frivole’ (the title of his second collection of poetry in 1910). After seeing the Ballets Russes perform in 1909 and meeting their impresario manager Serge Diaghilev, he committed himself to modernism and participated in a branch of the Parisian avant-garde that comprised Picasso and Stravinsky. He worked for Diaghilev’s company as a scene painter and publicist, a collaboration that culminated with the 1917 ballet, Parade. This ‘scandalous’ groundbreaking work, for which Apollinaire devised the term ‘surréalisme’, exemplified Cocteau’s search for anti-traditional, mixedmedia art forms involving visual puns, fantasy, and irrational and dreamlike sequences. Other heterogeneous works for the stage followed, including the mime/jazz pastiche Le Bœuf sur le Toit (1920) and the satirical farce Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921), produced in

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collaboration with the group of composers called ‘Les Six’ with whom Cocteau became associated: Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Francis Poulenc, Darius Milhaud and Germaine Tailleferre. In his preface to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, Cocteau coined the term ‘poésie de théâtre’ in reaction to what he regarded as merely poetry in the theatre, for instance, the works of Paul Claudel, Edmond Rostand, Maurice Maeterlinck and the symbolists where, according to Cocteau, theatre was but a pretext for dramatised poetry in the conventional sense. For Cocteau, who excelled at creating concrete images and metaphors on stage, the theatre should be active and dynamic. Following the tragic early death in 1923 of his intimate companion, the writer Raymond Radiguet, which provoked a descent into opium and self-withdrawal, Cocteau produced in 1924 a remarkable set of thirty sketches where he presented himself for the first time as ‘Jean l’oiseleur’ (‘Jean the bird-catcher’) l’oiseau’ is also French slang for phallus). However, he was denounced by the surrealists led by André Breton who regarded him as no more than an amuseur, a court jester for upper-class dandies. This criticism stuck and only increased when Surrealists like Paul Eluard and Louis Aragon later joined the communist party. Cocteau’s allegiances were to individuals, not to artistic movements or political causes, and this helps to explain – although not excuse – some of his actions during the Occupation. He was never a direct collaborator with the Nazi regime, although like many artists who remained in Paris he happily applied for licences to publish and produce his work. However, quite unnecessarily, he promoted the highly phallic creations of his friend, the German sculptor Arno Breker, in a burst of purple prose entitled ‘Salut à Arno Breker’, published in the French newspaper Comœdia on 23 May 1942. In fact, Cocteau found himself attacked from all political sides during the war, sometimes even physically in the case of the Fascist League, and in 1941 a revival of his 1938 play Les Parents terribles was banned from the Paris stage. He survived the war and Liberation largely unscathed by charges of collaboration and treason, yet considered himself out of place and even ostracised in the immediate post-war period, the era of political engagement and Existentialism centred around Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir. This heady new world associated in Paris with the jazz caverns and Juliette

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Gréco is alluded to by Cocteau in Orphée with its mocking presentation of the Café des Poètes. During the 1950s Cocteau found refuge at SaintJean-Cap-Ferrat in the South of France due to a rich patron, Francine Weisweiller, who invited him to share her villa Santo-Sospir near Villefranche-sur-mer. This was the period of Cocteau the decorative artist, producing frescoes at Villefranche and also at Saint-Blaise-desSimples near his home in Milly-la-forêt outside Paris where he later died and is buried. Cocteau’s long career was thus one of consistent experimentation in style and the mechanics of form and it embraced a range of traditions and disciplines. Alongside his early modernist novels (Le Grand écart, Thomas l’imposteur, Les Enfants terribles) and defiantly modern plays such as La Voix humaine (1930) and La Machine à écrire (1941) are works where Cocteau radically modernised classical theatre, for example, Antigone (1922), Orphée (1926), La Machine Infernale (1934), Œdipe-Roi (1938) and Renaud et Armide (1943), a tragedy written in Alexandrine verse. Whatever field and medium he was working in, however, Cocteau always considered himself a poet inventing ‘la poésie’ (‘de théâtre’, ‘de roman’, ‘de cinema’) as opposed to simply ‘the poetic’ as conventionally understood. This provides his multifarious work with an overall identity and clarity of purpose that foils any attempt to dismiss him as a touche-à-tout, or Jack of all trades, possessing, to quote Robin Buss, ‘the talents of a polymath and the instincts of a dilettante’ (Cocteau 2001: 7). Moreover, beyond their countless twists and turns, Cocteau’s life and work functioned in parallel to form an overall ethical project, specifically a metaphysical engagement with questions of the self and the other. Indeed, Cocteau’s almost feverish construction of the self through the Other, born of a profound ‘difficulty of being’ (the title of his 1947 collection of essays), is best regarded as a sustained ‘work in progress’, a continuous putting into question of the self that helps to account for his unparalleled capacity for self-transformation. In this regard, I am in broad agreement with the central tenets of Claude Arnaud’s major biography published in France in 2003 entitled Jean Cocteau, an exhaustive volume that uncovers in its 800 pages new and important facts about Cocteau’s life. Yet if Cocteau’s work is inextricably linked to his life which he fashioned like a legend into a living work, we need to approach it with care. So cleverly and persistently did he blur the usual artistic boundaries, forging new links between what he delineated as ‘the living

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man’ and ‘the posthumous artist’, that he generated much critical misunderstanding and public confusion. The obvious ambivalence about Cocteau – gay transcendence or simply self-display? – is characteristic of other modern gay artists too such as Oscar Wilde and Jean Genet, but it is not enough to make full sense of Cocteau. Moreover, a fascination with the fanfare of Cocteau’s public and mythical persona – the dazzling surfaces and multiple masks, the who’s who of his address book, his ‘flirting’ with fashion and artistic movements like Surrealism – has too often obscured the unwavering intelligence and seriousness of a man whose fundamental asceticism produced one of the most coherent, original and influential artistic statements of the twentieth century. To return specifically to Cocteau’s film work, let us establish the four key modes of his filmic practice: his status as an auteur, his role and range as a collaborator; his commitment to experimentation; and his importance as a film theorist. We begin with a basic question: what type of filmmaker was Cocteau?

Cocteau as auteur Cocteau is usually regarded as a ‘literary filmmaker’, part of a peculiarly French tradition of writers who also became innovatory filmmakers (see Michalczyk 1980: 1–28). Godard has referred to Cocteau in this respect as one of a ‘bande des quatre’, or ‘gang of four’, that includes Sacha Guitry, Marcel Pagnol and Marguerite Duras (see Godard 1988: 140–2). Yet this term is rather limiting and creates the false impression that Cocteau’s films were simply an extension or faithful adaptation of themes and styles already well rehearsed in his literary work or plays such as L’Aigle à deux têtes, Les Parents terribles and Orphée, in other words, part of a continual recycling of a set number of themes and images in different formats. These include most obviously troubled masculinity, incestuous desire, death, resurrection, fate, phallic women, mirrors, doubles, reversals and false identity. While there is certainly continuity, Cocteau’s films were above all a direct response to a specific medium with its own particular problematics and thematics. In fact, what makes Cocteau a ‘pure’ filmmaker is precisely the fact that because key themes and figures were already well in place in his work – the emptiness of childhood, Dargelos the school bully and object of fascination, the poet as Orpheus,

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etc. – he could devote himself even more thoroughly to the fundamentals of cinematic form. The beautiful written works that arose from the filmmaking process, such as the screenplay of Le Sang d’un poète which is accompanied by short texts and a series of drawings, and his gripping diary of the long and tortuous production of La Belle et la bête, stand on their own terms as unique cinematic documents. If Cocteau was wont to describe himself as a ‘false cineast’, it was because he considered himself above all a self-taught ‘amateur’ (in the French sense too of a lover of cinema) and ‘artisan’ rather than a paidup member of the industry. He was a humble ‘cabinet maker’ of sounds and images who learned his craft on set and through watching editors at close hand. Yet Cocteau also styled himself as a sharpshooter of the cinema working both within and against the system, another manifestation of his self-willed identification with a long tradition in France of the artiste maudit, which encompasses such poets as Villon, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Like his contemporaries Robert Bresson and Jacques Tari, he was an independent filmmaker whose work stood out from the French cinéma de qualité of the 1940s and 1950s with its strict rules and hierarchical structures where film production was divided out among a set of highly trained specialist technicians. Dialogues, for instance, were regarded as quite separate and distinct from the original script. With L’Eternel retour in 1943 Cocteau was deliberately transgressing the standard methods of commercial cinema by conceiving the project himself, writing both the script and dialogues, choosing his own director (Delannoy) and actors, and even helping to edit the film. Like every other dimension of his art, Cocteau’s films were a statement of artistic and aesthetic will and provided evidence of his special destiny as a poet. That said, Cocteau never conformed to the particular myth of the auteur as martyr prevalent in French cinema and embodied by such figures as Jean Vigo who died a tragic early death and left only a small body of prodigious work. Cocteau could have left France at the onset of the Second World War and gone into voluntary exile yet stayed to pursue his artistic career, much like the French film industry itself which, although its production rates fell, nevertheless consolidated its quality and status under the Vichy government. Cocteau is defined, in fact, by his longevity and staying power despite – yet also perhaps because of – his numerous self-transformations. True, he did suffer a kind of premature death in the 1950s when, following

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the relative failure at the box office of Orphée, and notwithstanding his high profile and standing within the French film industry, he was unable to secure financial backing for his own projects. Cocteau wrote many interesting synopses, often unpublished, for films that were never made. 1 In the case of one that was made, an adaptation of Mérimée’s short story La Venus d’Ille turned into a film by Luis Saslavsky entitled La Couronne noire (1952), Cocteau considered it a gross betrayal of his intentions. Yet Cocteau was effectively reborn as a filmmaker with Le Testament d’Orphée, sponsored and produced by François Truffaut (out of gratitude, Cocteau included in the film JeanPierre Léaud, the young star of Les 400 coups (1959))·Le Testament allowed Cocteau to regain contact with the avant-garde and it presented him at his most authorially potent. He was involved in virtually every aspect of the film’s production, as scriptwriter, dialoguist, decorator, set designer, costumier, machine operator and, at the centre of it all, lead actor, at once self-knowing and self-mocking with his repeated injunction (also the film’s subtitle), ‘Ne me demandez pas pourquoi’ (‘Do not ask me why’). Cocteau was a consummate professional of film if we define professional as W. H. Auden once did while summarising Cocteau’s achievements: ‘His [Cocteau’s] attitude is always professional, that is, his first concern is for the nature of the medium and its hidden possibilities: his drawings are drawings, and not uncoloured paintings, his theatre is theatre, not reading matter in dialogue form, his films are films, not photographed stage effects’ (cited in Levi 1990: 170). Indeed, there was nothing half-baked about Cocteau’s approach; every aspect of his cinema was conceived in fine detail and invariably followed through in its correct proportions. Yet Cocteau was also a professional in the more general sense that he operated successfully at all levels within the French film industry. It is not simply that he won numerous awards, including the Prix Louis Delluc in 1946 for La Belle et la bête and the Grand Prix de la Critique Internationale and Grand Prix du Film Avant-Garde in 1950 for Orphée, or that he had a working interest in all aspects of the industry, from sound technology to the cross-fertilisation 1

Some of these unpublished scripts, including those of La Vénus d’llle and Coriolan, are included in Cocteau 1988. Others, for example Tennis (made in 1949 by Marcel Martin) and La Couronne noire, are now available in Amy de La Bretèque and Caizergues 1989: 95–105.

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of film and theatre and the use of 16 mm film, a format he was already promoting in 1948 in The New York Times for its potential freedom and low cost well before the Nouvelle Vague (see Cocteau 1988: 56–8). Cocteau was also instrumental in shaping French cinema during the 1940s and 1050s, and the list of his official appointments is long and impressive. He was, for example, president of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1953 and 1954 (honorary president in 1957), honorary president of the Fédération française des Ciné-Clubs, as well as an active member of the Club des Amis du Septième Art (which numbered Elie Faure, Fernand Léger, Arthur Honegger, Maurice Jaubert and Jean Epstein) and of Objectif 49 over which he presided at one point with André Bazin, Roger Leenhardt and Alexandre Astruc. In addition, he was president of the Fédération Nationale du Spectacle and the Syndicat des Scénaristes. Working as so often in parallel with, and against, the mainstream, Cocteau also co-founded the Festival du Film Maudit at Biarritz in the summer of 1949. Finally, he even found the time in 1956 to design a set of Japanese – style lights for the auditorium of the historic Studio 28 cinema in Montmartre. In short, Cocteau was a great enabler and go-between of French cinema, and his hands (which he fetishised literally in his drawings and photography) can be found in countless film productions large and small that have a place alongside those already mentioned (see the filmography at the end of this book). He used his enormous influence to promote new talents, notably Jean Genet whose erotic short Un Chant d’amour (1950) he facilitated by making available the grounds of his home at Milly-la-Forêt. He was also happy to take cameo roles in the work of other promising and still marginal filmmakers, for instance, in Jacques Baratier’s Désordre (1947) and Isidore Isou’s Traité de bave et d’étemité (1951). In the first issue in 1948 of the film magazine St-Germain-des-Prés, Cocteau directly addressed Isou and other young Lettrists such as Guy Debord. Yet Cocteau’s interest in the cinema extended well beyond national boundaries. In September 1953’ for example, he paid fulsome tribute to the Japanese film tradition and the following year personally endorsed Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell (1952) at Cannes where it won the Palme d’Or (Cocteau even provided a prefatory text for the French version of the film, La Porte de I’enfer). He also went to exceptional lengths to welcome the young American gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger to France after being emotionally

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overwhelmed by his explosive 1947 short, Fireworks. (According to film legend, a cortege of limousines was waiting in Le Havre when Anger docked there in the spring of 1950; Anger however decided to avoid the pomp and ceremony and took the train to Paris instead.) Hence, if Cocteau was a gentle militant in the cause of the Seventh Art against the big studios, producers and distributors, his aim was less to undermine the system than to open it up to new filmmakers, allowing them to realise their projects and reach their particular audience (we note in this regard Cocteau’s wish to present the world premiere of Le Testament not in Paris itself but in the less obvious surroundings of Belleville). Cocteau grasped that the cinema-going public is varied and multiple and that different and challenging films had to be given not only financial backing but also the time and space to work their spell. Despite possible appearances to the contrary, he was therefore not an elitist breed of film auteur but essentially progressive and even radical in his approach, all the more so in view of his establishment status.

Cocteau as collaborator Every aspect of a Cocteau film bears the concrete mark of its author’s signature, from the customary ‘home style’ credit sequences featuring his drawings and cursive handwriting sealed by his trademark star, to his omnipresent voice-overs with their distinctive grave tone and slow, highly mannered drawing out of syllables (a style of delivery which his actors often ended up imitating). All this was possible, however, because Cocteau approached cinema as a fundamentally collaborative medium. He made it his business to work not only with other filmmakers like de Poligny, Bresson and Melville but also with professionals, technicians and machine operators, notably the great cinematographer Henri Alekan, the set designer and artistic director Christian Bérard, and the musical director and composer Georges Auric. Indeed, it was Cocteau’s desire to collaborate with such outstanding talents that allowed him ironically to go against the rules and resist their professional habits, or what we might call, citing Heurte-bise in Orphée, their ‘déformation professionnelle’. This was most obviously the case with Alekan during the shooting of La Belle et la bête, when Cocteau had to retrain – or rather untrain – Alekan in order to achieve the crisp clarity of the image he was seeking. It was not

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simply the professionalism of his collaborators that Cocteau depended on but also their total commitment to a collective enterprise. He expected all the members of his specially chosen crew to give themselves body and soul like him to the exhausting labour of love of filmmaking. Such proof of professional friendship and mutual respect is something Cocteau paid full tribute to in his books and articles cataloguing the production of his films. The link between collaboration and friendship was most complete in the case of Cocteau’s leading men who were also at one time or another his lovers and intimate companions: Enrique Rivero and Jean Desbordes in Le Sang d’un poète; fean Marais in L’Eternel retour, La Belle et la bête, Ruy Blas, L’Aigle à deux têtes, Les Parents terribles, Orphée and Le Testament d’Orphée; Edouard Dermit in L’Aigle à deux têtes, Orphée, Les Enfants terribles, La Villa Santo-Sospir and Le Testament d’Orphée. The most extensive of all these collaborations, of course, was that between Cocteau and Marais, a young actor half his age whom Cocteau met in 1937. As his self-appointed mentor and impresario, Cocteau groomed Marais for success on the Paris stage before he and Delannoy gave him the lead role in L’Eternel retour, the film that transformed him into a national star and heartthrob. It was Marais’s desire to be a filmstar that actually inspired Cocteau’s return to filmmaking, and their long collaboration, a model of creative friendship for Cocteau, was one of the most productive and sustained between director and actor in the history of the cinema. It included not only their consistent work together on stage and screen but also many texts on, about and for each other, for example, Cocteau’s admiring yet objective portrait entitled simply Jean Marais (1951). To emphasise the critical importance of Marais here is not, however, to diminish the importance of Dermit who replaced Marais in Cocteau’s affections in 1947, a process played out self-consciously in Orphée where the established poet Orphée (Marais) finds himself supplanted by the new generation and avant-garde represented by Cégeste (Dermit). Originally from the Lorraine where he had worked in the iron mines before suffering an accident, Dermit quickly progressed through a series of odd jobs at Cocteau’s home in Milly-la-forêt (purchased earlier with Marais) to become eventually his ‘adopted son’. The 1950s were really the ‘Dermit years’, and as we shall see Dermit helped to bring a new atmosphere and sensibility to Cocteau’s film work, notably in the home movie La Villa Santo-Sospir,

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Cocteau’s only film in colour. While there is inevitably some overlap between Marais and Dermit (Marais remained a loyal collaborator for Cocteau long after the end of their ten-year relationship), the mapping of Cocteau’s life around his major relationships avoids the standard periodisation that has proved so unhelpful for understanding his personal and artistic development (the critical tendency, for example, to lump together the last thirty years of his life, as diverse and prolific as the previous thirty, under the simple rubric of Cocteau ‘the public man’).2 Cocteau’s collaborations with Marais and Dermit helped to redefine the limits of male performance and collaboration in general for reasons we shall explore at length in Chapter 5. The crux of their very varied work together, however, was the representation of the male body. Cocteau’s films offer one of the most complete artistic studies of the male body in movement and metamorphosis, in flux but also in stasis, subject to tension and extension, and in perpetual formation but also deformation and reformation, a process of transition inflected by the mappings of gender. If the body in Cocteau is consistently erotic and autoerotic because exposed and vulnerable to these different states and movements, it is however rarely explicitly sexual. Apart from the poet in Le Sang d’un poète swooning in joyful abandon, his head tumbled backwards in solitary pleasure as the dislocated wound runs out of frame down his naked torso, there exists no explicit scene of male sexual desire in Cocteau’s film work. Indeed, in Cocteau’s work as a whole, the anonymously published Le Livre blanc (1928), his private graphic drawings and rare poems such as ‘L’Ange Heurtebise’ (1925) stand out as exceptions to the rule. Even the most compelling heterosexual romance in his films, in La Belle et la bête, is played out ethereally as that between woman and beast. When human desire does erupt in Cocteau, it rarely evolves into fully-fledged raw passion and is quickly transformed and sublimated, like the movement of violence in his work, into an aesthetic climax of absolute love. That said, Cocteau’s film productions are also a history of physical torment for his partnerscum-collaborators, most obviously Marais who endured many hours of make-up to play the role of la Bête, and Dermit who was continually falling backwards, sometimes even off a cliff into the sea, for the 2 See, for example, Nemer 2003, the fifth and last chapter of which (‘L’homme public’) is dedicated to the whole block of years 1930–63.

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purposes of reverse-motion photography. Cocteau himself was not unscathed by the process. For three days during the shooting of his first foray into film, Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma, which featured Fabien Haziza (also possibly a lover) as the fatal dunce of a boarding school, he appeared to lose his vision due to the brutal set lighting. This temporary blindness constitutes a kind of primal scene for Cocteau as director. The opening image of Le Sang d’un poète is of himself as author, masked except for his eyes and holding in his right hand draped with cloth another hand made of plaster (the film’s first episode is entitled: ‘La main blessée ou les cicatrices du poète’ (‘The wounded hand or the scars of the poet’)). During the making of La Belle et la bête he suffered from a range of debilitating skin conditions. The same discomfort was experienced with his acting roles: as de Musset in Guitry’s La Malibran where Cocteau, by his own admission, looked grotesque, and as the ghost of Baron Carol in de Poligny’s Le Baron fantôme who, mummified and hidden for decades in his decrepit castle, is literally wasting away. Such concrete moments as these belie the simple notion that Cocteau made himself blind metaphorically through narcissistic self-absorption. There is an intrinsically dark side to his cinematic universe that undermines the surface sheen and lightness he was constantly accused of (along with his exhibitionism and perceived solipsistic wish for self-apotheosis). Cocteau exposes himself in, and yet is exposed by, the cinema almost masochistically, most flagrantly in Le Sang d’un poète where he is pictured early on ‘caught in a trap by his own film’ due to the ‘surprises of photography’. If Cocteau’s works have a clear biographical basis, it is, however, the relationship between the bio(s) and the graphic that we should take most seriously rather than any autobiographical secrets the films may possibly contain. Certainly, Cocteau returns again and again to archetypal and magical images which he reads always and flexibly selfreflexively. Yet from the very beginning, in the opening caption of Le Sang d’un poète, he effectively counsels against the public’s desire to search for personal symbols with his provocative authorial statement: ‘Tout poème est un blasón. II faut le déchiffrer’ (‘Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered’). In his presentation of the film during its first public screening in Paris in January 1932 (which now serves as a postcript to the published text), Cocteau also spoke of it possessing a far truer form of himself, albeit more obscure due to its hieroglyphics.

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In other words, what matters most is the mobile figure of the Poet and his ‘acts’, or allegories of acts’, glimpsed at the moment of the film’s projection, rather than any prerecorded evidence of Cocteau’s individual self. At the very most he is what he calls in his written preface to Le Testament an ‘archéologue de ma nuit’ (Cocteau 1995: 1322) (‘archaeologist of my darkness’). For Cocteau to pitch his films on such a level is to offer the viewer not an authentic autobiography but rather, to use Claude Beylie’s term, an ‘autograph’ in the continual act of being written, both on the skin of the screen and on that of the filmed body (see Beylie 1966). The theatrical, often highly camp male body in movement in his cinema will reveal truths that are impersonal, universal and contingent, for example, about the nature of gender as performance, the relationship of the body to different kinds of space (private, public, urban, familial, claustrophobic, incestuous), and the body in its different stages, from youthful prime to weakened old age (Cocteau is one of the most acute observers of the different generations). This, rather than the patient construction of an Orphic identity in his films as documented in impressive detail by Arthur B. Evans among others (see Evans 1977 and Thiher 1979), is the primary force and ambition of Cocteau’s staging of the Poet for which he has still not been given proper credit.

Cocteau as experimenter As already suggested, Cocteau conceived of cinema as essentially a research laboratory and each of his films marks a direct response to aesthetic questions raised by the medium. Le Sang d’un poète, for example, explored the new formal possibilities afforded the human voice by the introduction of sound. It is as though Cocteau had to wait for the arrival of sound and thus the full complement of the Real to begin filmmaking. His interest in new technology and processes prompted new approaches, for example, his major experiment with Kodachrome colour film in La Villa de Santo-Sospir, and as he himself recognised he was obliged to reinvent his technique with every film. In fact, Cocteau approached film less with the question: ‘what is cinema?’, than: ‘what can the cinema do?’. For the filmmaker Chris Marker, Cocteau never stopped trying to comprehend the world through film, hence the importance he attached to waves, signals and all forms of

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mechanical revelation. Marker wrote: ‘he [Cocteau] collaborates with mystery, he offers to the monster camera prepared nourishment, of course, but it is a food from which he ultimately expects a prodigious metamorphosis’ (cited in Gilson 1969: 159). Further, Cocteau insisted on cinema’s ceremonial aspect and the fact that when films are projected we receive phantom images and words emanating as if from beyond the grave. This sense of an almost religious communion replays the extreme, sleep-walking state of the shoot itself. He proclaimed: ‘Un spectacle est un cérémonial. Si l’on perd le cérémonial, tout est perdu [ ... ] le spectacle est une messe’ (Cocteau 2003:119) (‘A spectacle is a ritual. If one loses the ritual, all is lost [ ... ] the spectacle is a mass’). Yet what ultimately was Cocteau searching for in the cinema? Cocteau’s passion was for the forms and shapes produced by and in the camera. This stemmed from an abiding interest in the early scientific forms of cinematography, notably the work of the early British filmmaker James Williamson (1855–1933) whose 1901 film Stop Thief constituted one of the first attempts at film narrative. Williamson, whose importance Cocteau acknowledged directly in his presentation of Le Sang d’un poète, filmed underwater with his brother and their slowing down of documentary images appeared to cast a supernatural light on objects, endowing them with a kind of grace similar to that produced in the work of Etienne-Jules Marey which decomposed speed and the marching of time. Such filmmakers were the greatest poets for Cocteau precisely because they were not seeking the poetic. With Cocteau there is always the giddy sense of the marvellous waiting to be revealed, and he had an impish delight in discovering the strange, unheralded forms delivered up by the machine. A great film is an accident, a banana skin under the feet of dogma he once quipped with utter seriousness, and he considered his role in the process as merely that of an intermediary or conductor agent. Cocteau’s attitude towards the cinematic object as always potentially animate influenced how he viewed his characters, as specimens of human flesh in perpetual motion. This provides his films with a defining tension, between characters blessed with motivation and psychology (and with it the potential for free will), and their material status and destiny as creatures of squirming organic matter. Hence, when Cocteau explains that he filmed Les Parents terribles to preserve for posterity the extraordinary stage performances of his cast, in particular Yvonne de

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Bray, he refers to his actors quite literally as his ‘monstres sacrés’ (also the name of his 1940 play about the world of the Paris stage). As we shall see, he maintained a crucial distance from his characters by eschewing point of view and subjective shots while at the same time magnifying and multiplying angles and perspectives in order to extend our perception of human subjects as objects. As Neal Oxenhandler has put it well: ‘The image does not merely pass across the screen, it unfolds, using the full space of the screen, living organically with its background and every other object represented ... Cocteau encourages his actors to be larger than life, to be the phantasms of the unconscious that they become on the movie screen’ (Oxenhandler 1965:17). Cocteau’s films also represent one of the most sustained, quasiscientific explorations of time and its relativity in the history of cinéma. As Philippe Azoury and Jean-Marc Lalanne have suggested in their excellent recent study, Cocteau et le cinéma. Désordres (2003), Cocteau’s literary trips into time such as Opium and Mon Premier voyage (Tour du Monde en 80 Jours), an account of his marathon tour of the world in 1936 with Marcel Khill in the footsteps of Jules Verne, may be regarded as proto-cinematographic works and effectively a prologue to the corpus itself (Azoury and Lalanne 2003: 106–7). Azoury and Lalanne even claim with some justification that Mon premier voyage is the book Cocteau never wrote on the cinema. In their view, Cocteau’s approach towards film is fundamentally an attempt to retrieve through the image the dazed sensation of opium, not its supposed hallucinations but rather its ‘counter-time’, that is to say, its ‘quietude’ and pure, ‘immobile speed’ which Cocteau insists is the only way of gaining access to the world of the invisible and our own internal, individual speed. Some of the remarkably vivid descriptions related by Cocteau of his ‘anti-voyage’ in Mon Premier voyage evoke cinema as a pure machine of sensations and a silent refuge of suspended time. The only time that truly exists for Cocteau, however, is subjective, even if – and this is always the paradoxical logic of Cocteau, an artist marked by his period but suffused by his own internal thoughts and imagery – a given, official time must be in place in order for this to appear. The result is an interpersonal cinematic space tuned in to different force-fields and subject to an anti-gravitational pull. In Opium, which ends with the statement that his next work will be a film (so it proved: Le Sang d’un poète), Cocteau suggests that film permits the viewer to conceive of a

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‘change of speed’, and that by being slowed down celluloid can reveal like carbon the secrets of the soul (Cocteau 2003: 619). He later described Le Testament, his most extensive experiment in slow motion and time as a fluid, reversible ‘space’, in the following terms: ‘Le film autorise le phénomène qui consiste à vivre une œuvre au lieu de la raconter, et, en outre, à faire voir l’invisible’ (Pillaudin 1960: 9) (‘The film authorises the phenomenon which consists in living a work instead of narrating it, and moreover in showing the invisible’). Cocteau’s highly materialist approach to film practice provides it ultimately with a metaphysical aim to transfigure the real, one that we shall chart during the course of this study. Indeed, the sheer awe that Cocteau feels when tapping into cinema’s primal forces induces a genuine pathos: these were real objects transformed by cinematic time and are now projected visions of both sublime beauty and horror. The fragility and risks of the medium produce their own set of emotions. The cinema is linked intimately, and tragically, to a consciousness of death. Indeed, to cite one of Cocteau’s most celebrated phrases from Orphée about mirrors, it is essentially death at work. For Cocteau, any filmic image, however fictional and in whatever style, has the documentary force of a newsreel since it has recorded reality and is thus a direct despatch from the real. As he once phrased it succinctly: ‘Ce qu’on voit, on le voit. Cela devient done vrai, dans le sens où Goethe emploie le terme’ (Cocteau 2003: 66) (‘What we see, we see. It becomes therefore true, in Goethe’s sense of the term’).3 The special effects in Cocteau’s films, a combination of mechanical artifice and visual mirage, are ‘true’ because they were witnessed in the here and now by the actors and crew and duly recorded by the camera. For this 3

Later in the same volume, Cocteau refers to the shared experience of watching Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad (1938), which operated through the vérisme of moving images to the point of becoming ‘une actualité: ‘Ce qu’on croyait, on le voyait ... Cela prouve que le film nous autorise à exprimer n’importe quoi, pourvu que nous arrivions à lui communiquer une puissance expressive apte à changer nos phantasmes en faits indéniables’ (Cocteau 2003: 104) (‘What we believed, we saw ... This proves that film authorises us to express anything, provided that we manage to communicate to it an expressive power capable of changing our fantasies into undeniable facts’). Not for the first time, Cocteau celebrates here unproblematically the truth of the cinematic image, even in the explicit context of fascism. We shall come back to this troubling question in Chapters 3 and 5.

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reason, Cocteau generally avoided post-production techniques and was never more happy than describing the basic methods he employed to achieve his effects. This superior, truthful realism (or ‘vérisme’) is ‘le plus vrai que le vrai’ (‘the truer than truth’), as he termed it in his published notes to Orphée. We thus find ourselves already transported with Cocteau into the realm of the fantastic and the marvellous. One of Cocteau’s pivotal statements on cinema is a chapter of La Difficulté d’être (1947) entitled ‘Du merveilleux au cinématographe’ (‘Of the marvellous in the cinematograph’), where he emphasises that ‘le merveilleux’ is not some kind of simple conjuring trick but part of the very core of reality. He refers to painting and specifically Vermeer to make his case: ‘Chez Vermeer l’espace est peuplé d’un autre monde que celui qu’il représente. Le sujet de son tableau n’est qu’un prétexte, un véhicule par où s’exprime l’univers du merveilleux’ (Cocteau 1995: 892) (‘In Vermeer space is peopled by another world from the one represented. The subject of his painting is merely a pretext, the vehicle by which the realm of the marvellous is expressed’). The marvellous cannot be forced, however: ‘le cinématographe peut s’apparenter au merveilleux tel que je l’envisage s’il se contente d’en erre un véhicule et s’il ne cherche pas à le produire’ (Cocteau 1995: 892) (‘the cinematograph can attain the marvellous as I envisage it if it contents itself to be its vehicle and not try to produce it’). Indeed, for the Poet, ‘Merveilleux et Poésie ne me concernent pas. Ils doivent m’attaquer par embuscade’ (Cocteau 1995: 893) (‘Poetry and the Marvellous are not my aim. They must assail me by ambush’). Even the most banal objects of daily life such as a rubber glove or a car radio can suddenly reveal themselves with unexpected grace and achieve poetic, even mythic status (hence Cocteau’s perpetual mixing of the classical and modern as two types of mythology). In fact, according to Cocteau, poetry functions best in L ‘Eternel retour during the more ordinary scenes of the garage because there it is entirely unforeseen. In La Belle et la bête it is to be found during odd moments of dialogue and looking, for example, in the early scene of the male servants transporting the carriages. Cocteau’s singular realism of the marvellous is thus always of the order of surprise and can even arise ‘de quelque faute, de quelque syncope, de quelque rencontre fortuite entre l’attention et l’inattention de son auteur’ (Cocteau 1995: 892) (‘from some fault, some syncope, some lucky encounter between the attention and lack of attention of its author’). Cocteau adds immediately in a decisive footnote: ‘Et la faculté

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d’émerveillement du spectateur. On n’a rien sans rien’ (Cocteau 1995: 892) (‘And the viewer’s capacity for astonishment. One gets nothing for nothing’), for his ideal version of cinema is conceived as a direct engagement with the individual viewer who ‘collaborates’ with the film to make it his or her own. Yet such vital participation and sensitivity to the marvellous requires discipline and precision. Even la Bête must impose strict rules on Belle. To honour the marvellous with respect and to treat cinema only as its privileged vehicle means that its secret power will never be exhausted. As Frédéric Strauss has observed, the signs and signals of the marvellous in Cocteau always appear fresh and intact, even if his films often return to the same images and themes and sometimes repeat certain sequences (Strauss 1989: 79). Indeed, Cocteau’s personal mythologies (statues, mirrors, doubles, etc.) almost always resist the standard codes of representation and exegesis and guard the imaginary against his sworn enemy, banal symbolism. Snatched as if from death, each instance of sound and image in his work is nothing less than an apparition in the spontaneous act of becoming. Cocteau’s formal concern with the projected real object and what it can reveal of the marvellous and invisible predominates over any other, including that of montage. This is despite occasional statements about the status of montage clearly inspired by his formative meeting with Sergei Eisenstein in 1930 just before he began filming Le Sang d’un poète, for example: ‘Le cinématographe est un métier de montage. C’est le montage qui est le plus important travail du cinéaste. C’est son style, son écriture’ (Cocteau 2003:124) (‘The cinematograph is a craft of editing. Editing is the filmmaker’s most important work. It’s his style and his signature’). In fact, the editing process gives rise to all sorts of metaphysical ideas in Cocteau, as, for instance, when he talks of ‘un mécanisme d’âme qui ne soit pas un mécanisme de paroles, un mécanisme nocturne, mettre au jour de la nuit, en détail, de la même manière qu’on monte un film’ (Cocteau 2003: 124–5) (‘a mechanism of the soul that is not a mechanism of words, a nocturnal mechanism, bringing darkness into day in detail the same way one edits a film’). In practical terms, a film for Cocteau is a discontinuous series of images. Each image must be set off from another and not flow into the next, although this method varies in degree from film to film: from Le Sang d’un poète which is composed as a collage of disparate elements to a more obviously narrative film like Orphée. Cocteau’s primary concern is not to damage what he calls the individual ‘relief of each image, so that

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the linking and juxtaposing of images in montage is enhanced by the textures of traceable difference. Only this guarantees the overall beauty of a film (‘La beauté est faite de rapports’) (Cocteau 1988: 33) (‘Beauty is made out of connections’). Montage can thus be defined more generally in Cocteau as a play of angles and distances within the shot itself, as well as of rhythms intensified by his use of different speeds and forms of motion, in particular slow and reverse motion, both within the image and on the soundtrack. In Le Testament, for example, we witness at once the protracted sound of a high-pitched tuning fork and Cégeste’s words played back in reverse, apparently faster although this is merely an illusion. Sounds and images can be suddenly interrupted and suspended within the blink of an eye, and between both tracks there are additional possibilities for variation and syncopation by means of ‘accidental synchronism’, Cocteau’s term for producing a random encounter between music and the prerecorded image (we shall explore this phenomenon in Chapter 2 as it affects Le Sang d’un poète). Cocteau was, in fact, one of the most remarkable exponents of rhythm, speed and pace because he understood that slowness was never really just slowness but a type of rhythm. In his opinion film needed to impose and increase its rhythm in order to reveal its true worth: ‘II n’est pas impossible que le cinéma puisse un jour filmer l’invisible, le rendre visible, le ramene à notre rythme, comme il ramène à notre rythme la gesticulation des fleurs. L’opium, qui change nos vitesses, nous procure l’lntuition très nette de mondes qui se superposent, se compénètrent, et ne s’entresoupçonnent même pas’ (Cocteau 1995: 634).4 So integral is rhythm to Cocteau’s thinking about film that it even defines the communal experience of the shoot: ‘Ce rythme de travail ne peut exister que dans une entente ... Mes artistes, mes techniciens, mes ouvriers sont choisis par moi d’après leur valeur morale beaucoup plus que d’après leur valeur artistique’ (Cocteau 2003: 93).5 4 ‘It’s not impossible that the cinema will one day be able to film the invisible, render it visible, and bring it to our rhythm, just as it brings to our rhythm the gesticulations of flowers. Opium, which changes our speeds, procures for us the very clear intuition of superimposed and interpenetrating worlds that barely suspect each other.’ 5 ‘The rhythm I follow is possible only in harmony ... I choose my cast, my technicians and all my workers according to their moral rather than artistic value.’

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Cocteau as theorist We arrive now at the final major aspect of Cocteau’s cinematic practice, his contribution as a film theorist. All his films offer to a lesser or greater extent a reflexion on their own construction and cinema itself and are thus innately metacinematic. Entire sections of dialogue in Le Testament read like extracts from a book of cinematic axioms, for instance, the Poet’s reply to the Princess and Heurtebise during his mock trial: ‘Un film est une source pétrifiante de la pensée. Un film ressuscite les actes morts – Un film peut donner l’apparence de la réalité à l’iréel’.6 Moreover, the published screenplay of Le Testament arrives complete with a range of critical texts: ‘Préface’, ‘Pas de symboles’, ‘Le Cinématographe considéré comme hypnotiseur’ (‘The Cinematograph as Hypnotist’), ‘Le péché originel de l’art’ (‘The Original Sin of Art’), as well as a short poem called ‘Phénixologie’ (‘Phœnixology’). Even Cocteau’s spoken and highly poetic commentary for André Zwobada’s 1948 short, Les Noces de sable, a version of Tristan and Isolde set against documentary-style images of the Moroccan desert, begins as an artistic statement about the keyhole art of filmmaking. Yet what exactly was Cocteau’s theory of film? It is true that he never wrote a major theory or manifesto of film as such, yet his considerable body of writing on the cinema, collected mainly in Du Cinématographe (first published in 1973 and expanded in 1988), represents one of the most sustained and comprehensive engagements with film in the history of French cinema and finds a place alongside René Clair’s seminal work, also written over time, entitled Cinéma d’hier, cinéma d’aujourd’hui (1970). The volume comprises not only Cocteau’s many articles and thoughts on the cinema, from its early development as an industry to its importance for art and modern culture, but also his tributes to other directors, actors and professionals, curators such as Henri Langlois who co-founded the Cinémathéque Française,7 theorists such as André Bazin, as well as assorted notes, prefaces, synopses of films made and not made, and accounts of his own films. The collection highlights how Cocteau understood cinema 6 ‘A film is a petrifying source of thought. A film revives dead acts – A film allows one to give a semblance of reality to unreality.’ 7 Cocteau describes Langlois brilliantly as ‘the dragon who guards his treasures’. In return, Langlois paid fine tribute to Cocteau (see Langlois 1972).

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in both its aesthetic and social dimensions, and also, more specifically, how consistent he was in his own approach to filmmaking, for example, in his suspicion of colour which he barely used except for the odd effect (in le Testament) and in the more intimate La Villa Santo-Sospir. It also reveals the paradox of Cocteau as a natural auteur who enjoyed and promoted popular entertainment. His tastes were eclectic, from BenHur (William Wyler) to Pépé le Moko (Julien Duvivier) and Les Yeux sans visage (Georges Franju), and from documentary and comedy to film noir and horror. Already in his 1921 satire for the stage, Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, with its non-sequiturs and montage of disparate elements including a photographic camera that eats and spits out its characters, Cocteau betrayed the direct influence of the burlesque and vaudeville in French cinema. He waxes lyrical in Du Cinématographe about Orson Welles, Robert Bresson and Marlene Dietrich, yet oddly never really mentions the work of the early French avant-garde, for example, Louis Delluc, Abel Gance, Jean Epstein, Rene Clair, Germaine Dulac. In fact, although Le Sang d’un poète had a profound impact on the development of the avant-garde, especially in the United States, Cocteau never regarded himself as part of an avant-garde film tradition. Instead, he acknowledges the sources of his passion for cinema as Chaplin and Keaton, Dreyer and Eisenstein, the early Hollywood westerns of the original screen cowboy William S. Hart, or ‘Two-Gun Bill’, and one film in particular, Cecil B. DeMille’s early silent The Cheat (1915), a light frothy drama which, according to Cocteau, made ‘Cinema’ the name of a muse. In an article for Paris-Midi published on 28 April 1919, Cocteau eulogised Chaplin (whom he later met in 1936) for his universality (his ability ‘to address all ages and peoples’), and hailed cinema’s capacity through close-up, lighting and other techniques to make us see the world magnified and as if sculpted for the first time. As Robin Buss has pointed out in his preface to the English translation of Du Cinématographe, the collection proves how much Cocteau prized mutual affection and tribute even to the point of blandness (Cocteau 2001: 11). This is to be contrasted, of course, with some of the grotesque criticism sometimes heaped on Cocteau himself over the years, for example, Lucien Rebatet’s nasty homophobic attack on L’Eternel retour which referred to Cocteau as ‘an aged weathercock of the third sex’ and a ‘frenzied coquette’ (see Vinneuil 1943). Yet the articles in Du Cinématographe on topics such as ‘the theatre and

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cinema’, ‘science and poetry’, ‘poetry in cinematography’, ‘film as a medium for poetry’, ‘beauty in cinematography’ and ‘sound civilisation’, all bear the mark of serious enquiry and inspired theoretical speculation. Cocteau was always thinking about new ways to improve both the practice and institution of cinema, spurred on by his hope that film realise its full potential and become the complete art par excellence. This he defined as ‘un théâtre des foules où ni la musique, ni la danse, ni la parole, ni le masque grec (le gros plan), ni le murmure que des centaines d’oreilles peuvent entendre, ni ríen de ce qui compose le drame ne fait défaut’ (Cocteau 1988:165).8 Moreover, the cinema, with its ‘supernatural esperanto of images’ (Cocteau 1988: 113), might serve as ‘une arme puissante pour projeter la pensée, même dans une foule qui s’y refuse’ (Cocteau 2003: 12) (‘a powerful weapon for projecting thought, even into a crowd that refuses it’). Yet Cocteau recognised that for film to achieve this, it had first to differentiate itself from all other arts and move beyond the fact of its immediate and almost abnormal popularity. That might entail in the first instance developing more intimate, confessional modes and genres. His profound disappointment with the way cinema quickly succumbed to the dictates of trade and entertainment before it could deliver on its universal promise infuses his film work and finds contemporary resonance in Godard’s video magnum opus, Histoire(s) du Cinéma (1998), a personal testament that is also an elegy for cinema and makes direct reference to Cocteau as both a benevolent uncle figure and one of the founding fathers of cinema. Running throughout all Cocteau’s film writing is the sense that he is on our side, the side of death-bound humankind, and he wants us above all to share his fascination and astonishment for the serendipity of the machine and its limitless trouvailles. For Cocteau, as for Godard, the cinema can reveal and encourage new forms of relationships and perceptions. Indeed, it is Cocteau’s absolute faith in cinema as the gateway to a new, fourth dimension accessible to all, as well as a vehicle for pure poetry and a source of epiphanic power, that serves as his guiding principle and drives him to assume at times a pedagogical role, a role he plays up to brilliant effect as the Oxford don in his gown in Le Testament. According to Cocteau, the time has now 8 ‘[A] theatre of the masses where neither music nor dance, nor speech, nor Greek masks (the close-up), nor the murmur audible to hundreds of ears, nor anything of which drama is composed, is missing.’

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come for the cinematograph to be taught at school as a means of understanding both the world and history. This leads him on occasion to overstate his case, for example, disclaiming in his solo campaign against Cartesian reason all interest in technique and virtuosity. What is remarkable, however, is that despite his heavy sense of collective responsibility linked to what he calls the ‘moral progress’ and ‘line’ of his work, or ‘le style de l’âme’ (‘the style of the soul’) (Cocteau 1995: 962), his films vibrate with genuine wit and humour, even self-parody, to the point of employing gags and slapstick in the Chaplinesque style of Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma. A short article published in Le Film on 15 November 1919, although not collected in Du Cinématographe, conveys the significance and cohesiveness of Cocteau’s philosophy of film. Entitled simply ‘Notes autour du cinématographe’ (Amy de La Bretèque and Caizergues 1989:13–15), the piece is remarkably prescient of Cocteau’s own future film practice. He talks here of the as yet unguessed potential of ‘le cinématographe’ (as opposed to ‘le cinéma’). According to the dictionary of the Académie Française, which he himself helped to produce (he was elected to this exclusive club in 1955), it was Cocteau himself who invented this term. Certainly his definition of it is particular. Le cinématographe presents cinema both as an instrument that records (like the seismograph and the telegraph) and as a form of writing, in this case with light. He states elsewhere: ‘c’est une encre de lumière avec laquelle j’ai le droit d’écrire ce que je veux’ (Cocteau 1988: 127) (‘it’s an ink of light with which I have the right to write what I like’), and: ‘Un film est une écriture en images et je cherche à lui communiquer un climat qui corresponde davantage aux sentiments qu’aux faits’ (Cocteau 1958: 150) (‘A film is writing in images and I seek to communicate a mood that corresponds more to feelings than to facts’). Cocteau’s insistence on le cinématographe, which he pursued with an almost missionary zeal, was a way of establishing a healthy distance from the nefarious effects of the industry, in particular Hollywood, which he realised very quickly was predicated on the quick buck and the ‘false perfectionism’ of unimaginative professionals taken over by technique (he claimed at one point that the slow pace of his films was an act of resistance against the ‘speediness’ of American cinema). Cocteau emphasises also in this article his mistrust of symbolism and conventional ‘expressions’ of reality, his belief in the simple beauty and

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integrity of an object captured in silence, and above all his commitment to le cinématographe as an art of the detail and enlarged objects, indeed any object and gesture that becomes as though an actor in itself (he refers to the medium’s ‘poignant imagery’). Cocteau proposes that the underlying mechanism of cinema is like that of a dream but is not itself a dream since we believe in what we see. By implication, all films, and Cocteau films in particular, are dreams which the audience dreams together (the French word for a film screening is ‘séance’). This is cinema as a shared hypnosis or waking dream. Cocteau puts it elsewhere in a form that loops back to the notion of ‘the truer than truth’ cited earlier: ‘Je suis un poéte qui use de la caméra comme d’un véhicule propre à permettre à tous de rever ensemble un même rêve, un rêve qui n’est pas un rêve de sommeil mais le rêve rêvé debout, qui n’est autre que le réalisme irréel, le plus vrai que le vrai...’ (Cocteau 1988: 152). 9 As Strauss has rightly observed, Cocteau’s films are haunted not only by the consciousness of death but also by a dream that remains somehow beyond the appearances of onirism, a dream whose internal logic does not depend on any unconscious (Strauss 1989: 76). The result is a mysterious cinema of almost hyper-real detail and precision that demands our total involvement but which lays bare all our attempts at easy interpretation. We have witnessed some of the different, often contradictory levels at which the cinema operates for Cocteau and which make his films, like the man himself who once declared ‘Je suis un mensonge qui dit toujours la vérité’ (‘I am a lie that always tells the truth’), a site of endless paradox and irony. We may try to formalise these paradoxes and contradictions yet we shall never be able to straighten them out fully or resolve them. Nor should we wish to since Cocteau, being of the same age as the cinema, naturally embodies many of its conflicting tendencies (documentary vs. the fantastic, the popular vs. the aesthetic, entertainment vs. science, etc.). All his film work confounds the viewer in some way, from the shifting, compound genres of his feature films to the formal enigma that is Le Testament. Indeed, they ue at the intersection of multiple forces and counter-forces, movements and counter-movements. Everything that is put into play exists, as it were, 9 ‘I am a poet who uses the camera like a vehicle capable of allowing everyone to dream the same dream together, a dream that is not the dream of sleep but the waking dream, which is nothing other than unreal realism, the truer than truth.’

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en décalage and requires some kind of translation, displacement or substitution. Even the simple sound of arrows being fired in La Belle et la bête has to be reinvented; which is to say, cinematic truth in Cocteau may be found in the false and artificial, and vice versa. It is precisely in order to respect the plurality and hybridity of Cocteau’s cinema that I wish in this study to adopt an interdisciplinary approach based around general areas or ‘zones’ of thematic and formal concern, rather than to pursue a separate examination of each film in strict chronological order. Such thematic zones will necessarily overlap yet they will have the advantage of treating Cocteau’s films on an equal basis and allowing potentially all his multifarious work in the cinema a place within our discussion. Chapter 2, ‘All is possible: Le Sang d’un poète’, takes the pulse of Cocteau’s cinema by examining in detail his groundbreaking first film. Approaching Cocteau as the meeting point of two major and interconnecting strands in French cinema, realism (Lumière) and fantasy (Méliès), I will assess the film’s intermeshing of documentary and fiction, paying particular attention to its formal innovations and metacinematic aspects. I will argue that Le Sang d’un poète offers a vision of the potential of film for Cocteau, and generates a bedrock of energy, passion and sensuality that underlies and propels all his subsequent work. In Chapter 3, ‘The tricks of the reel’, I trace the evolution of realism and fantasy in Cocteau’s work by introducing a third main element, theatre. I shall assess 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; and from the still little-known documentary short La Villa Santo-Sospir to Cocteau’s final portrait of the artist as Orpheus, Le Testament d’Orphée. Although Cocteau would ideally wish to collapse realism and fantasy into one in order to achieve a perfect poetic synthesis, a kind of magic realism, they are in constant tension with each other throughout his film work, resulting in a complex set of variations, balances and modulations. Chapter 4, ‘In the Zone: Orphée’, is devoted exclusively to Orphée. In this film which is far from being his last, all the various formal tendencies of Cocteau’s cinema come together but with the additional element of time conceived of as history. Orphée (Jean Marais) is led

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through the Zone, a ‘no man’s land’ littered with the ruins and sounds of recent war and defined as ‘faite des souvenirs des hommes et des ruines de leurs habitudes’ (‘made with the memories of men and the ruins of their habits’). By analysing in particular the treatment of time and memory in the film, we shall be able to re-evaluate the general claim of Cocteau’s apparently missed encounter with history. Chapter 5, ‘Cocteau, Jean Marais and collaboration’, examines key performances by Marais in Cocteau’s films, namely L’Eternel retour and La Belle et la bête, in order to establish how far they redefine the limits of male performance and collaboration. The approach taken will be specifically that of gender. In a film like La Bêlle et le bête, for example, where he is three figures in one (la Bête, Belle’s coarse suitor Avenant, and finally the Prince), can we formalise the different erotic positions adopted by Marais? To answer this and other related questions, we shall focus primarily on Marais’s body as an amalgam of aesthetic tensions that are ultimately resolved in Le Testament by means of Edouard Dermit. We shall discover that sustained collaboration in the cinema allows Cocteau to redraw the lines between life and art by instituting new creative practices of male friendship. Chapter 6, ‘For our eyes only: body and sexuality in reverse motion’, considers whether the real homosexual element of Cocteau’s cinema surfaces more at the most immediate level of sound and image. Resisting the common temptation both to decode Cocteau’s films as part of a vast network of personal and poetic symbols and to regard every instance of forbidden, secret love in his work as simply a thematisation of the ‘love that dare not speak its name’, we shall concentrate on the specifics of Cocteau’s filmic style, in particular camera angle, framing and reversemotion photography. By drawing on the fruits of current gay and queer theory to formulate a homoerotics of filmic style, we will be able to appreciate the radicality of Cocteau’s cinematic practice. Chapter 7, ‘En route’, offers a final assessment of Cocteau’s cinema and his filmic legacy, taking his valedictory film Le Testament as its point of departure. We shall consider his influence on European and American filmmakers, in particular Godard who offers an exemplary form of artistic engagement with Cocteau’s work by staging various types of encounter with Cocteau in his own films, in the process helping to advance our understanding of the Zone. A complete filmography of Cocteau and a select bibliography of primary and secondary material are included at the end of the book.

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However, biographical details and facts about the production of Cocteau’s films will be mentioned in the main body of the text only when pertinent. When citing material I shall refer to the original texts and screenplays. All translations from the French will be my own unless otherwise stated.

References Amy de La Bretèque, F. and Caizergues, P. (eds) (1989), Une encre de lumière, Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry. Arnaud, C. (2003), Jean Cocteau, Paris, Gallimard. Azoury, P. and Lalanne, J.–M. (2003), Cocteau et Ie cinéma. Désordres, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Beylie, C. (1966), ‘Jean Cocteau’, Anthologie du cinéma, 12 February: 59–112. Brown, F. (1968). An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau, New York, The Viking Press. Cocteau, J. ([1946] 1958), La Belle et la bête. Journal d’un film, Monaco, Editions du Rocher. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 1988), Du Cinématographe (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Pierre Belfond. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 2003), Entretiens sur le cinématographe (‘Edition anniversaire), (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Editions du Rocher. Cocteau, J. The Art of Cinema ([1988] 2001) (trans. R. Buss), New York and London, Marion Boyars. Introduction by R. Buss. Cocteau, J. (1995), Jean Cocteau: Romans, Poésies, CEuvres diverses (ed. B. Benech), Paris, Le Livre de Poche ‘Classiques Modernes’. Evans, A. B. (1977), Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity, Philadelphia, The Art Alliance Press. Gilson, R. ([1964] 1969), Jean Cocteau: An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy, New York, Crown. Godard, J.–L. (1998), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard II (1984–98) (ed. A. Bergala), Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Langlois, H. (1972), ‘Jean Cocteau et le cinéma’, Cahiers Jean Cocteau 3: 25–34. Levi, A. (1990), Guide to French Literature 1789 to the present, St James Press. Michakzyk, J. J. (1980), The French Literary Filmmakers, Philadelphia, Art Alliance Press. Nemer, F. (2003), Cocteau. Sur le fil, Paris, Gallimard. Oxenhandler, N. (1965), ‘Poetry in Three Films of Jean Cocteau’, Yak French Studies 17:14–20. Pillaudin, R, (1960), Jean Cocteau tourne son dernier film (Journal du Testament d’Orphée), Paris, La Table Ronde. Philippe, C.–J. (1989), Jean Cocteau, Paris, Seghers ‘Les Noms du Cinéma’. Strauss, F. (1989), ‘Un cocktail, des Cocteau’, Cahiers du cinéma 425: 75–82. Thiher A. (1979), The Cinematic Muse: Critical Studies in the History of French Cinema, Columbia and London, University of Missouri Press. Vinneuil, F. (aka Lucien Rebatet) (1943), ‘L’Eternel retour’, Je Suis Partout (October).

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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 d’un poète, 1930–32. Room 23 at the Hòtel des Foliesdramatiques: 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

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3 L’Eternel retour, 1943. Patrice and Nathalie I find unity in death in the boathouse; now begins their real life. Note the reference to Cocteau and Marais’s personal life, their dog Moulouk

4 La Belle et la bête, 1946. Bêlle and la bête take a walk on the wild side and set up another tableau. The statuary is baroque, the poses theatrical, the lighting dramatic: this is fantasy in the skin of the real

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5 La Belle et la bête, 1946. The father is initiated into the sensual, hybrid world of la Bête by disembodied male arms thrusting up from below and behind

6 L’Aigle à deux têtes, 1948. The mute servant Tony beholds a series of false doubles and inversions typical of Cocteau: his mistress the Queen mourns her dead husband in her white wedding dress awash with jewels; the young terrorist Stanislas who came to kill her, and who resembles the late King, lies bloody and exhausted in her arms

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7 Les Parents terribles, 1948. Yet another gagging in Cocteau’s cinema with the focus again on hands: Mic has just revealed to his mother the monstrous truth that he loves a young woman

8 Les Parents terribles, 1948. The penultimate shot, a backward tracking that accompanies Yvonne as she turns her back on the happy family and heads slowly towards her death. The expanding counterpoint produces a progressive depth of field

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9 Orphée, 1950. Orphée penetrates the mirror and enters the Zone with Heurtebise, or are they perhaps ‘penetrating out’ of it? The wonders of reversemotion photography with its ‘bizarre poses’

10 Orphée, 1950. The final mock-gay pietà in the Zone Played out as high tragic drama: Heurtebise and Cégeste inflict death on the already dead Orphée in order that he may climb back in time

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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 friends, since poets only pretend they are dead’: the Poet’s resurrection through reverse-motion photography, with painted eyes intact

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2 All is possible: Le Sang d’un poète

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 make a short film. The result in Buñuel’s case was the surrealist classic, L’Age d’or, and discussion of Le Sang d’un poète has forever revolved around the similarities and differences between the two films. Whatever their mutual influence in terms of images, however, the two films are distinctly different and, for reasons that will soon become clear, confirm Cocteau’s own opinion that Le Sang d’un poète could never be classified as a surrealist work. Cocteau began filming on 15 April 1930 in the Joinville-le-pont studios outside Paris. The cast was entirely non-professional with the exception of Pauline Carton who plays the sadistic schoolmistress. It starred in the role of the Poet Enrique Rivero, a Chilean playboy who had just featured in Jean Renoir’s Le Tournoi (1929), the American model Lee Miller as the human statue, Cocteau’s lover of the time Jean Desbordes as the Poet’s friend in Louis XV costume, and the black jazz dancer Féral Benga as the guardian angel. The hermaphrodite was played by Francis Rose. The film crew was chosen almost at random: the cameraman Georges Périnal, selected simply because he was to first to respond to Cocteau’s general call (his only previous work had been some debut shorts by Jean Grémillon), the set designer Jean d’Eaubonne, and sound engineer Henri Labrely who used for the film the new RCA photophone process. In the first of his many film

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collaborations with Cocteau, Georges Auric composed the music played by the Edouard Flament orchestra (technical direction by Michel Arnaud), and plastercasts were supplied by Plastikos. The final editing was by Cocteau himself. The five-month shoot was particularly onerous due to a combination of factors. First, the lack of discipline from Cocteau’s nonprofessional cast, particularly Rivero and the young scene shifter playing the boy Dargelos. Second, a run of bad luck that included Benga spraining his ankle in the first days (an event which Cocteau exploited by making Benga limp in the film). Third, Cocteau’s difficult relationship with his crew of technicians who were already highly suspicious of a film neophyte spouting forth highfaluting ideas about Méliès and ancient mythology, and who forced them even to tinker with DIY (for instance, replacing the broken horn of a bull Cocteau had saved from the abattoir for the final scene). Tension developed into anger when they were bitten by fleas and bugs breeding in the old mattresses that Cocteau had tied to the walls in order to soundproof the studio. On the last day some of the more belligerent members deliberately generated a mist by stirring up the dust, an event which Cocteau, inspired by Périnal, again exploited to his advantage for its impression of haloed mystery. Finally, Cocteau, already weakened by opium, pushed both himself and his cast to the physical limit. Struck down by sciatica due to bending down to supervise every take and manoeuvre, he staggered through the shoot in immense pain yet never let up on his actors who at times pointedly refused to cooperate. Like him, they were literally sleeping standing up, which was, of course, precisely the effect he was searching for. When on 17 November 1930 the Noailles viewed Le Sang d’un poète at a private projection organised at the Studios de Billancourt in the illustrious company of Picasso, Colette and Paul Morand, among others, they were mortified by their own portrayal and that of friends as theatre-goers in private boxes apparently applauding the death of a boy and the suicide of the Poet. They demanded that Cocteau remove the offending shots and reshoot the last sequence, which he did in Hyères in January 1931, employing extras and friends such as Barbette, the American impersonator and trapeze artist. Because of the furore over the film’s production and also the religious scandal, even violence, provoked by the private projection of Buñuel’s L’Age d’or earlier the same month (stink bombs had been thrown by the Ligue des Patriotes and the Jeunesses Antijuives), the

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Noailles cancelled any new projection of Le Sang d’un poète. A licence for distribution was withdrawn and the film locked up in a safe. The Noailles themselves were ostracised by certain sections of high society and persecuted for commissioning such a decadent work. It was not until a year later, on 20 January 1932, that Le Sang d’un poète was publicly shown during a gala evening at the Théâtre du VieuxColombier although it was a poor print, truncated by at least one scene, and badly projected. During its month-long run at the Théâtre du VieuxColombier, the film provoked the particular ire of André Breton and his band of surrealists who declared it nothing more than an inferior imitation of Buñuel’s heterosexual bourgeois shocker L’Age d’or, now withdrawn from distribution by the police. They saw obvious parallels in imagery such as the gaping hand, the smile that is wiped away, and the flowing blood, although the claim that the hermaphrodite’s spiral disc plagiarised Marcel Duchamp was less easy to sustain. Breton and his troops resented above all the fact that the film was being touted as surrealist (although never by Cocteau himself) and featured Lee Miller who was Man Ray’s partner. The affair would have blown over quickly but for the tenacity and venom of Breton, aggravated by Cocteau’s patently false denial of ever having seen L’Age d’or (he had, after all, attended the private projection) and even Buñuel and Dali’s earlier Un Chien andalou (1928). Buñuel, whom Cocteau admired enormously, later acknowledged that his film would never have been produced without Cocteau’s rich social connections. At this point, however, feeling that his work had been unjustly maligned and banned, he was happy to join Paul Eluard, Louis Aragon, René Char and many others in a surrealist chorus of attack against Cocteau, an attack that had a clear homophobic thrust and conflated Cocteau with the figure of the hermaphrodite.1 Breton, having already excluded Cocteau from his elite group in 1926 for daring to write novels, pursued a highly personal vendetta against him as an ‘unnameable’ pederast throughout the 1930s. The situation was further exacerbated by Cocteau’s rivalrous claim (in truth more a fantasy) that Freud had written an essay on Le Sang d’un poète as a case study, an honour never bestowed on Breton who had always craved official recognition from the school of psychoanalysis. 1

See Amaud 2003: 454–8 for a full account of this affair which was further compounded by a bitter struggle between Cocteau and Breton for the attentions of the painter, Valentine Hugo.

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Ironically, and despite all Breton’s best efforts to smear Cocteau worldwide, Le Sang d’un poète was championed in the United States in February 1934 precisely as a surrealist work and would eventually enjoy a seventeen-year run at the Fifth Avenue Playhouse in New York. What exactly, then, was this film that had caused so much rancour and controversy? Originally called La Vie d’un poète, Le Sang d’un poète charted the trials and tribulations of being a poet, the influence of his childhood, and the transformations he must undergo, including the repeated ritual of death, to achieve immortality. It is structured in four unequal parts. In the first episode entitled, ‘La main blessée ou les cicatrices du poète’ (‘The wounded hand, or the scars of the poet’), the Poet, naked to the waist in his ‘modest bedroom’, draws a face on a white canvas. Suddenly the mouth starts to move its lips, and attempts by the Poet to efface it with his hand result in the mouth ‘contracted as if by leprosy’ taking hold in his right palm (filmed as a superimposition). The Poet’s friend who had been banging on the door finally enters and, dumbfounded by this bizarre sight, runs away. The Poet tries to suffocate the disembodied mouth with the palm of his hand but it is irrepressible and gently asks for air. Eventually he begins to caress himself with it: his hand reaches down to the bottom of the frame and we next see his head tipped over backwards, his now painted eyes wide open as he appears to swoon. Waking up the next morning to behold a life-size statue of a woman without arms draped in plaster, the poet gags the statue with his right hand containing the mouth, an act that inadvertently brings it to life. The second episode, ‘Les murs ont-ils des oreilles? (‘Do the walls have ears?’), begins with the Poet trying to escape. The statue dares him to enter the tall mirror that now stands where the door had once been. Angrily he mounts a chair that materialises next to the door frame and, after tapping the mirror several times, finally throws himself into the glass (substituted by a tank of water shot from above). We then see him move off into the ‘Night’ while appearing to remain stationary (he is, in fact, being pulled along the floor by a trolley). Upon his return he gradually fills up the lens before entering the shabby corridor of the Hotel des Folies-dramatiques through which a Chineselooking gendeman in European dress walks towards the viewer before suddenly vanishing. The Poet stumbles with difficulty as though offbalance and weighed down past a row of rooms (he is moving along the ground over a flat representation of the set filmed from above). He

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looks through the keyhole of each and beholds a separate vision: a Mexican bandit or revolutionary who is repeatedly shot in slow motion by a firing squad but each time resurrects himself (through reversemotion photography); a young girl who is subjected to ‘flying lessons’ on the ceiling (the camera is turned upside down and the image then righted); Chinese shadows cast by an opium lamp plus the hands of a smoker and a pipe (this is Room 19, ‘Plafond celeste’ (‘Celestial ceiling’)); a pair of slanting eyes in close-up (the Poet’s own reflected?); the form of a reclining hermaphrodite coming into being by means of a human face and male limbs that suddenly materialise (the editing together of still frames) along with a female torso drawn on a blackboard, while to the left of the sofa a spiral disc is continually revolving (Room 23). The hermaphrodite lifts up a loin cloth to reveal a sign that reads ‘Danger de mort’ (‘Danger of death’). Once these visions are over, the Poet stands up and is handed a revolver by a saleswoman’s arm that appears from behind the corner. Instructed to shoot himself he promptly fires but the blood quickly turns into a red cloth draped around him and a laurel wreath forms around his head – the ‘blood of a poet’. In seething irritation, the Poet flees down the corridor as if running against a cross-current. He returns to the darkness of night whence he came and where he is now represented by a white pipecleaner figure. When this fills the whole frame he is expelled by the mirror back into his room to the sounds of a children’s religious choir (another instance of reverse-motion photography). Taking a hammer the Poet hits the statue on the head, which splits into two. The cloud of plaster dust that is produced covers him and in the next shot he is transformed into a white statue at the base of an office building lying in ruins. The statue and its pedestal form the background to the third episode entitled, ‘La bataille de neige’ (‘The snow battle’), which replays the opening scene from Cocteau’s 1929 novel Les Enfants terribles. The setting is the snow-bound Cité Monthiers, a playground for the pupils from the Lycée Condorcet in Paris who use the statue as ammunition for their battle. Suddenly, one pupil (the Poet as a child) is struck down deliberately by Dargelos and dies. This second death of the Poet in the film is thus the first chronologically. The scene of death segues into the fourth and final episode entitled, ‘La profanation de l’hostie’ (‘The profanation of the host’). The playground is now surrounded by impromptu theatre boxes filled with

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amused spectators. Close to the dead boy is the Poet in evening clothes sitting at a table playing cards with a young woman identical to the statue and watched by the Poet’s friend. In slow motion the Poet’s hand slips into the boy’s jacket and steals the ace of hearts in order to continue his game. At this point a young black androgyne with dragonfly wings, the boy’s guardian angel, descends a curved staircase and stretches out flat on his stomach over the boy’s cloak which eventually disappears (the scene is shot in negative). The angel walks back up the stairs but not before grabbing the ace of hearts from the Poet. The woman then remarks scornfully that if the Poet doesn’t have the ace of hearts he is lost. The music is suspended, the film appears to hold its breath, and the Poet kills himself at the table with a revolver. Blood spurts out from his right temple and the audience appears to applaud the spectacle. The woman, her eyes now drawn in black on her eyelids and wearing black gloves, stands up and throws down her cards. Recast as a female statue she walks off as if sleepwalking towards the entrance at the side and descends through the arch. We meet her on the other side of a golden door and she walks down a set of steps hesitantly to make contact with a bull that enters in slow motion from the right with a torn map of Europe stuck to its back with cow dung. So begins the last ‘pantomime’. After the bull has exited, a pair of horns slowly rises up the screen and reveals itself to be a lyre. A ‘false woman’ (created by two stagehands, one standing on the other’s shoulders) appears with a face drawn in chalk on slate and holds both the lyre and a globe of the world. This image recedes into darkness, followed by a close-up of the face of the female statue now lying down (her face and hair are real but redrawn in outline on her white skin). After a further fade-out we are provided with a bird’s-eye view of the statue lying down beside the lyre and globe, then a close-up of her mouth drawn in relief, half open. Another last fade-out, another long shot of the image, and we return finally to the crumbling factory chimney whose demolition had been suspended at the very beginning of the film. Milliseconds before its explosion into rubble, which is made fully audible, Cocteau shouts: ‘Fin’ (‘The End’).2 2

It is important to note that the text of Le Sang d’un poète, which Cocteau first published in 1948 in the form of a ‘ciné-roman’, is not a completely faithful record of the film. The order of events is sometimes wrong and even reversed. It has been translated, not always felicitously, by Carol Martin-Sperry (see Cocteau 1985).

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Four key aspects of Le Sang d’un poète stand out immediately on initial viewing. First, the film’s extreme, trance-like slowness which Cocteau himself acknowledged as excruciating and which is accentuated by the passages of slow motion and the unremitting sense of claustrophobia created by the enclosed spaces (the Poet’s bedroom, the Hotel des Folies-dramatiques with its locked rooms, the studio construction-cum-auditorium that extends visually out of the base of a deserted building). Second, the film’s eclectic range of styles. It comprises sequences of high-art (the title of the fourth episode ‘The profanation of the host’ is an explicit reference to one of the six episodes of a predella by Uccello entitled Miracle of the Host), theatrical follies, ‘pantomime’, and, to use Cocteau’s own borrowed term inspired by the illusionism of Méliès and the circus, various ‘tragic gags’ (Cocteau’s original idea had actually been to make an animation film with Auric). Indeed, the film asks to be read as a collage of styles and influences, from its blending of the Orpheus and Narcissus myths in the figure of the Poet who drowns in his own image to its polyglot cast and anachronistic array of characters and impersonators: the ‘Annamite’ in a European suit, the Mexican bandit/revolutionary ‘who looks like the Poet’ (a stock figure from the circus), the hermaphrodite part real, part drawn and painted (recalling the two acrobats in Cocteau’s ballet Parade), Barbette as a woman in the audience, the Poet himself naked to the waist with cycling shoes and a Louis XV wig. The third major feature of the film is the presence of Cocteau on the soundtrack: he provided all the voices (except for Rachel Berendt who dubbed Lee Miller) and intervenes continually in the form of authorial introductions and subjective voiceovers that are sometimes ironic comments on the action and the Poet, for example, the phrase ‘A casser des statues on risque d’en devenir une soi-même’ (‘By breaking statues one risks turning into one oneself) which accompanies and just slightly pre-empts the transformation of the Poet into a statue in close-up. He even reads out a full three-verse poem over black screen that begins: ‘Ce coup de poing de marbre était boule de neige…’ (‘That blow of marble was a snowball’). Cocteau’s imprimatur is established visibly in the very opening shot where he stands facing the camera against a backdrop of studio lights, masked except for his eyes and holding a prosthetic plaster hand from his right wrist draped in cloth. Although no words are spoken, when he draws back his open arm he effectively becomes a Master of Ceremonies welcoming us to his private club, the

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Hôtel des Folies-dramatiques, where the scenes will unfold like a series of happenings. In the following scene we see that Cocteau’s signature of the star is inscribed directly like a stigmata on Rivero’s left shoulder blade where it appears in the form of a scar (the ‘scar’ of the first episode). Hence, from the very beginning the film is founded on a primary tension between Author and Poet (to be understood in its more general original Greek sense of someone who creates), and Cocteau invites us to view with ironic detachment the romantic cliché of the isolated poet creating art from his wound (here the hand wound is self-inflicted and is the result, not the cause, of his art). The fourth pivotal aspect of the film is its obsession with certain themes and motifs, from blood, death and violence to doubles and false doubles, resurrection and metamorphosis. In addition, two sets of related images essential to Cocteau’s cinema are put into play: the artificial eyes painted as if wide open, thus producing a gaze that fixes but does not see, and the reversed head of a young man filmed from behind. In fact, the film falls largely under the sign of reversal and inversion. Among such many brilliant moments is a light metal ball moving first right to left in slow motion, then several shots later in reverse. When the image operates with sound the latter can become louder as the object in the image recedes, and the same the other way round, as for example when the pipe cleaner in the shape of a tank driver moves off into the background while the sound of an advancing tractor increases, a combination immediately repeated in reverse. The film’s special beauty is without doubt enhanced by the simplicity of these and other special effects. Whether Cocteau’s profession of ignorance of the technique of filming tracking shots is true or not, the act of pulling Rivero on a cart is proof of his defiantly amateur status and his general refusal to concoct special effects in the laboratory. Le Sang d’un poète presents itself explicitly from the outset in an extended caption as ‘un documentaire réaliste d’événements irréels’ (‘a realistic documentary of unreal events’) and thus a concerted experiment in form and style. We shall come back later to the problematics of realism and documentary, but it is crucial at this point to register Cocteau’s warning to the viewer to expect a film diametrically opposed to the photographic realist aesthetic. Instead, it will treat the profilmic event as if it came into being solely as a direct result of the artist’s own creative imagination, a fact underscored by Cocteau’s self-portrait as Author in the first image. The message of

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Cocteau’s introduction could not be more blatant and ostensibly uncinematic: ‘Tout poème est un blasón. II faut le déchiffrer’ (‘Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered’). He completes it by dedicating this ‘bande d’allégories’ (‘reel of allegories’) to the memory of a select group of painters of coats of arms and enigmas (Pisanello, Uccello, Piero della Francesca, del Castagno). It is as if Cocteau were deliberately willing his film against the cinematic grain. The events glimpsed through the keyhole in the Hôtel des Folies-dramatiques recall images from early cinema: a newsreel of a political execution in Mexico, an exotic documentary of opium-smoking in China, the sadistic beating of a young girl transplanted perhaps from an early melodrama by D. W. Griffith. The Poet, however, is trapped on the other side and cannot test or judge the reality of such images. As John Pruitt has observed, Cocteau contrives their treatment in such a way that he throws into relief their tawdry artifice, for example, the executed Mexican bandit/ revolutionary who is immediately reanimated through reverse motion (Pruitt 2001: 132–3). In the light of his failure to achieve authentic vision or insight, the Poet commits an appropriately cinematic and hence phoney form of suicide with the false laurels of public acclaim. Having disposed brilliantly of all that is inadequate about what we would today call the power of mainstream illusionistic cinema, Le Sang d’un poète quickly reverts to its stagey emblematic manner in the name of more ennobling aesthetic forms: poetry and painting. Thus, if Cocteau invokes film history it is immediately to disengage himself from it and focus our attention instead on the poetic process. The opening episode could not be more self-reflexive and is soon followed up by a caption written in Cocteau’s hand: ‘Les surprises de la photographie ou comment je me suis laissé prendre au piège par mon propre film’ (‘The surprises of photography or how I was caught in a trap by my own film’). This gesture is essentially metacinematic, a device by which Cocteau calls our attention to the film as film and obliges it to present itself as a mimetic act. The very name of the Hôtel des Folies-dramatiques was derived from a popular cinema in Paris, and each of the rooms there showcases a different aspect of the cinematic process, from the tricks of reverse-motion photography and slow motion to the play with perspective and gravity and the various effects of editing, notably during the scene with the hermaphrodite. Like the Poet, Cocteau is peering for the first time through the keyhole

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into the world of cinema and seeing what is possible. But if Cocteau highlights the lure of the cinematic image through images of peep-hole voyeurism, he also explicitly draws our attention to the new phenomenon of sound. One of the first sound films made in France, Le Sang d’un poète clearly exhibits some of the intermedial tensions created by the transition to the talkies. The disembodied mouth uttering ‘De l’air! De l’air!’ (‘Air!’ ‘Air!’) physically marks this critical moment, and the written captions parody one model of early Hollywood sound cinema that used brief dialogue cards in conjunction with musical arrangements. Cocteau’s ventriloquism and dubbing which are often just out of sync and, in the case of Rivero, almost deliberately clumsy, direct our attention each time to the presence and arrival of sound. The range of sounds found and produced by Cocteau in the film is astonishing: an interval bell, the roar of a tractor, a drum roll, assorted clinkings, gunshots, a religious choir, a motor and plane engine, random whistles, running water (arriving suddenly after the quick-fire dialogue ‘Eteins!’/’Non’/‘Si’/’Non, laisse’ (‘Put out the light!/No/Yes/No, leave it’) whispered over a black screen), wet fingers passing over a wet crystal bowl, and the protracted sound waves of a tuning fork. In its minute attention to each grain of sound and its sliding scale of volume and sonority, from the odd stutterings and ejaculations of human speech to the magnified sound of Cocteau’s own heartbeat and the abrupt break into silence, the film is at once deaf-like and deafening. Le Sang d’un poète offers itself, in fact, as a cinema of the senses. On the level of the image, Cocteau focuses on the object in process and its mutation and transformation when subjected to different kinds of movement and gradations of colour, light and shade, or when placed into contact with other media and substances. A statue morphs naturally into a woman, bull horns become a lyre, the blood of a bullet wound forms into a star, and so on. At the end of the film, as the image fades into the dust (literally) and enters the phosphorescence of night, the white surface becomes stony and catches the light (the original silver salt used in film-printing during the 1930s would have rendered this scene even brighter than it appears in current prints). If objects and themes are continually repeated and reversed, they always, however, record a difference. In the case of the pipe-cleaner figure, through repeated rotations it undergoes a series of superimposed expressions – sad, happy, grimacing. During the crisis between the

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Poet and the statue, that is to say between creator and creature, a recurring theme in Cocteau’s cinema, we witness a reversible process of metamorphosis between the animate and inanimate and the mobile and immobile in which Cocteau as author is directly implicated. The sleeping Poet’s face becomes first a mask and then a plastercast of Cocteau himself through which the Poet’s eyes blink brightly into being. Later, the Poet gives ‘his’ found mouth to the statue which comes alive. Finally, the Poet smashes the plaster statue with a hammer only to become a white statue himself that will be destroyed during the snow battle. Cocteau also creates a play of variable space and distance through the alternation of extreme long-shot and extreme close-up, as well as by juxtaposed movements of withdrawal and return. Finally, a highly concrete network of attraction and repulsion is developed, most obviously in the case of the mirror first lapping up the Poet then later ejecting him. What Cocteau is essentially doing here is loading the image with movements, sounds and sensations in one dense, composite frame in order to transform it into a dazzling ideogram with multiple textures and calibrations. In addition, the assorted effects of disembodied lips bubbling in the palm of the Poet’s hand, the visceral contact between human flesh and the cold dingy wall, the close-up of Dargelos wetting his lips in oral satisfaction during the orgiastic riot, the sound of blood oozing out of the mouth of his prey almost like sexual moaning, the rolling of bare muscles in a back caked in sweat, together with other elemental images of opium, snow and slush, are all pre-eminently physical, whether monstrous or erotic or both. Cocteau uses the adjective ‘sensual’ in the screenplay to describe the moment when the Poet, after crawling, rubbing and rolling along the floor, bends down to look through the keyhole of the hermaphrodite’s room: ‘Son dos se creuse. L’image doit être sensuelle’ (Cocteau 1985: 1291) (‘His back arches. The image should be sensual’). (Cocteau, we note, had insisted on a ‘debauched sort of lighting’.) The homoeroticism of the Poet’s semi-naked body, first glimpsed at crotch level behind his transparent easel, is pushed to a graphic limit at the end of the opening episode when his hand smothers the mouth of the statue which then comes to life only to defy him still further. The delicate capillary effect of veins gradually surfacing on his right forearm like the branches of a tree due to his immense effort appears almost obscene, like a penis becoming hard with the rising sap of blood (again, the blood of a poet). During

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the one moment of flagrant autoeroticism, when the Poet caresses himself with the free-wheeling, vaginal mouth which he has pushed down across his body and out of frame, we see his swooning head tilted backwards and shot from behind such that his mouth and chin are positioned above his painted eyes. The queerness of such images is enhanced by the film’s frequent camp touches, for example, the Poet drawing with white gloves at the start and, in the final episode, the prolonged and hilarious overacting of Barbette as a frivolous aristocrat. The erotic thus falls under the sign of inversion and disjunction in Cocteau. Sound and image are pitted against each other in the scene where the guardian angel effectively mounts the schoolboy lying dead on the ground while the sound of an aircraft engine continues to escalate. Cocteau conveys the intensity and violence of this moment in the screenplay: ‘Ce moteur monte, monte, ronfle, tonne, éclate, ravage le silence’ (Cocteau 1995: 1303) (‘This engine rises, rises, roars, thunders, shatters, ravages the silence’). Cocteau’s voice-over at this point highlights the symbiotic process of absorption and extraction: ‘La pélerine, s’étalant comme une tache d’encre, disparut sous le corps du personnage surnaturel qui pâlissait en absorbant sa proie’ (‘The cloak, spreading out like an ink-stain, disappeared under the body of the supernatural being who was becoming paler as he absorbed his prey’). Yet if eroticism is depicted at the most material level in Le Sang d’un poète like the starred scar on the Poet’s shoulder blade, how does this connect precisely with the edited surface and skin of the film itself? Let us return again to that first image of Cocteau facing the camera, for it is immediately followed by a close-up of a door-knob being turned. Someone is trying to open the door. The same shot is repeated three times, each in silence and cutting even into Cocteau’s introductory text displayed on the screen. In other words, the door remains closed and entry is barred, a fact that directly negates Cocteau’s opening gesture of welcome. This, along with the Author-Poet split already mentioned, establishes a tone of opposition and discontinuity that will extend throughout the film where continuity shots are rare and ‘openings’ will be created in montage through unnatural rhetorical linking, for example, the mirror expelling the poet to the sound of a children’s choir. Cocteau formalises this method of formal equivalence explicitly when he declares in the first room of the Hôtel des Folies-dramatiques: ‘Au petit jour, le Mexique, les fossés de Vincennes, le boulevard Arago, une chambre d’hôtel se valent’ (‘In the early morning, Mexico, the

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trenches of Vincennes, the boulevard Arago, a hotel room, are all worth the same’). Added to this is the persistent desynchronisation of sound and image whereby, like the mischievous near-misses of dubbing we mentioned above, sounds often arrive just after the visual event, as for instance when we hear the smashing of a window after it has already been destroyed. Similarly, when the Poet kills himself at the table it is in silence; we hear the shot only afterwards. It is as if the full synchronisation of sound and image were a mortal event, like the demolition of the chimney at the end where sound and image finally fuse together. The effect of these subtle forms of mismatching and décalage, together with the elisions and ellipses produced by disjointed and fragmented images, is a syncopated rhythm and syntax intensified by the film’s sporadic use of slow motion and Cocteau’s own severely slowed-down vocal delivery that can dilate into a kind of hiatus, as in the penultimate line: ‘La route……..est longue’ (‘The road……..is long’). As for the music, Cocteau experiments here with what he terms the ‘faults’ of accidental synchronism, the process whereby at the very last stage of production he links up the images with a different soundtrack.3 Certain passages of Auric’s music are reshifted and juxtaposed with images different from those originally earmarked in order to create new connections and rhythms (in a letter to his mother while completing the film, Cocteau talked suggestively of minuscule ‘zigzags’ of words and music). By virtue of being asynchronised and syncopated, of course, Auric’s music becomes even more prominent and can itself assume the status of a sudden momentous event. We need, however, to draw a clear distinction here between the majority of the film and the third episode of the snowball fight which is structured around more complete passages of Auric’s music and remains far more fluid. This discrete narrative sequence heralds, in fact, the style and mood of poetic-realist cinema of the 1930s, most obviously Jean Vigo’s story of child rebellion, Zéro de conduite (1933). For the most part, Le Sang d’un poète unfolds as an extended series of static shots foregrounding the play of movement, forms and acts within the frame. The sudden materialisation and disappearance of objects through dissolves and, in the hermaphrodite scene, the additions and incrustations of the 3

This process would later be taken to the extreme by Cocteau in his 1946 ballet Le Jeune homme et la mort, where at the last minute he placed a Bach passacaglia over Roland Petit’s choreography which had been based on a jazz rhythm.

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natural/artificial body formed through montage, guarantee an unusual staccato rhythm. In view of Cocteau’s dual emphasis on the human body and the skin of celluloid, we might regard this intensive collage of juxtaposed styles and movements as a cinematic form of greffage or grafting. Indeed, the dynamically tactile and elastic nature of the film makes possible the distorting visual features such as trompe l’œil, mirror games, and other destabilising forms of artifice and illusion which dramatise its erotic excess. This has led one critic mindful of the pictorial basis of Le Sang d’un poète to describe the film, and Cocteau’s work in general, as a cinema of ‘baroque unease’ (see Greene 1997). The specifically cinematic lines of influence in the graft of Le Sang d’un poète are not too difficult to trace. We have already implied an allusion to the very early keyhole films of silent cinema which featured not only an erotic scene (for example, a woman undressing) but a spectator to view it, thereby underlining the voyeuristic ‘eye’ of the camera (see Burch 1986: 499). And Cocteau will return again and again to the idea of the keyhole in his 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 camera movement. Jean Epstein’s La Chute de la Maison Usher, made in 1929 and comprising a quasiscientific use of slow motion, is another point of reference for Le Sang d’un poète, although its Gothic effects of drapery and vapour are in complete contrast to the almost clinical clarity and ironic reserve of Cocteau’s work. The film’s episodic structure can be linked to the format of the early silent serials, such as the fantasy cinema of Louis Feuillade during the 1910s. As for the elements of burlesque and American slapstick comedy so beloved by Cocteau (Chaplin, Keaton, Landon, etc), these are also recognisable (most obviously the serial death and resurrection of the Mexican) though often transposed into verbal games (for example, the witty last phrase ‘L’ennui mortel de l’immortalité’ (‘Mortal tedium of immortality’) delivered with false solemnity by Cocteau) or dubious metaphors such as the all-too-phallic chimney whose programmed fall is suspended for the length of the film (see Mourier 1997: 155). Despite such signs of cinematic continuity, however, critics at the first screening of Le Sang d’un poète in 1930

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scrambled to make sense of the film’s novelty and intensity, in particular its agonising slowness, and speculated on a more profound purpose. Writing in Action Française, 26 November 1930, J.–P. Gélas spoke of the ‘double echo of intellectual resonance contained in each image’, while René-Pierre Bodin, in Le Figaro, 9 November 1930, proposed a new, deep ‘symbolic cinema’ as opposed to contemporary ‘superficial cinema’. Bodin welcomed the fact that for the first time in cinema the quality of the show depended directly on the quality of the spectator. One critic who did not wish to accept such terms, however, Grégoire Villoteau of Le Soir, 29 November 1930, regarded the film more cynically as nothing more than a ploy by Cocteau to promote his literary work. Reactions to the film in 1932, influenced no doubt by the hostile campaign of the Surrealists, took a far more antagonistic turn. Gaston Thierry, in Paris-Midi, 6 January 1932, viewed it simply as perverse. Georges Hugnet, in L’Ami du Film, 15 Jan 1932, linked its transparent plagiarism to ‘an hysterical aesthetic pretence’. Writing in Film Sonore, 6 January 1932, Michel Gorel dismissed the film as ‘stupid, senile ranting’ by a longtime poseur. The small number of reviewers who did, however, respond to the unique challenge of Le Sang d’un poète hailed its immaculate beauty, in particular its complex network of imagery and remarkable sense of surprise. In L’Ami du Peuple, 8 January 1932, Paul Gilson celebrated the many formal interconnections whereby the inanimate becomes animate, solid becomes liquid, and the fact that this could be achieved only through the techniques of cinema (slow motion, superimposition, etc.). 4 According to Cocteau, Chaplin himself considered the uninterrupted passage at one point from medium shot to close-up to record the continuous movement of one character as an innovation (Cocteau attributed this in typical modesty to his ignorance of montage).5 We come back, however, to the niggling question of whether Le Sang d’un poète is to some degree surrealist. Certainly, like Un Chien andalou and L’Age d’or, the film privileges the image over the word and 4

5

See also G. Leblanc, Comœdia, 24 January 1932, and Kessel, Les Annales, 1 February 1932, who remarks that for all its many often terrible twists and turns, the film closes in an extraordinary peace and calm. See Cocteau 2003: 81. Cocteau does not identify the sequence but is almost certainly referring to the moment in the Hôtel des Folies-dramatiques when the Chinese-looking man moves forward down the corridor and into near-frame.

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opposes reality to the imagination. It also engineers ruptures between temporal and spatial reality and has recourse to shock images. Yet one critic, Maurice Mourier, has recently laid to rest the idea that Cocteau simply imitated or quoted certain images from Buñuel (and Dalí). At the very most he subtly and ironically misappropriated them. As Mourier correctly argues, unlike Buñuel’s vertiginous rush for le merveilleux and his desire to transform given reality in the name of freedom, Cocteau proposes an almost tragic acceptance of it (Mourier 1997:161). Or rather, Cocteau is more interested in revealing another reality, that of the invisible which remains necessarily of the order of absence and the subconscious. Hence, while Buñuel offers us the real streets of Paris almost like a realist, Cocteau focuses instead on the duality between the interior (or interiority) and the exterior (exteriority). A film in the business of unveiling the invisible cannot be easily recuperated socially or politically in the services of total revolution. But the central premise of surrealism, that there is an unconscious that needs to be unrepressed and unleashed, is anyway not part of Cocteau’s thinking. His conception of la Nuit (the Night) is left tantalisingly open. The Poet’s only way out of the room is through the mirror, that is to say, by overcoming the self-consciousness of reflection. In other words, he must go beyond mere self-fascination in order to experience revelation. For sure, the Poet may unite with himself for a second as he touches the mirror, yet he must quickly descend to those unknown, nocturnal forces that can seize him and use him as a vehicle for poetic expression (Mourier 1977: 155–6). As another critic Franz-Josef Albersmeier has suggested, Le Sang d’un poète is concerned primarily with private phantasms and obsessions, Cocteau’s aim being not so much to shock as to create a complicity with the viewer in the darkened auditorium with its potential for collective hypnosis (Albersmeier 1997:164). On this point Cocteau was adamant: the film was not a dream, surrealist or otherwise, but displayed instead the mechanism of a waking dream. He wrote much later in 1947: Le Sang d’un poète n’est qu’une descente en soi-même, une manière d’employer le mécanisme du rêve sans dormir, une bougie maladroite, souvent éteinte par quelque souffle, promenée dans la nuit du corps humain. Les actes s’y enchainent comme ils le veulent, sous un contrôle si faible qu’on ne saurait l’attribuer à l’esprit. Plutôt à une maniere de somnolence aidant à l’éclosion de souvenirs libres de se combiner, de se

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nouer, de se déformer jusqu’à prendre corps à notre insu et à nous devenir une énigme. (Cocteau 1995: 891) (my emphasis)6

Even more categorical was Cocteau’s statement in 1949: ‘Le Sang d’un poète n’a pas de sujet ... C’est le contraire d’un rêve, mais plutôt la manière dont les souvenirs s’enchanent et se déforment chez l’homme qui dort debout’ (cited in Azoury and Lalanne 2003:17) (‘Le Sang d’un poète has no subject ... It’s the opposite of a dream, rather the way memories link together and lose shape in the man who is sleeping standing up’). The seductive mix of individuality, subjectivity, freedom and chance which Cocteau displays in these quoted extracts translates for the viewer into a sure licence for interpretation. The film’s opening message – ‘Tout poème est un blasón. Il faut le déchiffrer’ – is itself a provocation. During its initial run in New York in 1933, a lobby poster even advertised a prize of $25 for its true explanation. In the brilliant introduction he gave to Le Sang d’un poète at the Théâtre du VieuxColombier in January 1932 and which, since transcribed, serves as a postface to the published screenplay, Cocteau linked the extreme experience of the shoot directly to the poetic process, claiming that since the film was as ‘confessional’ and as obscure as possible it was therefore up to each viewer to find a personal meaning. Later in his 1946 preface, where he imagines himself wandering in a kind of halfsleep as though in a labyrinth, Cocteau proposed that the film substituted for symbols ‘des actes ou allégories de ces actes, sur lesquels puisse symboliser le spectateur, si bon lui semble’ (my emphasis) (Cocteau 1995: 1274) (‘acts or allegories of these acts, which the spectator can make symbols of if he so wishes’). Both these texts are evidence of Cocteau’s prodigious capacity to accompany and guide the reception of his films, if only then to deny all authority. The response of Albersmeier, like many critics before him and since, is

6

‘Le Sang d’un poète is only a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of dreams without sleeping, an awkward candle, often extinguished by some breath, carried off into the night of the human body. Acts link together as they will under a control so weak that it cannot be attributed to the mind. Rather to a form of drowsiness that encourages the hatching of memories free to combine and take shape, and also lose shape to the point of gaining substance without our knowledge and becoming for us an enigma.’

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wilfully to disregard this warning and read the film for symbolic images, or what he calls its ‘symbolique multimédiale’. Since there are clearly many traces of Cocteau’s life in Le Sang d’un poète – the Cité Monthiers was indeed part of his own childhood geography, his father (almost certainly a closet gay) shot himself dead at home in April 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 personal crisis, specifically the sublimation of unrealised love Cocteau felt for intimate friends such as Radiguet (see Springer 1989 and Weiss 1995). The critic Milorad, who presided over the Cahiers Jean Cocteau and possessed inside knowledge of Cocteau’s life, has offered the most exhaustive dissection yet of Le Sang d’un poète, paying particular attention to the (symbolic) death of the child and the (real) death of the father (see Milorad 1981). For Milorad, all Cocteau’s work as a poet replaces a real complex – the Oedipal murder of the father – and represents an attempt to redeem the Oedipal crime. Nothing is left to chance by the strictly Freudian Milorad. In Cocteau’s unconscious, he writes, the homosexual love object always links back fatally to the figure of Cocteau’s father which it thus reincarnates. For this reason, death becomes one of the key attributes of the gay love object, notably Dargelos and the paternal figure of the angel of death whom Milorad links to Radiguet. According to Milorad, homosexual love in Cocteau is accompanied unconsciously by a desire for murder and emasculation followed immediately by punishment through the eternal law of’an eye for an eye’. Cocteau’s entire corpus is ultimately reduced to this one sexual complex, making all Cocteau’s female subjects and objects of death and deathliness (statues, the Princess in Orphée, Diana in La Belle et la bête, etc.) representations of the paternal figure of suicide. Despite such a massively overdetermined reading of Le Sang d’un poète where aesthetic sublimation becomes simply recuperation, purification and self-absolution, Milorad does at least avoid casting judgement. This is not always the case however with Cocteau’s critics. Frederick Brown, for instance, approaches the Hôtel des Foliesdramatiques as a ‘music-hall Passion’, with Cocteau moving within himself although at one remove (Brown 1968: 298–9). The following

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‘plunge’ in episode three where the Poet is beaten at cards by a woman having lost his trump card and his heart to an angel is Cocteau’s avowal of his own homosexuality. According to Brown, in the final episode where Zeus mates with Europa symbolising Cocteau’s theory of art as hermaphroditic self-fertilisation, the Poet kills himself because he has now fulfilled his artistic destiny: he has signed his work in blood and beholds himself transformed into marble. Brown places much store on the film’s explicit reference to Uccello’s Profanation of the Host which pictures the host shedding blood on to the floor, indicating Cocteau’s exalted identification with Christ. For all his commitment to detail, however, Brown sees the film as merely the tragic if lucid underside of the Cocteau legend. Each dream sequence is a play within a play (the first unfolds within a cinema, the second within a theatre), suggesting that even here in the deepest core of his being Cocteau viewed himself as an actor whose mask conceals other masks. The block of marble at the end, which signifies the Poet’s fate, stands on a rise like some as yet unveiled tombstone. Putting to one side Brown’s underlying contempt for Cocteau’s erotico-aesthetic project, much of what he is proposing is based on a wishful overreading of the film’s images. At no time in the film, or indeed in the screenplay, does Cocteau suggest, for example, that Zeus is mating with Europa. The bull is a bull, and the map of Europe remains stubbornly Europe. The Christian implications are less easy to gauge. Cocteau claims again not to have had any Christian ideas in mind when he chose the Uccello image, and he makes no mention at all of the statue of the Virgin in the first room of the Hôtel des Folies-dramatiques which shatters due to gunshot and is then remade whole. That said, the film is surely offering itself on a more general metaphysical level as a form of transubstantiation. For cinematic projection is also most literally a type of communion whereby the director offers to the public his body and his blood, i.e. all that he has ‘shot’ with his own labour and toil and which has now passed into the thin wafer of celluloid, the host, to be distributed. In Cocteau, ultra-modernist art and the quest for aesthetic salvation go effortlessly hand in hand. Cocteau, however, never lets us forget the force and status of the cinematic real in Le Sang d’un poète which, in whatever mode it is operating, functions as a ‘realistic documentary of events’. His statement in 1949 that cinema is most effective as a combination of intimate, confessional and realistic elements seems to apply directly to

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this film (Cocteau 1988: 30). Historical actuality is, of course, deliberately pushed to the background at the beginning (‘Tandis que tonnaient au loin les canons de Fontenoy ...’) (‘While the canons of Fontenoy thundered in the distance’), yet it is not completely elided. A drum roll is heard in the film which ends with the climactic fall of the factory chimney (the entire film has taken place during that single, extended, dreamlike moment between explosion and collapse). History will remain, however, a latent presence in Cocteau’s cinema, eventually to resurface in Orphée. Until then, Cocteau asks us to conceive of the real in film as a documentary of acts and gestures, however ‘unreal’. One of Cocteau’s last voice-overs – ‘Documentaire. Interminable, voilá comment le tricheur imagine son geste, plus rapide que l’éclair’ (‘Documentary. Interminable, that’s how the cheat imagines his gesture, faster than lightning’) – is immediately followed by the action in question, although ironically in slow motion: the Poet’s hand slips into the jacket of the boy lying dead on the ground to extract the ace of hearts. Actions in Cocteau always have repercussions, however, and the Poet will shortly shoot himself in the head. Similarly, in his postface to Le Sang d’un poète, Cocteau emphasises that, unlike in the original staging of the snow battle in his novel Les Enfants terribles, here the boy dies. The cinematograph thus both encourages and exacts definitive acts and events. In conclusion, Le Sang d’un poète is cinema’s first complete multimedia film, one that offers a vision of the potential and promise of cinema. All is possible, even, it may be said, the impossible. Such pure potentiality of thought and projection, motion and emotion, sensuality and sensation, will be further shaped and refined during the course of Cocteau’s film work, just like the figure of the Poet himself who, according to Cocteau, must be consistently reborn in a shape closer to his real being. It would certainly be premature, especially after what we have observed of Milorad’s sweeping approach, to call this general, progressive distillation a process of sublimation, yet the film has a primary sexual and erotic core which, as we shall see in Chapter 6, energises and propels all Cocteau’s cinema. Indeed, part of the compulsiveness of Le Sang d’un poète lies in its continual working through and filtering of moments of tension and pain, crisis and violence, conveyed formally by the relentless juggling of elements of documentary, fantasy and theatre. How this configuration plays out in Cocteau’s subsequent films, and whether it achieves some kind of

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formal unity or ultimate meaning, will be the subject of Chapters 3 and 4.

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References Albersmeier, F.– J. (1997), ‘Tensions intermedíales et symbolique multimédiale dans Le Sang d’un poète de Jean Cocteau’, Œuvres et Critiques 22(1): 162–9. Arnaud, C. (2003), Jean Cocteau, Paris, Gallimard. Azoury, P. and Lalanne, J.– M. (2003), Cocteau et le cinema. Désordres, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Brown, F. (1968). An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau, New York, The Viking Press. Burch, N. (1986), ‘Primitivism and the Avant-gardes: A Dialectical Approach’, in P. Rosen ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, New York, Columbia University Press. Cocteau, J. ([1968] 1985), Two Screenplays: The Blood of a Poet/The Testament of Orpheus (trans. Carol Martin-Sperry), New York, Marion Boyars. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 1988), Du Cinématographe (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Pierre Belfond. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 2003), Entretiens sur le cinématographe (L’Edition anniversaire) (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Editions du Rocher. Cocteau, J. (1995), Jean Cocteau: Romans, Poésies, Œuvres dlverses (ed. B.Benech), Paris, Le Livre de Poche ‘Classiques Modernes’. Greene, N. (1997), ‘Jean Cocteau: A Cinema of Baroque Unease’, Bucknell Review 41(1): 130–47. Milorad (1981), ‘Le Sang d’un poète: Film à la première personne due singulier’, Cahiers Jean Cocteau 9: 269–334. Mourier, M. (1997), ‘Quelques aspects de la poétique cinématographique de Cocteau’, Œuvres et Critiques 22(1): 152–61 Pruitt, J. (2001), ‘“In the Hôtel des Folies-dramatiques”: in Michael Snow’s The Living Room’, in C. Roberts and L. Steeds eds, Michael Snow, Almost Cover to Cover, London, Black Dog Press. Springer, A. (1989), ‘Die filmische Gestaltung des Unbewussten’, in A. Ruhs, B. Riff and G. Schlemmer eds, Dos unbewusste Sehen. Texte su Psychoanalyse, Film, Kino, Vienna, Löcher Verlag, 76–99. Weiss, P. ([1956] 1995), Avantgarde Film, Frankfurt-am-Main, Siihrkamp.

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3 The tricks of the reel

Jean Cocteau nous prouve inlassablement que pour savoir faire du cinéma il nous faut retrouver Méliès, et que pour ça pas mal d’années Lumière sont encore nécessaires. (J.- L. Godard) (Jean Cocteau tirelessly proves to us that in order 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 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 cinema if one discounts his last-minute dialogues for Roland Tual’s Le Lit à colonnes (1942), a minor film also featuring Jean Marais, and his additions to Georges Neveux’s original dialogues for Marcel Carné’s Juliette ou la clef des songes, a film not completed until 1951 and which incorporated – although without crediting – Cocteau’s contribution. Cocteau wrote both the script and dialogues for L’Eternel retour and was involved at every stage of its production. He formalised properly here for the first time his notion of cinematic poetry as the point of intersection between the real and the unreal.

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L’Eternel retour/La Belle et la bête Shot in 16mm by Roger Hubert in March 1943 at the Studios de la Victorine in Nice, L’Eternel retour met with immediate critical and public acclaim when was released later that year on 29 October. Jean Marais became a national star almost overnight with crowds besieging his apartment building in Paris around the clock. His heraldic Jacquard sweater created a tidal wave in men’s fashion. Most critics were totally enchanted by Cocteau’s adaptation of the medieval legend of Tristan and Isolde, which he derived from the version established in 1900 by the French medievalist Joseph Bédier entitled Le Roman de Tristan et Iseult.1 They celebrated the plastic beauty of Hubert’s cinematography matched by the huge, sweeping sets of Georges Wakhévitch and the haunting, atmospheric score by Georges Auric. It was generally agreed that the commercial director Delannoy, who had just made in 1942 the historical film Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire with its clever parallels to the Vichy government, had succeeded in containing Cocteau’s personal extravagances and rescued him from the self-conscious hermeticism of Le Sang d’un poète. Even right-wing critics normally hostile to Cocteau approved. Robert Brasillach praised the film in Echo de la France of 20 November 1943 for its ‘delicacy’ and ‘good taste’, highlighting in particular Marais’s interpretation of Patrice as the magnificently handsome but naive Tristan wounded emotionally and physically due to his fatal love for Nathalie/ Isolde (Madeleine Sologne), also an orphan and ‘enfant de la mer’ (‘child of the sea’). Likewise, Lucien Rebatet celebrated the film for its privileging of the visual, recognising that Cocteau had wished to keep the language as simple as possible in order to achieve a ‘fairytale’ poetry. When the film finally appeared in England in 1946 as Love Eternal, however, reviewers objected to its mysticism of the cult of death and its general Teutonic look, in particular the lovers’ similarly dyed, ultra-blonde hair and statuesque poses, and the images of a Bavarian-style snow-chalet that evoked commercial German films of the war period. The film does indeed have the dubious privilege of being the most Aryan-looking work of French cinema made during the Occupation, highly ironic in view of Cocteau’s earlier crusade, shared by many in France following the First 1

For a useful account of the details of Cocteau’s adaptation of the legend as presented by Bédier, see Maclean 1999.

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World War, to divest modern art of exotic, dangerous and Germanic influences (even the radical Cubist project of Parade had sought to integrate childlike images of Epinal).2 As it happened, the Germans, feeling that the Tristan legend was their exclusive possession due to Wagner, were not at all happy for the film to be made and refused to allow Delannoy permission to shoot along the occupied Brittany coast, the original setting of the legend (exteriors were eventually filmed around Lake Geneva). Cocteau had wished for a long time to transpose the legend of Tristan and Isolde to the contemporary period. The film’s opening voice-over and caption explains that the title was taken from Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra) and suggests that old myths can be reborn without their heroes knowing it (‘Eternel retour de circonstances très simples qui composent la plus célebre de toutes les grandes histoires de Cœur’) (‘Eternal return of very simple circumstances that constitute the most famous of all the great Romantic stories’). The narrative may be a little contorted but it remains comprehensible. Patrice offers to find a bride for his wealthy uncle Marc, a recent and unhappy widower. While visiting a fisherman’s island during his search, Patrice successfully defends a beautiful young woman Nathalie against the bully Morolt (Alexandre Rignault) although he is stabbed in the thigh during the fight. Nursed back to health by Nathalie’s guardian Anne (Jane Marken), he ends up fleeing the island with Nathalie and returning with her to his uncle’s castle in the hope that the two will marry. Achule the resident evil dwarf (Pierre Piéral) decides to play with fate by inserting a herbal love philtre into the drinks Patrice pours for himself and Nathalie. The potion, originally prepared by Anne and marked ironically ‘Poison’, has the magical power to bind the pair to eternal love. Already by this stage, however, Patrice and Nathalie are on their way to spiritual love, hence the crucial carnal force of the potion is all but nullified. This fact effectively bowdlerises the Tristan legend, yet in Cocteau’s world sexual desire and passion quickly become base if not immediately purified and idealised. Unfortunately, Patrice’s loyalty to his uncle prevents him from openly expressing his love and Nathalie promptly becomes Marc’s bride. Patrice’s abiding sense of honour 2

See Winter 1995:131–2, where Winter reveals that in his journal Le Mot Cocteau presented many illustrations of the virtues of the Mediterranean versus the Nordic, the Gallic versus the Teutonic, and the poetic versus the prosaic.

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leads to tragedy, however. Forced to flee after being discovered talking with Nathalie, Patrice eventually returns and abducts her to a mountain chalet where they share together some idyllic moments before Marc tracks them down. In what will be a constant of Cocteau’s film work, the theme of the false double, Patrice encounters at the garage where he is now working a second, dark-haired Nathalie (Junie Astor) who manipulates him in his emotional agony. He proposes to her after being told by a malicious source that Nathalie I no longer loves him. Try as he might, he is unable to devote his thoughts and emotions to Nathalie II who realises she is nothing more for him than a pale substitute for Nathalie I. Out of pure jealousy, Nathalie II will eventually precipitate Patrice’s death by deliberately misreporting to him the colour of the flag (a white scarf) displayed by the boat in which her rival (Nathalie I) has come to save him while he lays dying in a boathouse due to an infected wound (this had been inflicted by Achille when Patrice returned to the château to test one last time if Nathalie I still remembered him). The obvious sublime beauty of the last moments of the death scene, when Nathalie I expires alongside her beloved and they find unity in death, transports the couple to an unreal, otherworldly realm unattainable in the original legend. The lovers achieve triumphant apotheosis and, in the words of the screenplay, so begins their real life. Although Cocteau boldly promoted L’Eternel retour as the first ever instance of ‘cinema poetry’, its style appears now woefully flat and academic especially in light of his subsequent films. It is overscored and extremely sentimental, with tears supplied for every departure, notably when Nathalie I is forced to leave the chalet with Marc. Nothing is left either to chance or to the imagination. The image of Marc in the pond really is the reflected image of Marc snooping on the lovers. Similarly, there is no play with speed, rhythm or the processes of change and metamorphosis of objects so dear to Cocteau. The film remains encased in its own smooth lining as if pre-programmed for the final image of the lovers in the same juxtaposed, supine form which they had adopted previously on the rug in front of the fire when taking the potion. The final words of resignation by Marc, a diminished paternal figure but still just strong enough to fulfil his narrative purpose, confirm the obvious: nothing more can be done for the lovers. The last shot, Cocteau’s favourite of the film, is a slow zoom-out – a

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future authorial marker – from the frozen tableau of the already glacial lovers who, as the surrounding details of the room dissolve, are transformed into the hard sculptured effigies of a monumental tomb. The film has become literally what it was always threatening stylistically to turn into, namely a mausoleum. In fact, if L’Eternel retour an still touch the contemporary viewer, it is more because of the random human elements that escape its stylised scenery and mise en scène laden with filters, chiaroscuro and tilted frames typical of the period. I am referring in particular to Patrice’s friend in the garage to whom he turns for support, Lionel (Roland Toutain), along with his sister, Nathalie II. With their dissident zazou style and contemporary idiom (their knowledge of Morocco means they can even imitate Arab voices), the pair embody the film’s most realistic elements. Cocteau inveighed against those critics, including Delannoy himself, who failed to see that the rather prosaic, claustrophobic setting of the garage where the topsy-turvy scenes between brother and sister take place was actually where poetry imposed itself most successfully because unexpectedly (see Cocteau 1995: 894). Of equal interest and genuine amusement are the scheming Frossins: the freakish dwarf coddled by his scheming mother Gertrude (also Marc’s stepsister) (Yvonne de Bray) and her feeble husband Amédée (Jean d’Yd). In her first appearance in Cocteau’s cinema as the suffocating, virtually incestuous mother, de Bray declares: ‘Achille est mon fils. Et je l’adore! (‘Achille is my son and I adore him!)’, and in the same breath: ‘II me rendra folle, folle’ (‘He’ll make me go mad’). In the screenplay of L’Eternel retour Cocteau talks of marrying the real with the unreal and elsewhere of the fact that the cinema offers the only means possible to establish an equilibrium between the real and the unreal. Cocteau’s primary aim is thus presented as an attempt to reconcile art and aesthetics with reality and worldliness, however obdurate and even treacherous the latter may prove in the form of Nathalie II (significantly, even when twiddling the buttons of the radio this character can find only static and interference). Yet as Gregory Sims has persuasively argued, Cocteau wished ultimately to transcend the worldly and the political altogether (see Sims 1998)3 For L’Eternel retour delivered a clear poetic statement: the eternal return of the title is 3

For a thorough account of Cocteau’s cultivation of ‘inactuality’ during the war, see Touzot 1992.

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fundamentally the eternal nature of the work of art itself which, even more than the two banished lovers, remains authentic because divorced from messy day-to-day reality, that is to say, the historical reality of war. Art, after all, requires death and persecution, and Patrice dies, or rather is martyred, in the name of art as much as love. In this most quintessential of romantic myths set in an indeterminate neverland, the fantastic death of the two lovers and their expulsion from the world of the quotidian serves as the very guarantee of their authenticity. For Cocteau, the joy of shooting L’Eternel retour was itself one of escapism into the ‘inactual’: the actors were as though ‘imprégnes, grisés, soulevés, transfigurés [ ... ]’ (‘imbued, intoxicated, raised, transfigured’), in particular during the last scene which left Cocteau, by his own admission, reduced to tears. As he put it elsewhere: ‘J’aime ce monde lunaire qui supprime le reste, ce travail fantôme qui se déroule dans le vide et dans l’attente. Le temps n’existe plus ... J’échappe dans le monde inactuel où l’essentiel consiste à prendre au vol une scène parfaite’.4 Films of legend and fantasy such as L’Eternel retour and Marcel Carné’s equally successful Les Visiteurs du soir (1942), set in what JeanPierre Jeancolas has aptly called ‘Ie contemporain vague’, characterise French cinema of the war, the so-called Cinema of Paradox because it was during the war that French cinema actually enjoyed relative prosperity and consolidated its quality and status. Right-wing critics advocated in particular a clean break from 1930s ‘poetic realism’ epitomised by Carné’s earlier films such as Hôtel du Nord (1938) and Quai des brumes (1938) which featured doomed male protagonists like Jean Gabin caught despairingly in the cynical, twilight world of working-class Paris. With its portrayal of pure love and a bleached, poeticised Middle Ages, Les Visiteurs du soir brought into existence an essentially ‘primitive’ cinema where elements of the fantastic and grotesque were now placed in the frame of – and subordinated to – an original, Méliès-inspired ‘painterly’ aesthetic of plasticity proper to a healthy national imagination. Cocteau’s cancelling of the brute power of the potion in L’Eternel Retour likewise serves to prevent any unwelcome tainting of his film’s ethereal beauty, its epic sweep and 4

‘I love this lunar world that eclipses the rest, this phantom work that takes place through emptiness and waiting. Time no longer exists ... I escape into the world of the inactual where the essential thing is to take a perfect scene on the rise.’

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depiction of le merveilleux (a word uttered by Madeleine herself) by the troubling and potentially uncontrollable forces of naturalism. Moreover, Cocteau saw Marais’s physiognomy as itself compatible with one of the sculptures he had so highly praised in his notorious ‘Eloge à Breker’ to coincide with the Paris exhibition in May 1942 of Hitler’s favourite artist, Arno Breker. (One wonders even whether the background image for the opening credits – the close-up of a sculptured hand – is an example of Breker’s work.) Yet the film’s refining and sublimating transformations of the Tristan and Isolde legend that help to situate it so resolutely in the domain of high art, even allowing it to allegorise its own independence from the socio-political context in which it was made, also forecast the broad, ‘exorcist’ purging and politically driven appropriation of cinematic aesthetics by French right-wing intellectuals in the early days of the Liberation. Indeed, a film festival held in Paris in December 1944 and organised in part by the Ministry of Information attempted precisely to draw a line between a supposed handful of ideologically compromised films and their producers and those ‘prestige films’ which bespoke political integrity and helped forge a new aesthetic and artistic will. L’Eternel retour was one of the films chosen, along with Les Visiteurs du soir and Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire, to name just a few. As Sims rightly claims, such a policy must be read as a cinematic manifestation of the nationalist, whitewashing discourse of ‘résistancialisme’ which General de Gaulle had begun fabricating from the earliest days of the Liberation (see Sims 1999)· Whatever the exact degree of Cocteau’s own personal contact with the Nazi regime, L’Eternel retour must be read ultimately in ideological terms as a form of aesthetic collaboration with Vichy France and fascism. The film’s systematic attempt to transcend history through the fantastic, along with its own ‘inactual’ perfection, is paradoxically what made it so ideologically acceptable and rooted it firmly in history. Unfortunately, unlike Les Visiteurs du soir with its final image of the lovers’ hearts beating audibly despite their having being reduced to stone by the Devil, there is no theme of resistance in L’Eternel retour powerful enough to justify a critical attempt to recuperate the film politically. That said, we shall come back to the film again later in Chapter 5 when we assess in detail the aesthetic implications of Marais’s momentous and defining performance.

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Cocteau’s next major work for the cinema, where he took complete charge as scriptwriter and director, reversed in spectacular fashion many of the underlying formal problems of L’Eternel retour by exploiting the full potential of the medium. Inspired by Madame Leprince de Beaumont’s 1757 tale of the same name, La Belle et la bête (1946) was shot between August 1945 and January 1946 at the Studios Saint Maurice at Epinay, with exteriors filmed at the Moulin de Touvoie, a seventeenth-century château in Rochecorbon near Tours, and the château de Raray near Senlis with its richly decorated gardens and bizarre terrace of animal statuary. Postproduction was a lengthy process and ran from January to April 1946. The film was again produced by André Paulvé after four months of delay and interruption when it seemed as if the project would have to be aborted due to the huge costs involved. The music was by Auric, and for the first time in Cocteau’s cinema Christian Bérard designed the costumes and sets, assuming the title – one that did not yet exist in French cinema – of directeur artistique. Cocteau’s technical assistant was René Clément who represented for Paulvé the reassuring hand of tradition. The cinematographer was the highly distinguished Henri Alekan (aided by Henri Tiquet) who had just worked with Clément on the superb action film about the Breton Resistance, La Bataille du rail (1946). The editing was by Claude Ibéria. Under the guiding influence of Marcel Pagnol, Cocteau chose Pagnol’s companion Josette Day to play Belle opposite Marais in his triple role as la Bête, Avenant and the Prince. Belle’s father was played by Marcel André, her two wicked elder sisters Adélaïde and Félicie by Mila Parély and Nane Germon respectively. La Belle et la bête is part of Cocteau’s cycle of medieval French, or more generally western, mythology that also included Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, Renaud et Armide and the later 1953 ballet La Dame à la licorne. His express aim with the film was to attain the fairytale style of de Beaumont and Perrault which he deemed the true French mythology, even though he firmly recognised the origins of de Beaumont’s story as British. Thus he retained the major narrative elements of the original moral tale, including the two elder sisters, the father’s increasing debts and ruin, his theft of the rose, the progressive attachment Belle feels for la Bête, and the transformation of la Bête into the Prince. In typical fashion he also made, however, important changes and additions: the ring that allows Belle to disappear and reappear whenever she likes is replaced by a magic glove and key;

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Belle’s three brothers are reduced to one, Ludovic (Michel Auclair); a handsome best friend in love with her, Avenant, is provided (the name means attractive in French), as is the figure of Diana in la Bête’s pavilion (in ancient mythology, Diana (or Artemis) turned the hunter Acteaon into a stag because he spied on her while bathing; he was consequently ripped apart by his own hounds). Other elements such as the riderless white horse Magnifique sprinkled with silver dust are derived from folk tale. Crucially, Cocteau elaborates on the reason for la Bête’s condition: rather than being simply a wicked curse it is the particular punishment exacted by angry fairies for the refusal of the Prince’s parents to believe in magic. Only the look of love can provide salvation. (This primary motive can be contrasted with that of Apuleius’s satirical Latin novel The Golden Ass: Or Metamorphoses to which the story of Beauty and the Beast necessarily refers, where the nobleman Lucius is transformed by accident into an ass and forced to witness the animal-like existence of slaves.) The fact that an act of choice lies at the root of la Bête’s story establishes a narrative of free will in the film, and with it the idea that one can manipulate one’s own reality through decisions taken. As Dario P. Del Degan observes, Cocteau’s version features more active characters who decide their own course of action despite the magical elements of fate imposed on the narrative.5 Indeed, the decisions of the characters drive the narrative, most notably Belle who decides herself to go to the chateau and stay there, not to marry la Bête, to ask la Bête if she can visit her father, and finally to fall in love with la Bête. Her active charm is the product of a modern psychology: she enjoys her tasks of servitude yet can also become arrogant and bossy like a master when granted authority. She is not innocent of the process of death and resurrection either, and occasionally displays perverse pleasure, as she recognises at the end (‘Moi j’aime avoir peur’) (‘I like to be afraid’). Her first real emotion for la Bête is provoked by a display of basic animality: the moment when la Bête laps water from her hand. In this way she completes more or less perfectly the trajectory of her role as summed up in standard 5

See Del Degan, 1999: 67–8. Del Degan places Cocteau’s representation of free will in the specific context of existentialism, arguing that the film creates a double tension: between facticity and transcendence and between fate and human freedom. Hence, la Bête’s ‘dual existence as human being and beast raises the distinction between objects, what Sartre calls Being-in-itself, and humans, what Sartre calls Being-for-itself (69).

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psychoanalytic readings of Beauty and the Beast, i.e. she admits and transfers the erotic quality of her incestuous desire for her father through the discovery of the animal in another man and herself (at one moment we even see parallel shots of Belle kissing her father’s hair while caressing la Bête’s). As for Cocteau, he acknowledges full responsibility for his rewriting of the story in the opening credit sequence which is often missing in prints of the film but which now takes its proper place in the newly restored version distributed on DVD by the British Film Institute. We see Cocteau in person writing out the names of the actors in chalk on a blackboard in slightly speeded-up motion. Marais and Day then approach the blackboard in modern dress to rub out their names (the sequence was initially planned as something much greater with all the actors involved). Further writing in Cocteau’s hand is then superimposed over the image of the blackboard which also reveals at one point his own chalk drawings. Cocteau appears to erase the titles as soon as they appear, as if playing a game with the cinematic apparatus. Once all the credits have been inscribed on the screen Alekan arrives with his clapperboard to announce the title of the film and set up the first take. The emphasis, as always with Cocteau, is thus on the playful yet complex nature of the creative endeavour where one has to erase in order to write, part of a continuous process of editing and correcting (Cocteau artfully places a missing circumflex accent over the ‘e’ of bête in the prewritten tide). The sequence is important in another way too, since it prefigures the documentary aspects of the film. We see Cocteau at the age of 56 with his lover Marais and even their dog Moulouk preparing for his first commercial film in his own name. If this degree of self-consciousness recalls the self-reflexive beginning of Le Sang d’un poète where Cocteau welcomed us in person to his imaginary world, it is in a completely different context, that of the film industry. Indeed, La Belle et la bête will offer one of the first encounters in French cinema between experimental art cinema and the mainstream, thus producing all sorts of new configurations and convergences. Even in the credits Bérard is presented artistically as the film’s ‘illustrator’, his name accompanied by an image of one of his designs. The credit sequence promotes Cocteau as an auteur who is fully hands on with his work, and it ends with him exercising his directorial control. After Alekan has shouted ‘Moteur’ (‘Camera’) Cocteau immediately responds with ‘Coupez! Une minute’ (‘Cut! One

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moment’). So begins another mini-sequence, a type of preface to the film, that consists of a short passage of Cocteau’s writing – in white over black as with the blackboard – heralded by a gentle drum roll and signed off with his name and customary star. This is one of many instances of Cocteau the pedagogue addressing the public and his critics, here on the nature of fantasy and illusion in the cinema. For it is a direct plea to the adult viewer (‘je vous demande’) to bring a childlike naivety to the film and to suspend disbelief. Counting on our good faith and essentially trusting to human luck, Cocteau permits himself to utter the traditional magic formula, ‘childhood’s open sesame’: ‘II était une fois ...’ (‘Once upon a time ...’). This, as we have already seen, is a touchstone of Cocteau’s film philosophy: the projected image is always real by virtue of having been recorded and so requires us to believe in it. An informal written contract is thereby established between Cocteau and the viewer who is now primed for both documentary and fantasy. It will be the last time in the film that we hear directly from Cocteau as author, although he was forced to dub with his own voice the few words spoken by the usurer (Raoul Marco) because of their poor delivery. Yet if La Belle et la bête is pitched by Cocteau at the level of an adult fairytale, it is nevertheless completely devoid of fairies and delivers no direct moral lesson. The evil sisters, for example, receive no final punishment of the kind meted out in de Beaumont’s tale where they were statufied alive. Eschewing sentimentality and clichés and introducing some purely descriptive visual passages that did not exist in the original, the film offers us instead images of blood, pain and torture. This is a fearsome if sometimes petulant beast whose feline ears prick to attention and whose long claws extend whenever a doe passes (Marais’s voice was actually lowered technically with base to achieve the full effect). Stylistically, the film’s pictorial glamour has what Cocteau calls ‘the soft gleam of hand-polished old silver’. He wished to create with Bérard a wonderland out of realism and so rescue it from traditional but false cinematic notions of the fantastic, for example, vagueness, vapour and hazy superimpositions. Mystery exists only in precise things, as Cocteau put it, and thus he sought ‘le réalisme impeccable de l’irréalité’ (Amy de la Bretèque and Caizergues 1989: 55) (‘the impeccable realism of unreality’), or better still, ‘cet air normal exigé par l’invraisemblable, lequel ne supporte pas la moindre invraisemblance et impose des lois beaucoup plus sévères que le réalisme’ (Amy de la Bretèque and

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Caizergues 1989: 45) (‘that normal appearance demanded by the improbable which does not tolerate the slightest improbability and imposes far more severe laws than realism’). Alekan had to put his training to one side, with great difficulty as it turned out, in order to obtain the sharp, unfuzzy photography and credible images required by Cocteau. At the same time, Cocteau insisted on the painterly basis of the images. Bérard and Alekan both worked from Dutch painting: the luminous atmosphere of Vermeer, Rembrandt and Le Nain for the family home, and the more sombre style of Gustave Doré’s engravings (notably his illustrations for Perrault’s fairytales) for la Bête’s château. Indeed, the film appears to unfold like a series of tableaux that go hand in hand with the highly theatrical manner and stylised posing of the actors, particularly Day as Belle. Cocteau relished strong contrasts without any diffusion or greyness. In the château we behold the intensity of isolated objects dramatically lit and as if ablaze (in the case of la Bête sometimes literally so) against pure black backgrounds. Each shot contains more zones of darkness than points of light, much like in early silent cinema where the closing of the iris provided greater focus on faces and gestures surrounded by a dark nimbus. La Bête’s flamboyant costume, a rich confection of feminine, masculine and animal features (a doublet studded with glitter and jewels and artfully incised slashes, an exorbitant brooch, padded shoulders, a lace collar turned up like a halo and matched by lace around the boots, muffs and hose, a lion’s face complete with fangs – this is sartorial style as a form of montage), demonstrates Cocteau and Bérard’s extraordinary eye for visual detail and texture in the film. Cocteau further accentuated the heightened contrasts in the image by creating stunning visual ruptures between scenes. For instance, the supernatural gleam of the father’s night in the château is followed immediately by the cold rawness of morning light in the grounds shot without filters. The effect is virtually that of a documentary, and indeed odd shots of deer alive and killed by la Bête recall the real hunting scenes in Jean Renoir’s La Régle du jeu (1939). Yet due to their particular context in the film, these sequences become another manifestation of the fantastic. As Cocteau put it in his diary of the production: ‘[r]ien ne vaut la sublimation du style documentaire’ (Cocteau 1958: 109) (‘nothing is worth the sublimation of the documentary style’). It is as if the more ‘real’ and more documentary film becomes, the more unreal and fictional – yet utterly believable – it looks. La Bête’s magic mirror of

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moving images is part of this double process, since it serves directly as a screen to depict real scenes taking place elsewhere such as the suffering of the father. If the camera can portray magic, so magical devices too are able to convey immediate reality, projecting the world in order to reveal the truth. The elder sisters are exposed directly by the technique of projection, not only by the magic mirror which shows them to be variously an old hag and monkey, but also in the most natural form possible by a view of white sheets stretched out on a line to dry in the family garden, behind which one of the sisters Félicie appears in silhouette as a witch. Both these scenes have a cinematic dimension. The first recalls the primitive magic of Méliès, in particular a short film from the 1910s where a character is filmed by a television company. The second constitutes a discrete episode, a kind of dumbshow opened and closed by a curtain to form a film within a film. As such they can be linked to the one obvious point of cinematic reference in the film, C. T. Dreyer’s horror film Vampyr (1932): the moment of the father’s arrival at la Bête’s château when his own proliferating shadow begins to stalk the walls. In each case, projection reveals itself as a form of magic realism, or what Cocteau terms ‘vérisme’, the ‘true real’. The film continually privileges our capacity to believe in images at this level. After his initiation into the world of the château, the father’s life quickly becomes enchanted (tears turn to diamonds etc.) since magic works by association and its very suggestion creates other possibilities even in the humdrum existence of the farmhouse, for example, the gorgons around the fireplace suddenly springing into life. Compare the impressionable father with Avenant who at the end falls into nothing but glass in Diana’s pavilion because he is unable to appreciate the poetic force of the mirror as screen and claims not to be believe in ‘monsters’. As for Belle, her magic represents the very automatism of projected film: invisible hands serve her, dress her, do her hair, close the door, and so on. If we admit that our knowing enchantment with Belle is also a fascination with the process of projection and our lust for spectacle, then La Belle et la bête as a whole may be said to operate meta-cinematically as a statement on the nature of film and its dual capacity for reality and fantasy whereby the filmic reel is always nothing less than a vehicle of the real. The realistic aspects of La Belle et la bête are enhanced by the relatively unflashy movements of the camera and the general use of static shots. The sheet scene in the garden we have just referred to

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could have been developed into more of a set-piece with cameras moving along and through the lines of sheets in circular tracking shots to convey the impression of a labyrinth. Yet here as elsewhere Cocteau studiously avoided unnecessary decorative thrills or movement. The sheets are stretched taut and the sequence filmed with precision as a set of fixed camera shots that has its own internal rhythm. The result in Cocteau’s terms is a harmonious compromise of Vermeer’s limpid simplicity and Doré’s serpentine excess. As for the use of sound in the film, Auric’s music frequently cuts across the visuals, reaching a synthesis at vital moments while at other times it is peremptorily suppressed, for example, when the father first sets foot in the chateau. Cocteau professed his respect for Auric’s musical passages but he also reserved the right to ‘direct’ them, thus setting up a play of counterpoint. Where before in Le Sang d’un poète he had transposed entire musical sequences in order to obtain ‘accidental synchronism’, here Cocteau prioritises such creative syncopations that jolt and awaken the imagination (see Cocteau 1958: 242). (Cocteau claimed that for inspiration during the shoot he even sang to himself the minuet from Lully’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme with its alien pomp and solemnity.) The factor of chance is again offered by Cocteau as a creative stand against the rules and mastery of the profession. As with the image, we are invited to appreciate new intensities, tones and volumes, from the full orchestral and sensurround effect of music gushing through the corridors right down to the whispered voice-over of la Bête. Abrupt changes of sound can be stunningly effective, as when Belle uses the magic glove to return to the house and is propelled by reverse motion through a wall to the angelic sounds of a children’s chorus reminiscent of Le Sang d’un poète. Like L’Eternel retour, La Belle et la bête breaks down really into two different types of film, yet these are now to be taken as two authentic visions of cinema. The first is the cinema of speech and theatricality, where dialogues spark and fizzle like the rapidly edited shots and quicksilver framings and reframings of figures in the family house. This is the world of realistic circumstance fashioned by the fantasy of the characters (the two spoilt sisters are modelled on Molière’s précieuses ridicules). The second is la Bête’s cinema of the marvellous which has little in common with the escapist romanticism of French cinema during the war and which Christopher Frayling has neatly categorised in his excellent commentary for the British Film Institute DVD as ‘low-rent’

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or ‘baroque’ surrealism. The simple but highly effective special effects are fused together with deliberately theatrical actions and postures, painterly shots and the general muteness of the characters. Time and movement have a logic and momentum all of their own in the château. When the father first encounters the (literal) external hand of magic in the castle – the candelabra mounted on dismembered human arms that beckon him forth and light up in the process – it is at an oblique angle (almost an overhead shot), filmed in reverse and slightly slowed down. The second row of candelabra perform the same gesture but with a difference: they detach themselves from their human supports and become suspended, thus creating a line of human fingers that point towards the waiting table. Once seated at the dinnertable, the father is effectively blown away backwards in his chair as if by a gust of wind (once again in slow and reverse motion). This composite movement of time and motion is extended when Belle first crosses the threshold of la Bête’s grotto and is immediately propelled into balletic slow motion. It is as if she were climbing back up the windy course of time and entering into the bygone world of silent cinema. Without moving she then glides in slightly slowed motion down the corridor towards us, past the white curtains billowing out from the windows on her left (she is clearly being pulled along on a cart while the camera performs a reverse zoom of slightly uneven speed). The effect is breathtaking. On other occasions Cocteau slightly quickens the pace, as, for example, when Magnifique (actually a recalcitrant circus horse called Aramis) bolts out of its stables producing a staccato effect. Cocteau is making us alive here to the transformative potential of speed and space by attuning us to different tempos, moods and registers. After her visit to the château, Belle henceforth experiences time differently, staying at home for ten days rather than a week as agreed with la Bête. The peculiar rhythm and grace of La Belle at la bête which many contemporary reviewers found generally too slow but which, as we see, allows the supernatural to consolidate itself as a way of being, is connected to Cocteau’s ideal of contemplation and his notion of cinematic acts as opposed to action. I am thinking here in particular of those moments of stasis when the characters become astonished spectators themselves, notably Belle in her most velvety movements when she spies in turn on la Bête. The film is forever recounting the adventure of the gaze: everyone and everything in the château is looking and being looked at, including the statues and caryatids around

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the fireplace that stare directly at the viewer in direct contravention of the rules of classical cinema. Of course, who and what they are really looking at in this porous world of flux and inversion where human bodies freeze into stone, statues move, a lion’s head carved on a wooden chair suddenly roars, a skin cover moves of its own accord across the sheets, a bedroom is taken over by vegetation, mirrors talk and la Bête moves back and forth between being a seductive gentilhomme and a frightening carnivore, is a key part of the film’s continual suspense. In this expanded field of sound and vision, where the boundaries of the cinematic frame melt away like time (we do not know where the château really begins or ends) and where the simple plucking of a rose by the father provokes the full volume of la Bête’s wrath amplified by a huge blast of wind (this is the surge and pounce of a Cocteau film: the father must now die or sacrifice one of his daughters), no sound or image can be taken for granted. Belle will eventually discover the correct gaze in order to pierce the visible surface (appearance) and so recognise the grandeur of la Bête’s soul (reality). This arrives too late, however, since the creature she loved is no more. According to the strict formal logic of reversal in La Belle et la bête, just as the not so charming Avenant must be killed with an arrow by Diana, goddess of chastity, for having symbolically invaded the sisters’ room at the beginning with a stray arrow and then having smashed his way in through the glass roof of her sacred pavilion, so la Bête must vanish in order for the Prince to be resurrected by rising upright from the ground through the miracle of reverse-motion photography. Simultaneously, Avenant falls to the ground and his face slowly acquires the features of la Bête. Thus, like the accursed Poet of Le Sang d’un poète, la Bête must die in one form in order to be reborn in another, his/her/its magic powers not appreciated until they have been destroyed. This scene of double reincarnation returns us, of course, to the play of erasure and superimposition in the opening credit sequence for which it provides a kind of closing frame. We shall return to the particular question of mutual metamorphosis later in the context of Marais’s performative function in Cocteau’s cinema. For the moment we see that the triumph of love is far from assured: the apparition of Prince Charming is shot in a deliberately flat, almost saccharine fashion matching the normative fairytale ending that Cocteau knew he could not entirely escape. The final spectacular image initiated by reverse motion photography when Belle rises from the ground with the Prince to

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ascend the heavens towards his kingdom (they first briefly sink to the ground: the fall before creation), ensures that the real motivation for her desires – and in formal terms the necessity for reverse motion – remain an object of mystery (at least for now). What Cocteau himself personally wanted with La Belle et la bête is revealed in his Journal d’un film which serves as a textual mirror for the project. From 26 August 1945 to 1 June 1946, Cocteau noted in detail the daily struggles and marvels of the shoot, sometimes even by the hour, insisting always that the experience was one of enchantment for everyone involved. Yet he also reveals much of himself in these pages. We see, for example, a melancholic and slightly paranoid Cocteau since he conceived La Belle et la bête as a kind of amateur film spying on the evil world of commercial cinema, and he was always suspicious of traps being laid by his team of industry professionals to prevent the possibility of felicitous errors and the treasures of the unforeseen. In addition, Journal d’un film shows the extreme degree to which Cocteau identified himself with the project and its vicissitudes, viewing the film as a form of personal spiritual journey. Its difficult gestation due to delays and shortages is directly linked to his own physical ailments during the shoot, including a bout of anthrax and a set of highly uncomfortable skin conditions such as impetigo and eczema. The story of the ‘good’ monster whose beauty is finally revealed clearly functioned for Cocteau as a screen for, and reversal of, his own ugliness. He writes: ‘Plus nous enlaidissons âvec l’age, plus notre ceuvre doit embellir et nous refléter comme un enfant qui nous ressemble’ (Cocteau 1958: 61) (‘The more ugly we become with age, the more beautiful our work should be, reflecting us like a child we resemble’). Yet the state of Cocteau’s film and his personal health is also linked to that of his country, since the poet in search of his art and the enchanter who desires to rediscover his childhood is also the citizen who wishes to affirm his patriotic feelings. The producer had demanded that La Belle et la bête help to re-establish French cinema following the war, and with it the identity of French society now in disarray much like Belle’s dysfunctional family. Such a mission, which Cocteau was happy to assume, would be well served by the film’s central theme of moving beyond the signs and appearances of monstrosity (Cocteau also discloses in the book his obsession with the Nuremberg trials then taking place). In short, the double mask of suffering allows Cocteau, like a sorcerer’s apprentice, to recast the film

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as an allegory of the bond between poet and Nation. Moreover, by means of his physical and artistic pain – he considers himself to be the victim of a bête mêchante – Cocteau will atone both for his own current passivity and the collective humiliation of his country, thereby affirming après coup effective resistance against the Nazi invaders (la peste brune). According to his own elaborate ratiocinations, the miracle of rejuvenation, whereby France rediscovers its natural goodness and child-like capacity for wonder which it possessed before succumbing to an evil spell (the Occupation and Vichy), is possible only through the difficult work of art (Christian images abound in Journal d’un film along with its messages of patriotism). The final metamorphosis of la Bête into the Prince via the death of Avenant marks therefore the return to a primary identity, that of la Bête’s childhood which had been maintained essentially intact precisely because of his/her/its immediate passage into immaculate ugliness. We can now better understand Cocteau’s claim that La Belle et la bête incarnated both a national and personal mythology. The film heralds a new aesthetic and cultural form of de Beaumont’s fairytale by which Cocteau will begin his life anew as a fully-fledged poet of French cinema. Yet success is also achieved at a cost, that of reproducing old and troubling stereotypes, specifically the racist caricature of the hooknosed Jewish usurer who, as a parasitical alien, threatens the national identity represented by Belle’s father, the merchant patriarch. The film articulates a postwar vision that simultaneously effaces any trace of the war from its visual images, whilst nonetheless symbolically encoding the underlying logic of otherness upon which the war was predicated. As Daniel Fischlin has argued, the anti-Semitic unconscious of La Belle et la bête circulates paranoia about the contaminant presence of the other all the more effectively because it is encoded at the level of a textual unconscious.6 Cocteau never acknowledged such problems in 6 See Fischlin 1998. Fischlin also draws our attention to a scene cut by Cocteau from the film entitled ‘The Draper’s Farce’, in which the parallel figure of the Draper (unnamed) effectively becomes the Jewish anti-type of the moneylender and is first outsmarted and then breaten up by Ludovic and Avenant. This scene of punitive anti-Semitism, which is fragmentarily present in some prints of the film, centres on the transvestite performance of Ludovic and Avenant as Belle’s sisters whereby the interested and duped Jew becomes implicitly homosexual. This conforms to a wellworn convention linking the Jew with feminisation (71). A full breakdown of’ The Draper’s Farce’ can be found in Cocteau 2003b: 63–72.

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the film or in his diary, perhaps because racial stereotyping was only too ‘natural’ in French cinema of the period. To a contemporary viewer, however, this makes the film more symptomatic of the period than exceptional, a question we shall address properly in the context of collaboration in Chapter 5.

L’Aigle à deux têtes /Les Parents terribles So far we have traced the imbrication of fantasy and realism in Cocteau’s film work. We pass now to L’Aigle à deux têtes (1948), which constitutes Cocteau’s first screen adaptation of one of his own plays and his initial attempt to balance cinema with the theatre. Jean Marais and Edwige Feuillère had already starred in the original and highly successful stage version of L’Aigle à deux têtes in October 1946, first in Brussels and then in Paris. Cocteau had, in fact, written the play according to Marais’s personal orders: ‘ne pas parier au premier acte, pleurer de joie au second, et tomber à la renverse dans un escalier au troisième’ (cited in Philippe 1989: 62–3) (‘be silent in the first act, cry with joy in the second, and fall backwards down a set of stairs in the third’). While the production was on tour, Cocteau immediately set to work adapting the play for the big screen. He had never really cared to provide scripts and dialogues for others, even when they were as successful as the clipped and cutting (though fundamentally unCoctelian) words he produced for Bresson’s Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (1945), since it over-confined him and did not offer the complete pleasures of the cinema, from the collective and strangely compulsive world of the shoot to personal encounters with the fantasmatic unreality of the image. Cocteau allegedly took on the project of L’Aigle à deux têtes to efface the bad memories of his work as scriptwriter for Billon’s Ruy Blas of the same year, a prose adaptation of Victor Hugo’s play where Marais as the swashbuckler is also killed at the end and which Cocteau had originally intended as a kind of western. Cocteau’s stated aim in L’Aigle à deux têtes was to preserve the theatrical character of the original play and to make a ‘theatrical film’. Indeed, its basic three-part structure corresponds to the play’s three acts: the first in the Queen’s chamber, the second and third in the Queen’s library. Cocteau regarded this costume drama, which he began shooting in October 1947 at the Epinay studios and on location at the Château de

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Vizille in the Dauphiné, as primarily another collaboration with Auric and above all Bérard, responsible with Georges Wakhévitch for both the costumes and the majestic sets. The cinematographer was Christian Matras and the editing was again by Claude Ibéria. The film also marked the first appearance in a Cocteau film by Edouard Dermit who took a small role as officer of the guard. Some of the more literary and possibly too bleak phrases from Cocteau’s original play were not included in the film version and the hopeless, tragic mood of the play is thus slightly reduced, doubtlessly reflecting Cocteau’s fundamental faith in the new medium he was working in. Most of the dialogues were retained, however, and virtually half of the film is composed of long conversations between the Queen (Feuillère) and Stanislas (Marais). The only obvious additions are the three brief instances of authorial commentary in the form of voiceovers: the first to tell us simply that Tony, the Queen’s deaf and mute black servant (Abdullah Ahmed) took care of Stanislas and that Félix (de Willenstein) (Jean Debucourt) returned once more to the door of the Queen’s chamber; the second to describe for the viewer the status of Stanislas and the Queen; the third to conclude proceedings and underline the author/narrator’s authority (the matter-of-fact: ‘Aux yeux de la politique et de l’histoire le drame de Krantz demeure une énigme, mais l’amour est plus fort que la politique et tout est arrivé comme je l’ai dit’ (‘In the opinion of politics and history the drama at Krantz remains a mystery, but love is stronger than politics and everything happened as I have said’). The second instance comes at the end of one of the most impressive shots in the film, a continuous long take that begins with the camera leaving the mirror and the Queen’s reflection in it and following her to her chair, zooming first slowly to her face, then to that of Stanislas perched above her, then back to her face and down her body to recapture his face at her knee before rising again up towards her face, and then gently zooming out to reframe both characters in a two-shot. This sets up the chance for Cocteau to deliver the beautifully formed sentence: ‘Ils étaient les rêves d’un dormeur qui dort si profondément qu’il ne sait même pas qu’il les rêve’ (‘They were the dreams of a man sleeping so deeply that he doesn’t even know he’s dreaming them’). For the most part, however, the film is governed by the rhythms of the theatre and indeed magnified by the high theatrical style of the actors fresh from the stage production as well as by the female costumes inspired, according to Bérard, by Queen Victoria and

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Queen Alexandra. The extraordinary coup de théâtre at the end when Marais falls backwards down the stairs is preserved intact and even intensified by the way it is filmed in shot/counter-shot, a technique which for Cocteau is always highly dangerous and, as here, even fatal. After slowly escorting Marais up the staircase in the form of a backward tracking shot, the camera positions itself briefly behind his head as he gazes towards the dying Queen hovering above him. It then turns round and, almost in her line of vision, frames his head in reverse free-fall as he collapses backwards down the stairs. L’Aigle à deux têtes is the story of the Bavarian Queen Natasha who is reborn as a woman when a young poet and terrorist Stanislas (or Azraël) breaks into her royal apartment wounded and exhausted with a mission to kill her. She summarises her feelings to him thus: ‘Vous deviez tuer la reine. Vous l’avez tuée. C’est une femme qui vous parle, Stanislas. Comprenez-vous?’ (‘You were to kill the queen. You’ve killed her. It’s a woman who’s speaking to you, Stanislas. Do you understand?’). In fact, on the night of Stanislas’s sudden arrival at Krantz the Queen is celebrating with a ball (in which she does not deign to appear) the tenth anniversary of her mourning for her dead husband, King Frédéric, whom Stanislas uncannily resembles. The plot is almost a reversal of La Belle et la bête: where Belle succeeded through her love in rescuing la Bête from years of reclusion,, here Stanislas falls in love with a withdrawn beautiful woman and ends the spell of mourning that has imprisoned her for so long. We have here a typical Cocteau combination of false male doubles and formal inversions, notably the fact that the Queen mourns her husband in her white wedding dress awash in jewels yet declares herself in love with Stanislas in the black robes of mourning. Hence, her rebirth is also a death, and vice versa. Either way, their relationship is an ‘eagle with two heads’. Eventually he will take the poison she had intended for herself and in the fifteen minutes it takes to work she will play a gruesome comedy. She will insult him and make him believe that she has struck him, to the point that he is provoked into stabbing her. The expression on her face when his knife enters her flesh is one of apparent pleasure and climax. She admits she loves him and they both die together, although not before she walks to the window to salute her people. With its historical allure and deathly intrigue, L’Aigle à deux têtes might seem to be an unconscious homage to a silent film entitled L’Assassinat du duc de Guise (1908) by André Calmettes and Charles Le

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Bargy. This film, one of the first ever to use narrative form, was likewise based on a stageplay and is one of the cinema’s earliest period dramas. It concerns an episode in the de Guise family struggle to seize power in 1563: Henri I of Lorraine, the Duc de Guise,, rival to Henri III of Navarre, is stabbed to death by the king’s bodyguards in the Château de Blois, to the distress of his mistress, the Marquise of Noirmoutiers.7 Yet the introductory written caption of L’Aigle à deux têtes, signed and starred by Cocteau in standard fashion, could not be more adamant: this film is not about history. The story exists only in the author’s imagination and should not be confused with anything that the public itself may remember. Cocteau expands on this theme at length in Du Cinématographe, explaining that L’Aigle à deux têtes is an invented tale of political and romantic intrigue freely inspired by the life of Elizabeth (1837–98), Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, a Bavarian princess who married in 1854 her cousin, Emperor Francis Joseph, and who, despite her exceptional beauty, intelligence and kindness, led an unhappy domestic life marred by family tragedy (see Cocteau 1988: 124–9). Independent and unconventional, she managed to avoid the stiff etiquette of the Viennese court before being assassinated by the Italian anarchist Luccheni on the jetty in Geneva. Cocteau, influenced as he explains in his preface to the play by Remy de Gourmont’s Portraits littéraires, creates a queen of naive pride, courage and elegance blessed with a sense of destiny yet who also has a ‘troublesome invisibility’ (a source of constant concern for the mother of the King, the Archduchess). The only element borrowed from the story that originally inspired Cocteau’s play is the knife wound and the fact that a famous Empress walked for so long with a knife planted in her shoulder blade. As usual in his work, Cocteau is not seeking to portray the largerthan-life characters of L’Aigle à deux têtes in natural psychological detail, opting instead for ‘an almost heraldic psychology’ (Cocteau 1988: 126) inflected by tension and violence. She is an elegant queen with an

7

L’Assassinat du due de Guise was written by the academic Henri Lavedan and, unusually for the time, also employed professional actors including Charles Le Bargy and Gabrielle Robinne of the Comédie Française.. The photography and set design are also impressive for the period, as is the music by Camille Saint-Saëns which was written especially for the film (reputedly the first narrative film in history to have been accorded the honour).

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anarchic spirit; he is an anarchist with a royal spirit sent by Fate to kill her. Yet if Natasha is bold and possesses little trace of pudeur, Stanislas by contrast is riddled by crisis. As the spitting image of the dead King and an object of constant fascination for Félix, he faints immediately he bursts through the window in his Tyrolean Lederhosen and falls at the Queen’s feet. In the three days they spend together, during which he is nominally employed as her official reader, no rules of protocol exist between them. Casting aside her maidservant Edith de Berg (Sylvia Monfort) the Queen takes pleasure in insulting him, and he her. He becomes not just the agent of her death but death itself. She states in terms that will be developed later in Orphée: ‘Vous [Stanislas] êtes ma mort! C’est MA mort que je cache! C’est MA mort que je sauve’ (‘You are my death! It’s MY death that I’m hiding. It’s MY death that I’m saving’). Cocteau emphasises this particular moment through the repetition of montage: three successive views of the Queen’s face – from medium close-up to close-up, then to extreme close-up – that almost touch her eyes. Indeed, the use of various angles, inspired according to Cocteau by walking along the aisles of the ThéâtreHébertot and discovering new perspectives unavailable in the ‘dead angle’ of the stalls (Cocteau 1988: 70), is frequent during the dramatic moments of the film. Hence, cinematic form is used by Cocteau to accentuate dramatic form, the shots constituting acts themselves and thus exemplary of his stated aim to produce a ‘theatre of acts’ as opposed to one merely of speech or mise en scéne. L’Aigle à deux têtes conforms, however, to certain standard conventions of French quality cinema of the period with its opening out of the action by means of exterior shots and its inclusion of natural decors almost for the sake of it, notably in the entire fifteen-minute opening sequence up to and including the Queen’s arrival and procession at Krantz. Such a dispersal of dramatic intensity ran counter to Cocteau’s general wish to create a kind of collective hypnosis in the audience yet it was imposed on him by the producers of the film. The initial shots of mountains and valleys are artfully framed and their majestic height and expanse recall the sublime visions of Casper David Friedrich. Yet they serve ultimately to highlight the Queen’s wish to close herself off within her chambers; in this film, the tragic centripetal trajectory towards death is never jeopardised by the small collection of centrifugal movements. In addition, the exaggerated theatrical style and constant verbal abstractions of L’Aigle à deux têtes (e.g. Stanislas: ‘J’étais

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une idée (folie, de fou) en face d’une idee’; the Queen: ‘Vous êtes une solitude en face d’une solitude [ ... ] une idée face à une idee’) (‘I was a mad idea, a madman’s, facing an idea’/ ‘You’re à solitude facing a solitude [ ... ] an idea facing an idea’) are matched on a formal level by the film’s excessive use of high and low-angle shots as well as of overheads (in particular during the opening procession), and its frequent recourse to subjective and point-of-view shots untypical of Cocteau’s style. These include the Queen looking down at the ball from a special curtained window in her bedroom, Edith watching Stanislas read Hamlet to the Queen as she enters the library from the top of the stairs, and Félix hidden behind a statue in the corridor to spy on the Queen as she visits her shrine. As Andrea Scott has noted, this causes a sense of confusion since it is also allied to apparently unmotivated and superfluous tracking shots, for instance, the sudden forward tracking shot capturing Stanislas’s impassive face while the Queen delivers her long monologue at the beginning, followed in the next shot by the Queen pictured from behind standing directly in from of him (although she had been walking away from him in the preceding shot).8 Similarly, there is a surplus of angles and points of view during the sequence when the Comte de Foëhn visits the stables to check up on how the Queen will be travelling. In general, the camera follows closely on the heels of most of the actors’ movements, framing, unframing and then refraining them in multiple small panning shots. This visual exorbitance is matched on the soundtrack by the use of Auric’s music, notably the processional hymn which, as Scott again observes, is being used to direct the audience’s feelings and emotions and is flagrantly manipulative, much like a ‘typical’ Hollywood filmscore. By the same token, there is little evidence of Cocteau’s preferred technique of accidental synchronism’. Such stylistic overkill is aggravated by the film’s phallic propensities, such as the knife standing erect in the Queen’s back, the many statues of naked men and the Queen’s super-masculine activities (she uses her library, for example, as a firing range and circus ring in which she even trapezes). 8 See Scott 1999: 94–5. Certain other interesting claims made by Scott do not, however, bear up under scrutiny, for example, that the door of the Queen’s shrine opens up by itself in the style of La Belle et la bête (it simply draws back once the Queen has unlocked it), or that at one point, coming through the curtain on the top of the stairs after encountering Félix, Stanislas moves for six seconds in slow motion.

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The final impression of this melodrama-cum-tragedy is certainly more than ‘tragic realism’ or otherwise ‘kitsch’ as some contemporary detractors viewed L’Aigle à deux têtes (see Gilson 1969: 37). Azoury and Lalanne have proposed a new genre, ‘a Bavarian western’, due no doubt to the Queen’s dazzling horse, whip and pistol skills and the fact that one key element of a western, the siege and its suspension of time, is in full effect here: the palace is like a fort under attack both from the outside (the army under the sway of the chief of police) and from within (the hidden terrorist) (Azoury and Lalanne 2003: 62). Moreover, the film’s highly idiosyncratic nature overrides any stylistic resemblance it may appear to share, for example, with the swirling, romantic film orchestrations of Max Ophüls, a director who had himself used Feuillère in his 1940 film De Mayerling à Sarajevo where she likewise plays a countess killed by an anarchist (Cocteau’s cinematographer Matras, we note, also worked on Ophüls’s last films). Indeed, Cocteau avoids any sentimentality, cultivating instead a harsh, often cruel play of irony predicated on ritual and ceremony. As Jacques Doniol-Valcroze later argued in his attempt to rehabilitate L’Aigle à deux têtes, the film’s baroque feel – the ornamental, stuffed interior of the Queen’s room in Louis II of Bavaria style, the curve and countercurve of some of the camera movements, the hyper-dramatic performances – is fully assumed by Cocteau, making it at the very least a ‘French tragedy set to Bavarian music’ (Doniol-Valcroze 1964: 9). Cocteau was aware of the problems of L’Aigle à deux têtes and understood the public criticisms of artificiality, over-theatricality and decorativeness even if he did not agree with them. Les Parents terribles (1948), shot immediately afterwards in May and June 1948 at the Studio Francoeur and released just two months after L’Aigle à deux têtes in December 1948, was his formal response: a new type of ‘hypotheatre’ based on the art of looking in extreme close-up at the drama within. The original play from 1938 had already been a great success, the first by Cocteau made to measure for Marais. Not that it had escaped controversy. In a review of the first production in Paris at the Theatre des Ambassadeurs in November 1938, the drama critic of the rightwing newspaper Je Suis Partout, Alain Laubreaux, mounted an extremely virulent attack on the play on account of its purported immorality, specifically its unsavoury portrayal of family relations. It was subsequently banned from municipal theatres and had to transfer

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to a private theatre. When reprised in 1941 at the Théâtre du Gymnase it caused outrage in the collaborationist press and was forced off the stage (members of the Parti Populaire Francais even threw tear gas at the actors) before being banned altogether by the Nazis. Les Parents terribles was, and remains, a shocking satire against the sham world of bourgeois respectability and the abuse of innocents. The theme of incest and diseased love, which Cocteau twisted brilliantly into a black comedy of grotesque caricatures with elements of a Feydeau farce, was reflected in the queasy domestic squalor of the family’s cramped, overdressed suite of rooms. In his preface to the play, Cocteau presented his ‘familie en désordre’ in his now standard terms of order and disorder, or rather of impure order versus pure disorder, terms, of course, which were massively loaded during the period of the Revolution Nationale.9 The idea still persisted that Cocteau was an immoral decadent and corruptor of youth, and Laubreaux himself regarded the play as embodying all the worst clichés of the ‘Jewish theatre of [Henry] Bernstein’ (see Laubreaux 1939). Cocteau had always wanted to bring together Marais and the great stage actress Yvonne de Bray, who had played Gertrude in L’Eternel retour as well as the small role of the ageing Présidente in L’Aigle à deux têtes. Marais admired her almost to the point of awe. Circumstances such as de Bray’s severe alcoholism dictated that they would never perform the play together on stage, apart from a brief period in 1946 that was promptly cut short when Marais began rehearsals for the play of L‘Aigle à deux têtes. They would have to wait therefore for Cocteau’s own film adaptation which re-established the original casting: de Bray as the diabetic mother Yvonne (or Sophie) (based apparently on Marais’s obsessive mother Rosalie), Marais as her 22–year-old son Michel (or ‘Mic’) whom she loves with an unhealthy passion, Marcel Andre as the father Georges, Josette Day as Michel’s girlfriend of the same age, Madeleine, and Gabrielle Dorziat as his aunt Léo(nie) who schemes to break up the exclusive bond between mother and son. The film marked yet another collaboration with Bérard and Auric and Cocteau promoted it as the first occasion in the history of the cinematograph that a single short musical motif had comprised the soundtrack. The film was edited by Jacqueline Sadoul assisted by Raymond Leboursier. 9 For an excellent account of the Laubreaux affair and its implications, see Bach 1993.

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Cocteau formalised very clearly his reasons and aims for making the film:

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i. fixer le jeu d’artistes incomparables; ii. me promener parmi eux et les regarder en pleine figure au lieu de les voir à distance, sur une scène; iii. mettre mon œil au trou de la serrure et surprendre mes fauves avec le téléobjectif. (Cocteau 2003a: 64)10 In other words, he wanted to preserve and celebrate the theatricality of the play. However, unlike in L’Aigle à deux têtes where he had sought to make a ‘theatrical film’, he would attempt here precisely to ‘detheatricalise’ (‘déthéâtrer’) the play (Cocteau 1988: 27). How though to make a cinematic play as opposed to simply filmed theatre? This posed a major challenge for Cocteau of the kind that inspired him to discover formal solutions. He knew only too well the differences between theatre and cinema, the fact, for example, that in the cinema it is the auteur/metteur en scène who controls the actors and determines whether, as he put it, ‘la ligne brisée qu’ils doivent suivre forme le fil rouge qui traverse, en ligne droite, le drame, de bout en bout’ (Amy de la Bretèque and Caizergues 1989: 63) (‘the broken line they must follow forms the red thread which crosses in a direct line through the drama, from end to end’). Again though, how exactly can a filmmaker move beyond the fixed frame of the theatre that obliges the dramatist/producer to obtain his effects ‘en bloc’, particularly in the case of such a tight, claustrophobic play as Les Parents terribles which Cocteau himself described in a second preface as ‘un noeud de vaudeville, un mélodrame, des types qui, tout en étant d’un bloc, se contredisent’ (‘a knot of vaudeville, a melodrama, types that, whilst all of a piece, contradict each other’)? The answer would be a new Coctelian paradox: being utterly faithful to the play’s theatrical ‘mechanism’ as well as the general concept of a théâtre d’actes will allow the cinematic to reveal itself. This means respecting the order of the play scene by scene and virtually line by line. Moreover, unlike the at times self-consciously cinematic L’Aigle a deux têtes for which he had rewritten the scenario, Les Parents terribles would never venture from its 10 ‘i. to fix the performances of incomparable artists; ii. to walk among them and look directly at their bodies instead of seeing them on stage at a distance; iii. to put my eye through the keyhole and surprise my savage creatures with the tele-photo lens.’

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two-set location through the use of exterior shots and would completely shun natural light. There would be no need either for mirrors since each set of characters came with its doubles. Yvonne’s bedroom would thus retain its primary function as a kind of vestibule in a tragedy of three acts. These are set out in brief schematic form below: Act of truth and candour (in Yvonne’s bedroom).

Michel finally arrives home after being out all night, announces that he has a lover, Madeleine, and that they are to get married. Yvonne makes a terrible scene and even threatens to call the police. A vaudeville element is introduced when Madeleine is revealed as Georges’s mistress who has recently been using every excuse not to see him. Meanwhile, it is revealed that Léo is herself still in love with Georges (she was originally to have married him but suddenly changed her mind, thinking it her duty to take care of her child-like sister and brother-in-law). She will now scheme to prevent Michel’s marriage. The entire family will go to the young girl’s apartment where Georges will threaten to reveal their affair if Madeleine does not break off her engagement to Mic. Battle against this truth (in Madeleine’s studio apartment where the light is suitably trampled and diffused).

The plan is carried out and Madeleine finds herself forced to renounce Michel. Léo, however, seeing the terrible state to which Madeleine has been reduced by her forced sacrifice, is filled with regret and decides to reverse the situation. Reappearance of the light and re-establishment of Léo’s implacable order (in Yvonne’s bedroom).

Michel and Madeleine are once again in each other’s arms and, in true boulevard fashion, it seems that everything will work out for the best. Yet Yvonne now feels left out and betrayed, revealing in a final coup de théâtre that she has poisoned herself. She dies a few minutes later. Ironically, Les Parents terribles begins in a supremely theatrical way. After the opening credits where the actors’ names are once again written in Cocteau’s authorial hand, the traditional trois coups are

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sounded and a theatre curtain is raised. This is actually a painted reproduction. The next shot is not of a scene on stage but a highly cinematic shot, signalling from the start that Cocteau is working in an altogether different medium. It is a hazy, almost abstract image of a mature man (Georges) filmed sideways in extreme close-up and armed with a diver’s mask. He briefly meets the viewer’s line of vision while peering through a large lens like that of an underwater gun. The third shot frames this image from the opposite angle. He is filmed from behind when suddenly he turns round still wearing his mask and gazes suspiciously into the lens of the camera. It is as though with this strange optical instrument (one of Georges’s ‘inventions’) Cocteau were staging a concrete mise en abyme of the process of reflection, putting into question both the film as a means of visual recording and our relationship to it. Indeed, Cocteau will use the camera precisely as a lens for the viewer to scrutinise in uncomfortable microscopic detail the murky waters of this family lurching into crisis. The camera’s function is rigorously determined in the film: it doesn’t move very much yet governs almost every action of the actors due to Cocteau’s strategy of highly deliberate and angled framing. Nothing of an individual shot is erased. This technique Cocteau had discovered in the theatre where, in plays conceived as a chain of’theatre images’, he had learned to follow one ‘gag’ immediately after another as in a boxing match, leaving the public no time to recover (Cocteau: ‘si je ne gagne pas à poing, c’est à point que je gagne’) (‘if I don’t score with my direct fist, fitfully do I win’). We are plunged into a state of voyeuristic fascination, which is almost obscene in view of the intimacy created with the characters to whom we remain invisible. Our positioning as a witness is further intensified by the repeated use of off-camera voices as interlocutors. The gradual ‘naturalness’ of the situation and the close proximity of the actors performing as if instinctively soon has the effect of preserving the so-called ‘fourth wall’ between spectator and performer which, according to Cocteau, is usually broken by theatrical mise en scène. The one element that remains specifically filmic here, of course, is the editing together of the images which juxtaposes different levels and forms of the gaze and can extend or compress time. The actors may move around in stage space but the succession of extreme close-ups of their bodies – a technique specific to cinema – upsets the continuum and stability of their movements. In fact, only about thirty of the film’s

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four hundred shots are actually close-ups. The large majority are twoshots or close shots often framing two faces. Sixty-five shots have camera movement although these are often quite short panning shots and are never simply descriptive. A key example of Cocteau’s formidable efficiency of shot is the awful scene between Georges and Madeleine filmed in close-up. There is barely any camera movement during this entire sequence composed of nearly twenty-five shots where the spoken word itself assumes the status of an act. So expressive, however, are the close-up shots, in particular of eyes, that they influence totally our reception of the film in a way that is different from that of silent cinema. They oblige us both to gaze at and, as it were, ‘de-gaze’ the human body. The most audacious and affective shot of Les Parents terribles is when Michel confesses to Yvonne his love for Madeleine. He places his head against his mother’s and they both look straight into the camera which frames their faces in such a way that nothing else is visible except for his mouth and her eyes and forehead. We thus see in graphic and violent detail the visual effect on Yvonne of Michel’s murderous words which utterly contradict the harmony between mother and son that she chooses to believe in and which such a highly staged image would ideally suggest. It is as though Cocteau were stripping bare and taming his cast of sacred monsters, in particular de Bray with her huge, rasping voice of velvet and metal. Almost every framing in the film becomes like a cage to squeeze and choke his characters in a relentless closing-up of an already closed and tragic world. Form, therefore, generates emotion here, or more specifically the continuous tension between two aesthetic forms: stage drama and the cinematic frame. We are back in the land of the troubling yet compulsive hybrid which we observed in the structure and composition of Le Sang d’un poète and which achieved concrete form in Marais’s beastly human body in La Belle et la bête. We can also better appreciate the force of Cocteau’s notion of the cinema as death at work, since the 35–year-old Marais is making every effort to convince us as the young son by delivering a performance virtually identical to the one he gave on stage ten years before. As for de Bray, every movement of her ravaged face, its wrinkles and muscles, is conveyed in cruel intensity. If the relationship between Yvonne and Michel has clear echoes of that between Jocasta and Oedipus which Cocteau had already staged in La Machine infernale (1934) (like Oedipus, Michel sees nothing either of

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the pain he inflicts on his mother or of his father’s own liaison with Madeleine), here it is shorn of its grand mythological aspects. Yvonne is also fully aware of the monstrous implications of what she is doing, referring both to herself and to Michel at one point as blind people about to begin their descent. The long shot of her final exit at the end of the film is the obverse of the many close-ups in the film. She moves slowly into our field of vision and, by means of a backward tracking shot, we accompany her directly as she glides slowly away from the others in the apartment, looking beyond the camera to the dark wastes of time beyond. This beautifully understated image, an open frame, is matched by the following shot that reveals the family, and specifically Léo, crying over Yvonne’s suicide due to an insulin overdose (her second in the film; Léo had saved her at the very beginning). This is now a closed frame, completing the fixed frame a little earlier out of which Yvonne’s face had dropped bottom right as she expired, immediately to be replaced by Leo’s head moving into frame almost ruthlessly top left. However, the final backward tracking shot is slightly jolty in its movement, due to the uneven floor of the studio. It was for this reason that Cocteau invented a voice-over from the dispassionate point of view of a distant observer. He states coolly and matter-of-factly: ‘Et la roulotte continue sa route. Les romanichels ne s’arrêtent pas’ (‘And the caravan continues its journey. Gypsies don’t stop moving’). With this Cocteau as author has regained complete control.11 After his highly negative review of L’Aigle à deux têtes in Le Parisien of 29 September 1948 as a film of bad taste resembling ‘something of a useless monster’, the film critic André Bazin championed Les Parents terribles for its cinematic purity (see Bazin 1951), as did Robert Chazal who, in Cinémonde of 6 December 1948, recognised the film’s artistic perfection as the consummate work of an auteur. Writing in Le Monde of December 2 1948, Henri Magnan wrote: ‘Rien n’est gratuit:: chaque cadrage correspond à la pensée de l’auteur’ (‘Nothing is gratuitous: each framing corresponds to the author’s thinking’). What particularly impressed Bazin was the film’s unity and 11 In fact, in a brief cameo that does not exist in the original play, Cocteau’s voice was heard at the very beginning off-camera: a gentleman knocks at the door asking for a Doctor Schmidt; Georges directs him to the floor above. Hence, as elsewhere in his cinema, Cocteau’s voice-overs provide the film with a clear authorial frame.

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‘infallible continuity’ despite the high number of individual shots, for the camera never abandons its keyhole strategy and ‘quasi-obscenity of vision’. Endorsing fully the aesthetic paradox of Parents terribles, Bazin proposed that the spirit and conventions of the theatre were not only compatible with the screen but may also come to define and determine cinematographic invention. Indeed, the theatre and the cinema appeared ultimately one and the same thing. We must regard the cinematic in Les Parents terribles as essentially documentary since the viewer is rarely given, if at all, the luxury of subjective point-of-view shots or identification through shot/counter-shot formations. These were of particular fascination at the time and, we as have seen, queered the pitch of L’Aigle à deux têtes. Claude Mauriac has talked of Cocteau’s ‘frontal attack on the marvellous’ resulting in an exceptional rigour and raw realism (see Gilson 1969:162–4). If we take into full account the special nature of the film’s production, we may go even further and claim, like Claude-Jean Philippe, that Cocteau is a documentarist of the real emotions inspired by de Bray and Marais’s almost filial devotion to each other (Philippe 1989: 97). This idea is possible despite, and yet also perhaps because of, Cocteau’s insistence – another aesthetic paradox – that the film represents an imaginary painting. He remarked: ‘Les Parents terribles ne sont pas un film réaliste puisque je n’ai jamais connu aucune famille vivant de la sorte. C’est la peinture la plus imaginative qui soit’ (Cocteau 2003a: 65).12 In short, the film is a successful working through of a series of different forms and media. This complexity is mirrored in the characterisation, leading one critic, Tamara El-Hoss, to claim with some justification that Léo is the most intricate personality ever created by Cocteau. For she is the director within the film, manipulating and controlling all three triangular relationships set in play while herself occupying the various roles of victim, executioner and saviour.13 The glittering, all-round achievement of Les Parents terribles may be compared with that of Les Enfants terribles made two years later by Jean-Pierre Melville, an adaptation of Cocteau’s 1929 novel of the same name and which Cocteau collaborated on by providing the script and 12 ‘les Parents terribles is not a realist film because I’ve never known any family living like this. It’s the most imaginative painting possible.’ 13 See El-Hoss 1999. For an interesting psychoanalytic reading of the Oedipal tensions in the film, see Kruger 1999.

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dialogues. The film, which formally credits Cocteau as co-adaptor (he also played a small cameo role in the train sequence), proved as controversial in its production as in its reception due to the highly public struggle for control between Cocteau and Melville, at that stage a new and relatively untried director. Cocteau had chosen Melville precisely because he was not yet fully schooled in the rules of the industry, even granting him the rights to his novel for free. Cocteau insisted, however, on the casting of his new protégé Edouard Dermit (whose performance was subsequently panned even by those favourable to the film) and that the setting be updated to the contemporary period. As for Melville, he sought to be as faithful to the novel as possible. This required occasionally leaving the hothouse interior of the incestuous bedroom (shot mainly in his own apartment) to venture outside for location shooting (only one studio was used, the Théâtre Pigalle in Paris). Cocteau, who at the time was still involved in the post-production for Orphée, himself filmed the brief winter seaside shots at Montmorency when Melville fell ill. (According to Melville, Cocteau even secretly hoped that he would die so that he (Cocteau) could complete the film.) These shots – eight in all – are perhaps the least interesting images of the film and serve mainly as a temporary distraction from the central drama. Unlike in Les Parents terribles there is much dynamic use of camera movement, including some almost Wellesian tracking shots, frequent recourse to unusual angles, notably overhead shots, and sustained sequences of rhythmic editing. There is also a continual tension and even friction between sound and image due to the excessive number of voice-overs by Cocteau who often merely underlines or duplicates what is shown. Such interventions overcompensate for his loss of authority over the film and they reflect its other formal extremes: the over-literal and descriptive dream sequence filmed in slow motion, the repeated bursts of baroque music, and the rather obvious signs of theatricality (e.g. a real curtain rising over the bedroom at the start, the set within a set of Paul’s interior tent). Another rather loose strand for this post-war film is the explicit reference to anti-Semitism during the brief scene with the Jewish American Michael who conveniently dies after quickly marrying Elisabeth, thus leaving her a mansion and fortune. For these different reasons, Les Enfants terribles would appear to have dispersed Cocteau’s original text, yet Melville is generally successful in transforming Cocteau’s novelistic space into a cinematic

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one. The snowball fight in particular, which had already featured in Cocteau’s own Le Sang d’un poète, is a perfectly accomplished narrative sequence (see Baron Turk 1980 for a fine account). The film also offers a disturbing exploration of incest and androgyny even though the homosexual undertones of the original novel, specifically the real and fantasised relationship between Paul and Dargelos, are scaled down: here Paul (Dermit) loves a girl, Agathe, who simply reminds him of Dargelos (played by the same actress Renée Cosima), and the last scene of Elisabeth (Nicole Stéphane) shooting herself replaces that of the novel which ended with Paul enjoying one last vision of Dargelos.14 Les Enfants terribles is perhaps most interesting now for the way it forecasts the Nouvelle Vague due to its absence of major funding, its use of real settings and its avoidance of major stars. On a formal level, too, the clear images of Henri Decae, sometimes extremely flat in exterior scenes due to the deployment of natural light and otherwise devoid of any expressionist nuance or shadow, anticipated his subsequent photography for Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol and in particular François Truffaut who later praised Les Enfants terribles as a rare collaboration between two artists working together like Bach and Vivaldi (the two composers Melville had chosen for the film). Truffaut even proposed the film as a new model of literary adaptation since it resisted the temptation to find cinematic equivalences for a literary text or, worse still, suppress the original altogether in order to conform to the stylistic conventions of the much decried cinéma de qualité.15

La Villa Santo-Sospir/Le Testament d’Orphée We turn now to the third major formal tendency of Cocteau’s cinema, documentary, which is revealed in its most extreme form in La Villa Santo-Sospir (1951). This little-known and rarely seen 36-minute short, shot in 16 mm over the course of a week in August 1951, is an avowedly amateur work and was born in part out of Cocteau’s disappointment with the world of professional cinema after the relative commercial failure of Orphée. His only assistant on the production was Frédéric 14 See Vincendeau 2003, 29–38, for an excellent analysis of the film, focusing in particular on its various aspects of androgyny and misogyny. 15 See Truffaut 1980: 223. Truffaut could not ignore, however, the ‘gravité blafarde’ (‘wan seriousness’) of Dermit.

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Rossif. With its homestyle rawness, its free play of the machine and the hyper-theatricality of Cocteau’s own performance (this is the first film to feature Cocteau as ‘Cocteau’), it pushes the limits of taste and decency, as Cocteau himself later admitted: ‘Ce film manqué (film d’amateur) a déjà pris de la force dans l’ombre. L’y conserver le plus longtemps possible. Un jour il sera un objet extrêmement curieux. Aujourd’hui il ne peut être qu’une indiscrétion’ (Amy de la Bretèque and Caizergues 1989: 80). 16 The Rockefeller Institute offered two million francs for the film if Cocteau removed the final segment on Picasso and a statement about Allied bombing. He declined. The tone of La Villa Santo-Sospir appears deceptively light, its bright, summer feel enhanced by the fresh, compliant faces of Dermit and Francine Weisweiller (the cousin of Nicole Stéphane). It takes place at Weisweiller’s villa situated in the hills above Saint-Jean-CapFerrat and Villefranche-sur-mer, the walls of which Cocteau had painted and ‘tatooed’ out of gratitude for being a free guest there since May 1950. Yet despite the promise of its descriptive title, the film elicits no biographical secrets or intimate confessions from Cocteau, either about himself or indeed about Dermit and Weiswellier. It focuses rather on his work in drawing, painting and tapestry, although even here we never actually gain a glimpse of his working methods, simply the works once complete. (Compare this deliberate omission with later films of the period dealing with painters, for example, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Mystére Picasso (1956), much admired by Cocteau, and Jean Grémillon’s André Masson ou les quatre éléments (1959)). With his teasing voice-over which delays the appearance of certain details and promises ever more images, Cocteau takes us on a tour of the villa which he has endowed with drawings and representations of Narcissus, Holofernes, Ulysses, sailors, the fishermen of Villefranche-sur-mer, Dionysus, Orpheus, Christ, Satan, etc. He also pictures himself in the garden campily mounted on life-size sculptures of animals. La Villa Santo-Sospir is, however, most fundamentally an experiment in the unusual Kodachrome colour process of centre-type whereby a positive print is made from what is already positive, a process that, according to Cocteau, ‘disturbs’ (‘perturbe’) colours at will. Cocteau is clearly not 16 This failed (amateur) film has already acquired force through being kept in the shadow. Keep it there for as long as possible. One day it will be an extremely curious object. Today it can only be an indiscretion.’

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over happy with some of the unnatural colours thus produced, those, for example, of his worn and mottled hands pictured in graphic closeup. As Azoury and Lalanne have pointed out, Cocteau’s discourse here on the dematerialising effects of colour film also conforms to the orthodox views of the period which still regarded black and white as more realistic and better suited for films of social reality and more overtly documentary themes (Azoury and Lalanne 2003: 88). Cocteau presents himself to the interpellated viewer (‘vous’) as a willing hostage to cinematic fortune (‘it is what the chemical baths wish, not me!’), and recommends that we step back from certain images in order to discern the empty spaces around the ‘significant lines’. Taking as an example his own astonishing tapestry of the slaying of Holofernes, which emphasises less the Judith and Holofernes drama than the swarthy bodies of the sleeping guardsmen rolled up over themselves, Cocteau states simply that to throw light in front of a painted image using Kodachrome film produces the abnormal effect of painted glass lit from behind. Although Cocteau talks at length, even verbosely, about technical forms and processes in La Villa Santo-Sospir, he never acknowledges the pervasive use of reverse-motion photography in the film which features for the first time in his work entire, uninterrupted sequences of reverse motion. These long takes provide immediate visions of the marvellous reversing the process of time, for instance, a flower slowly coming into life by acquiring petals. To return to La Belle et la bête, this is again creation by means of destruction: Cocteau films himself unpeeling the flower while the film in the camera rotates backwards. This is not a trick, therefore, nor a special effect. The act of unpeeling is a real event recorded by the camera but in reverse before being projected. While the terms of reverse-motion photography as a process of metamorphosis and transfiguration are made far more accessible and tangible here than in La Belle et la bête, nevertheless Cocteau does not thematise the process explicitly. Instead, it becomes an object of pure play, although as ever with Cocteau this is serious play. The intense and restless skirting with powerlessness which we witnessed already in Le Sang d’un poète takes on a more far-reaching form here, since it is his primarily his own body that Cocteau submits to the gaping voids and reversals of reversemotion photography. He films himself engaged in a range of bizarre activities: playing boules with and almost ‘on to’ and ‘over’ himself, again and again; ‘peeling back together’ petals of flowers; waiting to receive

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fragments of pottery that fly up into his hand; sketching forms by means of a rag, and so on. As in other Cocteau films, there are moments when it is not clear whether we are experiencing forward or reverse motion: his own arm is pictured dropping down slowly in consecutive shots (but is it 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, notably the petal restoration scene. In fact, the use of reverse-motion photography has now become endemic to Cocteau’s work with almost a twofold increase in special effects (whether derived mechanically or through mise en scène) since Orphée. 17 Whole sequences of reverse motion in Le Testament pass off without comment as if they were completely natural: a photograph of Cégeste materialising in the flames of a fire and, once rolled up, leaping into a gypsy woman’s hands; broken pieces of the same photograph being thrown into the sea out of which Cégeste immediately springs, landing on to a cliff to present the Poet with a hibiscus flower; the same flower later being reconstituted by the Poet after he has torn it apart, and so on. In some cases, the events of reverse action are not even mentioned at all in the published screenplay, for example, Cégeste’s jerky placing of a death mask on to the Poet’s face with the word ‘Obéissez!’ (Obey!’) after the mask has suddenly risen from the ground into his hands. As with La Villa Santo-Sospir, there are moments of real confusion when it is no longer clear whether filmic time is going forwards (the time of projection?) or backwards (the time of shooting?). Even speech is reversed at one point (as in the case of Cégeste’s words of accusation to the Poet).18

17 See Rolot and Ramirez 1992 for a full breakdown of the different types of special effects in Le Testament, including twenty cases of appearance/disappearance through fade-in and fade-out, ten instances of reverse-motion photography and six sequences of slow motion. 18 ‘Vous êtes-vous demandé ce qui m’arriverait après l’arrestation de Heurtebise et de la Princesse. Avez-vous pensé une minute que vous me laissiez seul et où?’ (‘Have you ever wondered what would happen to me after Heurtebise and the Princess were arrested? Did you stop to think that you were leaving me alone and where?’).

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Such apparently indiscriminate use of the device has provoked more than one critic to declare now an empty shell in Cocteau’s work, an embarrassing personal tic or worse, pure trickery à la Méliès, as when Cocteau as the Poet records his sudden upright resurrection as the Poet following his ‘death’. As we shall see, however, these cinematic events are intrinsically linked to the themes of Le Testament, in particular the relativity and reversibility of time and its connection with space, resurrection and metamorphosis, ageing and the passage between life and death. Le Testament d’Orphée ou Ne me demandez pas pourquoi was shot in 35 mm between September and October 1959 at the Studios de la Victorine in Nice and Franstudio in Paris, with exterior shots filmed at the Villa Santo-Sospir, Villefranche and Baux-de-Provence. It was an exceptionally fast and efficient shoot because Cocteau had planned everything meticulously in advance. The project featured yet again the musical collaboration of Auric, the technical assistance of Claude Pinoteau (the same position he held on Les Enfants terribles), cinematography by Roland Pontoiseau (with cameraman Raichi), sets by Pierre Guffroy, costumes and sculptures by Janine Janet, sound by Pierre Bertrand and René Sarrazin and editing by Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte. The set photographer was Luden Clergue who later produced an album of ravishing images of the shoot. Since Cocteau was unable to find traditional producers, the film was financed by a range of individuals including the ever-bold producer Jean Thullier of Les Editions Cinégraphiques/Les Films du Carrosse, Francine Weisweiller, Yul Brynner, Louise de Vilmorin (the partner of André Malraux) and François Truffaut who donated the international profits of Les 400 coups. As Cocteau’s first speech in the film makes explicit – a voice-over where he defines the nature and function of film (about which more shortly) – Le Testament offers ‘the legacy of a poet to the successive groups of people who have always supported him’. The excellently detailed account of the shoot of the film by Roger Pillaudin, Jean Cocteau tourne son dernier film (1960), which also features some striking original drawings by Cocteau, attests to the spirit of friendship and gratitude that reigned over the project. It also captures again Cocteau’s special investment in chance and the serendipity of the unforeseen. In one case, the sound of an aircraft passing overhead during the filming of the Minerva scene, Cocteau immediately added this to the soundtrack to form a tragic gag: Minerva throws her lance into the

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Poet’s back to the sound of a plane taking off, provoking the most often cited lines of the film, ‘Quelle horreur! Quelle quelle horreur! Quelle horreur!’ (‘How horrible! How, how horrible! How horrible!’). For the first time in one of his own feature films, Cocteau takes centre stage as the Poet and leads us through a virtual inventory of his life’s work, a vast back catalogue that includes such familiar characters and themes as Orpheus, Minerva, the Sphinx, Anubis (Egyptian god of the dead represented as a black jackal or dog), Antigone, Tristan and Isolde, Tiresias (the tall Idol from whose mouth spring forth oracular ribbons), man-horses (inverted forms of a Centaur who try to tempt Orpheus away from his vocation as poet), flowers (specifically the hibiscus) and false doubles (now Cocteau’s own whom he passes in the rue Obscure and who is presented as a scapegoat for attacks by the public and critics).19 No literal mirrors feature in the film since the different elements listed all serve as figurative mirrors of Cocteau’s life and corpus. Le Testament is, in fact, an artistic self-portrait, or more specifically a portrait of the artist as Orpheus. It proceeds in the barest linear fashion as a series of sketches and extended scenes during which Cocteau is continually on the move ‘like a sleepwalker’ passing in and out of slow motion. We follow him through direct and indirect echoes of most of his films, in particular Le Sang d’un poète and Orphée, accompanied by phrases culled from his writings and poetry, references to his other work in the plastic arts (painting, tapestry, etc.) and to dramatic situations already well rehearsed, and a roll-call of his key actors and companions: Dermit as Cégeste (and briefly at the end as the Sphinx), Marais as the blinded Orpheus supported by Antigone (Brigitte Morissan) whom the Poet simply passes by in the final moments, Françine Weisweiller as the distracted Lady, and Maria Casarés and François Périer (the Princess and Heurtebise from Orphée) as the Judges. In fact, many of the aesthetic statements made in Le Testament are exact repetitions of those formulated by Cocteau in his preface to the screenplay of Le Sang d’un poète, and the death/resurrection scene played out in front of the group of gypsies and the film’s ‘stars’ positioned as witnesses (Picasso, Lucia Bosé, Luis-Miguel Dominguin, Charles Aznavour, Serge Lifar, etc) recalls directly the final stages of Le 19 Cocteau had already met his filmic double in the 1958 short Le Musée Grévin by Jacques Demy and Jean Masson where, in one sequence, he improvises and acts out a dialogue with his wax double from the Musée Grévin in Paris.

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Sang d’un poète, although here there is no cruel applause from groups assembled in theatreboxes but rather individual expressions of awe and fascination. Stylistically, too, we have returned to the ideogrammatic form of Cocteau’s first film, in the sense that each shot and each image demarcates itself from the others by imposing its own particular signification. Structurally, the film evolves through different styles and genres: the opening short and fanciful science fiction episode with the Professor (Henri Crémieux) where, like a Goldoni farce, the Poet is lost in ‘space-time’; the imaginary television show with the presenter (Maître Henri Torrés) and the young girl (Michèle Comte) who has to define who Cocteau is (he plays a ‘violon dingue’ (‘crazy violin’), she says, as opposed to the correct ‘violon d’Ingres’ (‘hobby’)); the philosophical comedy of the mock celestial court, a theatrical tour de force where the Poet is accused of being both innocent and a poet (he is given the maximum sentence: life); the camp whimsy of the Anubis interlude where two boys in costume prance around the garden, hips linked together in doggy fashion, and an effeminate Maître d’ (Philippe) feigns deep offence at the aspersions cast by the distracted Lady; the Poet’s tragic encounter with Minerva and the solemn ceremonial of his death and resurrection, followed ultimately by his own abduction by Cégeste when they both dissolve into the rocks (a scene of rapture that rewrites the end of Orphée as well as that of Le Sang d’un poète which concluded with the bull as Europe being led away). Le Testament is an extraordinary artistic testament and act of poetic will, the first of its kind in the history of cinema and equipped with a clear function: to bequeath a final self-image to posterity by which Cocteau will always be remembered. To be sure, in view of the unique status he has granted cinema, Cocteau could not have completed this task in any other medium. Accordingly, the film starts and continues as a reflexion by cinema on itself, which is always the case when Cocteau’s cinema is operating at full capacity. His voice-over begins: ‘Le privilége du cinématographe c’est qu’il permet à un grand nombre de personnes de réver ensemble le même rêve et de nous montrer, en outre, avec la rigueur du réalisme, les phantasmes de l’irréalité’.20 The film thus corresponds to the other sense of the term 20

‘The privilege of the cinematograph is to allow a large number of people to dream the same dream together, and to show us, moreover, the spectres of unreality with the rigour of realism

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‘testament’: a statement of belief or credo. Yet typically Cocteau has already problematised the notion of finality in his most adventurous deployment yet of the opening sequence. The initial images, before the title or any of the credits appear, are excerpted from the end of Orphée (although not the very last): Dermit rises from the ground and watches the Princess and Heurtebise as they head off into the distance escorted by the police towards their punishment. By starting where Orphée left off, Le Testament is suggesting that what we will see is of the nature of a miracle: this is Cocteau’s belated ‘come-back’ after an absence of ten years from commercial cinema. Superimposed over these images, however, is a different soundtrack from the original: a sequence of mildly suspenseful music that would complement, in contrast to Orphée, a reasonably light detective mystery. Cocteau is indicating with this ironic gesture not only that as author he can re-edit his own corpus as he chooses, but also that this film will be among other things a concerted experimentation with sound. The use and range of sound and music in Le Testament is indeed remarkable: from the obvious set sequences of Gluck, Handel, Wagner (Tristram’s Horn) and Bach (a minuet and badinerie) arranged by Jacques Métehen, to incidental music with cymbals and drums played by Auric (e.g. the Procession of Seville), gypsy music including a lamento to aid the Poet’s passage to the next world, a burst of jazz, whistlings of all kinds, and, immediately following his resurrection, the extended, deafening sound of a tuningfork (the note A) that draws the Poet forward and dictates his movements. The film is like a symphonic fresco that also depends for its effect on the potency and pathos of silence. But the opening images of Le Testament also indicate the film’s status as an account of artistic responsibility, a theme that was already present in Le Sang d’un poète but which is made far more explicit here due to Cégeste who later holds the Poet to account for abandoning him in the Zone of Orphée. The theme assumes an additional personal charge because Dermit the ‘actor’ was effectively created by Cocteau, a fact alluded to when Cégeste first meets the Poet in the hyper-real gleam of dusk and responds to the Poet’s surprise (‘Cégeste!’) with ‘C’est toi qui m’as nommé’ (‘It’s you who named me’), a blatant use of tutoiement with Racinian overtones (compare Phèdre’s line to Œnone in Phèdre: ‘C’est toi qui l’as nommé’). (Later, during the mock-trial scene, ‘Cégeste’ is described by Heurtebise as the name of a Sicilian temple and claimed by the Poet to be a pseudonym rather than nick-

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name.) Yet whereas in Orphée Cégeste/Dermit was both a powerless young poet manipulated by the Princess and a mute vehicle for poetic aphorisms transmitted on the car radio and spoken by Cocteau, here he is a fully active and knowing subject who will guide the Poet, like Virgil with Dante, through the quarries and caverns of the Val d’Enfer (the spot where Dante allegedly wrote Vita Nova). It is no accident, therefore, that the first image of the film is of Dermit/Cégeste standing up, reactivated after a decade and ready to assume a role of power he could never dare to occupy in Orphée where he was sacrificed to the glory of Orphée. It could even be argued that J(acques) C(égeste) is the real double of J(ean) C(octeau) the Poet in Le Testament. After all, as Cocteau’s ‘adopted son’ (a fact directly mentioned in the film), Dermit will serve after his death as his spokesman and legal representative. It is not simply that Cégeste quotes back lines from Orphée to the Poet, some that were not even originally his own (e.g. ‘Vous cherchez trop à comprendre’), but also that he now acts on his terms, even if his aims remain mysterious (‘[ ... ] pour atteindre mon but, je dois vous guider ou plutôt vous suivre à travers des épreuves inévitables au bout desquelles j’obtiendrai seulement ce que je veux’) (‘In order to achieve my goal, I must guide you, or rather follow you through unavoidable trials, only at the end of which will I obtain what I want’). Throughout the film Cégeste is constantly demanding that the Poet prove his mastery and act like a professor (‘Mettez votre nuit en plein jour. On verra bien celui qui donne les ordres et celui qui les exécute’) (‘Turn your night into full day. Then we’ll see who is giving the orders and who is carrying them out’). He will also address the Poet in familiar Coctelian terms, as, for example, when he advises: ‘Ne vous obstinez pas, un peintre fait toujours son propre portrait. Cette fleur, vous n’arriverez jamais á la peindre’ (‘Don’t try any more, a painter always paints his own portrait. You’ll never succeed in painting that flower’). He somehow knows the rhythms of the Poet’s destiny yet never reveals the source of his knowledge (‘Ce rite relève d’un cérémonial sur lequel je n’ai pas le droit de m’étendre’) (‘That rite is part of a ceremony which I do not have the right to enlarge upon’). Moreover, Cégeste possesses his own powers of resurrection and metamorphosis, turning an orchid into a skull in a macabre masquerade whereby he comes to assume the figure of death. Ultimately he remains on the side of the Poet even though he abandons him in the bowels of the Val d’Enfer by gently engineering his own dissolve and fading out of the image to become ‘translucid’.

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He returns at the end to whisk the Poet away as if ‘crucifying’ him on the rocks, declaring: ‘La terre après tout n’est pas votre patrie’ (‘After all, this earth is not your country’) (a phrase, we note, that first made its first appearance in a slightly altered form in Cocteau’s war-time diary). Le Testament, where the aesthetic, subjective and objective are all inextricably linked, is a confessional work of a completely radical kind. In the opening voice-over, Cocteau emphasises the stakes of the project: ‘Mon film n’est pas autre chose qu’une séance de strip-tease, consistant à ôter peu à peu mon corps et à montrer mon âme toute nue’ (‘My film is nothing other than a striptease show, consisting of removing my body bit by bit and revealing my soul quite naked’). Here, and in the many interviews and paratextual documents relating to Le Testament (even more than usual for Cocteau), the key issue for Cocteau is authenticity: this film which has ‘neither head nor tail but a soul’ (Pillaudin 1960: 89) will offer a glimpse of his soul, or ‘transcendent reality’ (Cocteau 1988: 159). This demonstrates yet again Cocteau’s absolute belief in film as a means of truth and revelation, yet now the medium operates at an even higher level: not only will it show the invisible but it will also allow him to ‘live the work’ (Pillaudin 1960: 9). Here is how Cocteau puts it in one of his most eloquent analyses of his own cinema: Le Testament n’est autre qu’une tentative d’auto-portrait, auto-portrait qui s’attache à la ressemblance profonde et néglige cette ressemblance extérieure qui nous documente fort mal sur un artiste qu’on nous montre dans l’exercice de ses habitudes. Dans ce film j’ai inventé une suite d’actes imaginaires qui s’enchaînent selon le mécanisme du rêve et répondent à ce realisme irréel, à ce plus vrai que le vrai, qui seront un jour le signe de notre époque. Parfois même, et par pudeur, je me caricature, car je n’ignore pas le danger de ce strip-tease qui consiste à quitter peu à peu son corps et à montrer son ame toute nue. Bref ma présence risque de faire double emploi avec un ouvrage qui me retourne à l’envers comme un gant et qui, s’il intrigue les uns, bouleverse les autres. (Amy de la Bretèque and Caizergues 1989: 86)21

21 ‘Le Testament is nothing other than an attempt at a self-portrait, a self-portrait concerned with profound likeness and which neglects that exterior likeness which informs us so badly about an artist shown going about his habits. In this film I invented a series of imaginary acts that are linked according to the mechanism of dreams and answer to that unreal realism, that truer than the truth, which will one day be the sign of our times. Sometimes even, and out of modesty, I caricature

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In his insistence on the fundamental truth of Le Testament, Cocteau confirms what we observed in the case of Le Sang d’un poète: that a film may be composed according to the mechanism and logic of dreams and still not actually be the description of a dream – a crucial difference. Moreover, as we have seen, Cocteau states from the outset his commitment to the exactitude of realism.22 And later, during the trial, he asserts: ‘Un film permet de donner l’apparence de la réalité á l’irréel’ (‘A film allows one to give a semblance of reality to unreality’). Yet Cocteau is so identified with the medium in Le Testament that his body becomes also the body of the film itself: it is turned inside out and his soul revealed precisely because Cocteau submits himself physically to reverse-motion photography (‘un ouvrage qui me retourne à l’envers comme un gant’). Which is to say, metaphor has become reality. So profound and risky is this process for Cocteau that he must at times draw back, almost for survival’s sake, and resort to self-caricature and levity. This idea already figures, of course, in the notion of ‘strip-tease’ and it accounts for other statements by Cocteau about Le Testament such as: ‘Ce film sera une espèce d’ombre chinoise de ma vie’ (Pillaudin 1960: 133) (‘This film will be a kind of shadow puppet of my life’), which highlights the performative nature of Cocteau’s project. It also helps to explain the film’s provocative subtitle, Ne me demandez pas pourquoi (Don’t ask me why), which might otherwise appear simply an evasive and coy phrase from Cocteau, a virtual artistic escape clause. The strategic mood of serious play in Le Testament is immediately established by the first new image: a profile of Orpheus in chalk in the myself, for I am fully aware of the danger of this strip-tease which consists in leaving one’s body little by little and showing one’s soul quite naked. In short, my presence risks doubling up with a work that turns me over and inside out like a glove and which, while it intrigues some, bewilders others.’ 22 Cocteau also expressed this idea in the following categorical terms: ‘Dans Le Testament d’Orphée, les événements s’enchainent comme dans le sommeil, où nos habitudes ne contrôlent plus les forces qui nous habitent et cette logique de l’inconscient, étrangère à la raison. Un rêve est rigoureusement fou, rigoureusement absurde, rigoureusement magnifique, rigoureusement atroce. Mais jamais une part de nous ne le juge’ (Cocteau 1988: 141) (‘In Le Testament d’Orphée, events are linked together as in sleep, where our habits no longer control the forces inhabiting us or that logic of the unconscious, a stranger to reason. A dream is rigorously mad, rigorously absurd, rigorously magnificent, rigorously atrocious. But never does a part of us judge it’).

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act of drawing itself on slate line by line (Cocteau’s hand was visible in the preceding shot where he wrote the title of the film). This is then followed by a shot of ‘smoke’ slowly ‘dissolving’ and curling back towards the point of a knife where it forms into a ‘soap bubble’. At least this is how Cocteau presents in the screenplay the shot of a large bubble being pricked in slow and reverse motion, thereby emphasising the transformation between different substances and forms of being. The same image will be played in forward motion right at the end and thus provide a closing frame for the film which operates between two kinds of motion. In terms of the corpus as a whole, the beginning of Le Testament reworks both that of Le Sang d’un poète and of La Belle et la bête which put the initial stress on destruction (the suspended time of the chimney’s fall in the first, the erasure of writing in the second), even if we suspect by now that the passage from smoke to bubble, i.e. from formlessness to form, will eventually be reversed in ‘real’ time. As for the smoke, it will linger like mist in the interludes between the sequences and sketches, thus conferring a strange, oneiric atmosphere on the film and generating the ether out of which Cocteau will materialise, dematerialise and rematerialise within the image through cinematic dissolves virtually at whim. The all too evident narcissism and self-indulgence of such moments may, in the light of what we have just established, be viewed more as a personal counter-response to a profound state of being than as a primary motivation, and it would confirm Gilbert Adair’s astute opinion of Le Testament as ‘less a film than a man transformed into a film, a uniquely Protean projection and dispersal of self-hood’ (Adair 2004:13).

Acts, space and time Cocteau never went so far as to call Le Testament a documentary of the soul, even though the operative verb at the beginning of the large extract about the self-portrait cited above is ‘documenter’. In fact, he had originally conceived the film as a documentary on his own cinema, the third tranche of a larger project that would have addressed first his decorative work for the chapel at Villefranche, then his work for the registry office at Menton. Documentary is, however, the term that best corresponds to the film’s formal methods and techniques as we have defined them in his other work. For example, with its series of always

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just missed or failed encounters, notably the delayed exchange of glances between the Poet and the man-horse on the hill pass, no shot/counter-shot formations are ever possible any more than point-ofview or subjective shots. Indeed, these are all studiously avoided.23 Much of the film appears to be quasi-reportage, in particular the final scenes where Cocteau’s weak, emaciated body moves through the caves filmed by a mobile camera in the ready style of the Nouvelle Vague. The documentary aspect of Le Testament is given further substance by the fact that the contemporary real is always insisted upon: this is the filmmaker and poet Jean Cocteau talking about cinema; this is a photograph of Cégeste from his film Orphée; this is his adopted son Edouard Dermit who is also a painter; it is 1959 and Cocteau is now 70; these are Cocteau’s films and characters; these are Cocteau’s paintings and tapestries; this is the Chapelle de Saint Pierre which he painted in 1957; this is the Saint Jean lighthouse and the rue Obscure; this really is Picasso and Serge Lifar, and so on. As Cégeste says amusingly when he first meets the Poet: ‘Cette fois, ce n’est plus un film. C’est la vie’ (‘This time it’s no longer a film, it’s life’). This, of course, exemplifies the other meaning of ‘testament’ as something that serves as tangible proof or evidence, i.e. a testament to something. Already in the two elements of the film’s title Le Testament d’Orphée we grasp the vital Coctelian mix of reality (film as testament to the real) and fiction (the Orpheus myth). It is perhaps for this reason among others that Jacques Rivette considered Cocteau to have reinvented the documentary form with Le Testament (see Gilson 1969:164–5). Moreover, bathed in a crisp, spectral light that heightens contrast, much like the cinematography of La Belle et la bête, the film prioritises the immediate sensory meaning of the object over any symbolic value it may possess. Cégeste emphasises the fleshy materiality of the hibiscus – ‘cette fleur est faite de votre sang, épouse les syncopes de votre destin’ (‘This flower is made of your blood and married to the syncopes of your destiny’) – and the flower acquires further texture and intensity when, like the Poet’s blood, it suddenly and very briefly glows bright red. The effect of this 23

Except for one extended moment when it becomes an object of pure play. I am referring to the sequence of the Poet waiting inside the empty caves to meet the court-usher (Brynner), which develops into a parody of the shot/counter-shot formation. We shall consider the particular erotic implications of this strange scene in Chapter 6.

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flooding of the object in colour, unique in Cocteau’s feature films, is strangely erotic, like the noisy gushing of blood from the schoolboy’s mouth in Le Sang d’un poète, and draws us back again to the highly suggestive term ‘testament’ and its possible link with ‘testis’ and ‘testicle’. The resemblance between testimony, testify, testis, and testicle shows an etymological relationship (the Latin testis originally meant ‘witness’, and etymologically means ‘third (person) standing by’), although linguists are still not agreed precisely on how English testis came to have its current meaning.24 (We shall explore in depth in Chapter 6 the status of highly phallic objects like the hibiscus stamen in Cocteau’s work, and their ambivalent transformation through subjection to different kinds of movement, particularly reverse motion.) The ultimate proof of the real in Le Testament lies, however, in the film’s recording and projection of acts. ‘Un film ressuscite les actes morts’ (‘A film revives dead acts’), the Poet declares when asked to define film. This resurrectional and ‘phoenixological’ capacity, which allows a film ‘revivre à chaqué séance des épisodes qu’il ne connaissait pas la veille’ (Cocteau 1995: 1326) (‘relive at every showing episodes it was not aware of the day before’), applies most obviously to those graphic moments of reverse-motion photography such as the ‘magical task’ of resurrecting a dead flower, moments when we are shown what could not actually be viewed during the shooting. That is to say, when we are made privy to the invisible within the real. This is realism at its most profound and paradoxical. Yet the regenerative capacity of film applies to all cinematic acts and movements simply by virtue of their having been recorded and then projected. This affords potentially every 24 The Random House Dictionary explains that the te-part of testis comes from an older tri-, a combining form of the word for ‘three’, and that –stis is a noun derived from the Indo-European root st- meaning ‘stand’. How this also came to refer to the body part(s) is disputed. An old theory has it that the Romans placed their right hands on their testicles and swore by them before giving testimony in court. Another theory says that the sense of testicle in Latin testis is due to a calque, or loan translation, from Greek. The Greek noun parastatēs means ‘defender (in law), supporter’ (para- ‘by, alongside’, as in paramilitary and states from histanai, ‘to stand’). In the dual number, used in many languages for naturally occurring, contrasting or complementary pairs such as hands, eyes and ears, parastatēs had the technical medical sense ‘testicles’, that is ‘two glands side by side’. The Romans simply took this sense of parastatēs and added it to testis, the Latin word for legal supporter, witness.

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action equivalent status and relies on the goodwill of professional actors to, as Cocteau expresses it, put to one side any ‘theatrical science’ they have acquired and, like him and the rest of his untrained cast, become merely ‘des gens à qui des choses arrivent’ (Cocteau 1995: 1326) (‘people to whom things happen’). Dermit exemplifies this principle. He could not be more physically active in Le Testament since he did all his own stunts, including jumping into the sea backwards for the benefit of reverse-motion photography. We note, too, the phonetic resonance of Cégeste’s name, i.e. ‘ses gestes’, ‘his acts/deeds’. The fact that Dermit cannot really act and says some of his lines in Le Testament as though he were reading from an autocue ensures that the necessary duality of actor and role is never lost. The act in its purest form is Cocteau’s ultimate aim here, and he advances in a postscript to his written preface to Le Testament that the film was ‘la première tentative de transmutation du verbe en actes, d’une organisation d’actes à la place de l’organisation des mots d’un poème, une syntaxe des images au lieu d’une histoire accompagnée de paroles’ (Cocteau 1995:1322) (‘the first attempt at transmuting words into acts, at organising acts instead of organising the words of a poem, at a syntax of images instead of a story accompanied by words’). Here is another account by Cocteau of his primary intentions for Le Testament: ‘Dans Le Testament d’Orphée j’ai voulu que les événements que je montre se suffisent à eux-mêmes et n’exigent pas une culture ou une connaissance du passé. Le choc doit en être direct et surprendre comme n’importe quel spectacle quotidien de la rue’.25 In other words, it is the act in its total presence as a sign of the real and le merveilleux direct that is essential, not the particular interpretation(s) that could be made of it, a direct warning yet again to critics by Cocteau not to search for underlying symbols (Cocteau spoke also of Le Testament as ‘a machine to fabricate meanings’ (Cocteau 1988:141) (my emphasis)). Cocteau pushes le merveilleux direct to a still greater level in Le Testament, however, for the film unfolds like a continuous television show played out both on the giant set of the Studios de la Victorine and in the caves of Baux-de-Provence which comprise, in the words of the screenplay, ‘monumental platforms’. The nakedness that Cocteau 25 ‘In Le Testament d’Orphée I wanted the events that I show to be sufficient on their own and not require culture or knowledge of the past. Their shock must be direct and provoke surprise like any daily spectacle on the street.’

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speaks of at the start of the film in terms of a personal striptease is perhaps nothing less than the vivid rawness of the black and white images shot here. In addition, as the film critic Jean-Paul Fargier has proposed, the use of reverse-motion photography in Le Testament may constitute a deliberate wish on Cocteau’s part to do what only television could then accomplish, i.e. perform an instant replay (see Fargier 1992). Of course, Cocteau never worked directly in television (although he sometimes appeared on it), yet by deliberately moving against the tide of commercial cinema which turned to colour and cinemascope in the 1950s to counteract the increasing popularity of television, he is ultimately coming down on the side of the small screen, then still only black and white. Le Testament could be viewed, in fact, as Cocteau’s dream of an ideal television, reinventing the medium as a laboratory and machine for experimentation in order to create his own programme based on his notion of ‘space-time’ (‘l’espace-temps’), a term used by Cocteau in Le Testament for the first time and rich in scientific promise. As such, Le Testament can be contrasted with other film testaments that carry more ambivalent associations with television, for example, Jean Renoir’s contemporaneous television film, Le Testament du docteur Cordelier (1959), a free adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde that employed five cameras and other television production techniques, and Fritz Lang’s The 1000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960), the final part of his Dr. Mabuse series begun in 1932 with The Last Will of Dr Mabuse and where he addressed explicitly the dangers of television (the mastermind inhabits a space controlled by television monitors) (see Azoury and Lalanne 2003: 97). Yet what exactly is meant by ‘space-time’? For Cocteau, time and space were really one and the same, and it is only our human laws that separate them. In a chapter of his Journal d’un Inconnu (1952) entitled ‘Des Distances’, Cocteau had talked approvingly of Einstein’s attack on the standard organisation of space, initially believed to be immutable and eternal, and on the metaphysical truth of chronological time. The entire early episode with the Professor in Le Testament where the Poet is lost in ‘cet épouvantable capharnaüm de l’espace-temps” (‘this frightful entanglement of space-time’) is designed to demonstrate that time is not linear. The Professor also states during the Poet’s mock-trial that earlier scientists had failed to understand that temporal perspectives obeyed the same rules as those of space, yet even this professor of the twentieth century, a great physician and theorist of

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relativity, can barely conceive of the cosmic secrets divined by the Poet since he relies on the ancient crutches of reason. Indeed, whether as a baby in the pram, a schoolboy (Jean-Pierre Léaud), an invalid in his wheelchair pushed by his nurse (Françoise Christophe), or as a mature man aided by his assistant (Daniel Gélin), the Professor is always restricted while the Poet enjoys maximum mobility and can enter territories forbidden to the Professor precisely because he knows what he does not know and can anticipate what he has not understood. He can unwind time and even play at changing the course of time because he has already discovered the filmic method for achieving the process of resurrection so much desired by the Professor. Even after he has been shot by the Professor ‘relatively speaking’ with a bullet that goes faster than light, one that allows him to stay fixed in a particular period since it ‘unfolds a fold in time’, he transports himself through different times and spaces. If space is the dominant element of the ‘space-time’ dyad both in Le Sang d’un poète and Orphée due to the omnipresence of mirrors, in Le Testament d’Orphée, as the film’s very title attests, it is time. On the one hand, we observe the materiality of time as recorded by the machine which confirms that the cinema is death at work, for instance, the passage of time in the faces of Casarès and Périer who are obliged to wear the same costumes, make-up and hairstyle as they did in Orphée. On the other, we admire the fictional play of time through the use of techniques like reverse-motion photography which compress, distend and modify time in its duration, as well as through narrative devices such as different time zones, flashbacks, loops, etc. These various instances operate together in Le Testament whose key emblematic figures are a group of gypsies, i.e. travellers in time and experts in phoenixology or the art of resuscitating the dead. However, by crossing through time and melting away in the image (becoming, like Cégeste, ‘translucid’), the Poet also abolishes the distances and emptiness of space which the film nevertheless insists on, from the extreme close-ups of eyes (of the Princess and Heurtebise in the mocktrial scene) to the extreme long shots of colossal quarries and caves where the Poet appears but a minuscule object. Indeed, the exceptional lyricism and beauty of Le Testament is due not only to its variable pace and rhythms (those in particular of slowed motion which can make the Poet’s body appear wondrously light) but also to the exploration of different forms and boundaries of space such as the gouged-out caves

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and gaping voids of the Val d’Enfer, enhanced by the luminous, numinous, quality of the cinematography. Cégeste himself, whether in physical person or as a photographic image, crosses easily in the film from one element to another (from water to land, fire to water). It is as if enchanted space occurred only in zones where time has been modified, and the entire film becomes thus a vast technical Zone from which it is impossible to escape. In the last analysis, Le Testament is a fully reversible construct of form and content, one that has disoriented some critics like George Amberg anxious for definitive meanings. 26 Cocteau, however, fully acknowledged and assumed this effect: ‘Dans Le Testament d’Orphee, j’ai obtenu un tel mélange de la vérité et de la fiction, du réalisme et de l’imaginaire que je m’y embrouille et qu’il me serait impossible d’expliquer mon œuvre et d’en risquer l’analyse’ (Pillaudin 1960: 9) (‘In Le Testament I achieved such a mixture of truth and fiction, of realism and the imaginary that I lose myself in it, and it would be impossible to explain it or risk analysing if). With its vast weight of mythology, personal and other (including classical and Egyptian), and its extensive paratexts, this valedictory film could have ended up a solemn museum piece, like Judith in Cocteau’s tapestry who is no longer a woman but ‘le sarcophage contenant sa propre légende’ (‘the sarcophagus containing its own legend’), not to mention, returning to the beginning of this chapter, the oppressive mausoleum of L’Eternel retour. After all, the labyrinth of caves where the Poet meets Yul Brynner (three years after his giant performance as Rameses in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 epic The Ten Commandments) is described in the screenplay as an Egyptian temple where the Poet moves ‘d’hypogées en hypogées’ (‘from subterranean tombs to subterranean tombs’). Yet Le Testament has a wit and legerdemain that almost defies gravity and keeps it alluringly aloft. The last image of the American car carrying off its band of noisy youth and causing the hibiscus to fly away in the wind 26

See Amberg 1971–72, where Amberg remarks that it is as impossible to distinguish between symbols, allegories and metaphors in the film as it is between the realistic and illusory, with the result that the Poet relinquishes control and the viewer loses his rational bearings. At the same time, according to Amberg, Cocteau leaves no room for dubious exegeses and seeks to control the interpreter’s view. This, of course, is to presume, wrongly, that Cocteau is asking us to interpret in the first place.

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nods with excited approval to the arrival of the Nouvelle Vague (we note that the Série Noire thriller by David Goodis which the Lady is reading provided the basis for Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (1960)). The following two-part final credit sequence that completes the frame established at the beginning – Cocteau’s invisible hand now completes his drawing of Orpheus’s profile stroke by stroke and the bubble turns into smoke because the shot is now played in forward slow motion – emphasises not closure but dissemination: the mist of particles over which is superimposed the word ‘fin’ in Cocteau’s handwritten style wafts slowly but surely through the empty frame. The fact that this image of matter in free form is held for so long, continuing in silence even after the climactic finale of classical string music, ensures that we appreciate, if ever there were any doubt, Cocteau’s primary status as a materialist filmmaker. Further, while Le Testament clearly announces Fellini’s 8 1/2 (1963), where the creator is overcome by all the images that that he has fathered, it also pre-empts another materialist filmmaker, Warhol, by offering a tour of Cocteau’s dream factory, a working gallery that showcases his multiple artistic activities. The moment in Le Testament when the young autograph hunters stuff their newly gained booty into the mouth of the strange totem, ‘la machine à rendre n’importe qui cèlebre en quelques minutes’ (‘the machine to make anyone famous for a few minutes’), is a proleptic parody of Warhol’s dictum.27 If Cocteau’s cinema is fundamentally impure, the result of a selfreflexive, compound process of hybrid forms, genres, influences and traditions operating in continual tension and provisionally achieving equilibrium, one ingredient still remains to be added. This element has been either indirectly bypassed or deliberately short-circuited by Cocteau in the works we have examined thus far. I am referring to time as historical actuality. This is the special feature and distinction of Orphée which Cocteau himself regarded as the summum of his cinematic poetry. As the next chapter will reveal, Orphée is where fantasy, theatre, documentary and history come together in almost perfect harmony. 27 One might also add, of course, the cult of celebrity, youth and beauty shared by these two gay artists and Zvengalis, as well as their physical resemblance, particularly their white hair and rather formal attire, traits which Warhol himself recorded of Cocteau in a series of silk-screen prints during the mid–1980s.

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References Adair, G. (2004), Programme notes for the ‘Jean Cocteau: The Naked Dandy’ film season, held in March at the Institut Français, London. Amberg, G. (1971–72), ‘The Testament of Jean Cocteau’, Film Comment 7(4): 23–7. Amy de La Bretèque, F. and Caizergues, P. (eds) (1989), Une encre de lumière, Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry. Azoury, P. and Lalanne, J.-M. (2003), Cocteau et le cinéma. Désordres, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Bach, R. (1993), ‘Cocteau and Vichy: Family Disconnections’, L’Esprit Créateur 33(1): 29–37. Bazin, A. (1951), ‘Théâtre et Cinéma l’, Esprit 19(6): 891–905. Cocteas, J. (1946), La Belle et la bête. Journal d’un film, Monaco, Editions du Rocher. Cocteau, J. (1952,), Le Journal d’un Inconnu, Paris, Grasset. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 1988), Du Cinématographe (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Pierre Belfond. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 2003a), Entretiens sur le cinématographe (L’Edition anniversaire) (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Editions du Rocher. Cocteau, J. The Art of Cinema ([1988] 2001) (trans. R. Buss), New York and London, Marion Boyars. Introduction by R. Buss. Cocteau, J. (1995), Jean Cocteau: Romans, Poésies, Œuvres diverses (ed. B. Benech), Paris, Le Livre de Poche ‘Classiques Modernes’. Cocteau, J. (2003b), Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle (English edition) (ed. D. Moyen) (trans. T. Selous), London, Paul Holberton. Del Degan, D. P. (1999), ‘The Beauty of the Philosophical Beast: Towards the Existential Poetry of La Belle el la bête’, in C. D. E. Tolton ed., The Cinema of Jean Cocteau, Essays on his Films and their Coctelian Sources, New York, Ottawa and Toronto, Legas, 56–70. Doniol-Valcroze, J. (1964), ‘L’Aigle à deux têtes’, Cahiers du cinéma 152: 7–9. El-Hoss, T. (1999), ‘Léonie: The Director within Les Parents terribles’, in C. D. E. Tolton ed., The Cinema of Jean Cocteau: Essays on his Films and their Coctelian Sources, New York, Ottawa and Toronto, Legas, 99–110. Fargier, J.-P. (1992), ‘La marche arriére’, Vertigo (French) 9:101–3. Fischlin, D. (1998), ‘Queer Margins: Cocteau, Le Belle et la bête, and the Jewish differend’, Textual Practice 12(1): 69–88. Gilson, R. ([1964] 1969), Jean Cocteau: An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy, New York, Crown. Godard, J.–L. (1998), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard II (1984–98) (ed. A. Bergala), Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Kruger, J. D. (1999), ‘Les Parents terribles: A Lacanian Approach’, in C. D. E. Tolton ed., The Cinema of Jean Cocteau: Essays on his Films and their Coctelian Sources, New York, Ottawa and Toronto, Legas, 111–28. Laubreaux, A. (1939), ‘Le Scandale des Ambassadeurs’, Je Suis Partout, 13 January. Maclean, S. (1999), ‘Cinema Poetry: The Adaptation of Tristan et heult as L’Eternel retour’, in C. D. E. Tolton ed., The Cinema of Jean Cocteau: Essays on his Films and their Coctelian Sources, New York, Ottawa and Toronto, Legas, 43–55.

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Philippe, C.-J. (1989), Jean Cocteau, Paris, Seghers ‘Les Noms du Cinéma’. Pillaudin, R. (1960), Jean Cocteau tourne son dernier film (Journal du Testament d’Orphée), Paris, La Table Ronde. Ramirez, F. (1994), ‘La constitution de l’espace-temps dans les films de Jean Cocteau’, in C. Rolot and P. Caizergues eds, Jean Cocteau Aujourd’hui, Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry, 151–70. Rolot, C. and Caizergues, P. (eds) (1994), Le Cinéma de Jean Cocteau, suivi de: Hommage à Jean Marais, Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry. Rolot, C. and Ramirez, F. (1992), ‘Le rôle des trucages dans la “Poésie de Cinéma” de Jean Cocteau ou “Les tours d’Orphée”’, Quaderni del Novecento Francese 15 (Special Issue: ‘Jean Cocteau’): 163–76. Scott, A. (1999), ‘The Story with Two Lives: The Filmic Narrativity of L’Aigle à deux têtes’, in C. D. E. Tolton ed., The Cinema of Jean Cocteau: Essays on his Films and their Coctelian Sources, New York, Ottawa and Toronto, Legas, 85– 98. Sims, G. (1998), ‘Tristan en chandail: Poetics as Politics in Jean Cocteau’s L’Eternel retour’, French Cultural Studies 9: 19–50. Sims, G. (1999), ‘Démons et merveilles: Fascist Aesthetics and the “New School of French Cinema” (Les Visiteurs du soir, 1942)’, Australian Journal of French Studies 36(1): 58–88. Strauss, F. (1989), ‘Un cocktail, des Cocteau’, Cahiers du cinéma 425: 75–82. Touzot, J. (1992), ‘Cocteau sous l’Occupation ou le journal d’un poète inactuel’ in P. Caizergues ed., Jean Cocteau Aujourd’hui, Paris, Méridiens Klincksieck, 203–14. Truffaut, F. (1980), The Films in My Life, London, Allen Lane. Turk, E. B. (1980), ‘The Film Adaptation of Cocteau’s Les Enfants terribles’, Cinema Journal 19:2. Vincendeau, G. (2003), Jean-Pierre Melville: ‘An American in Paris’, London, British Film Institute. Vinneuil, F. (aka Lucien Rebatet) (1943), ‘L’Eternel Retour’, Je Suis Partout (October). Winter, J. (1995), Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

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4 In the Zone: Orphée

Vous cherchez trop à comprendre ce qui se passe, cher Monsieur. C’est un grave défaut. (You try too hard to understand what’s going on, kind Sir. It’s a serious fault.) (The Princess in Orphée) Cocteau was already at work on Orphée in December 1947 even before he began the filming of Les Parents terribles. Yet despite his strong track record and prestige in French cinema, he was initially unable to find financial backing for the film. Potential producers even regarded the script of Orphée as sinister. This unexpected disappointment, a Cocteau paradox, i.e. renown matched by a lack of true recognition, would become a major theme of the film. Eventually Paulvé agreed to coproduce the film after Cocteau had resolved to create his own company, Les Films du Palais-Royal, and to ask his actors to receive payment only on participation. A further misfortune occurred, however, during the preparation of Orphée: the death of Christian Bérard at the age of 47. Cocteau subsequently dedicated the film to him, and Jean d’Eaubonne was immediately brought in to design the sets. The film was shot between September and November 1949 at the Studio Francœur, the Vallée de Chevreuse and the ruins of the Saint-Cyr military academy outside Paris. Cocteau was assisted technically by Claude Pinoteau with cinematography by Nicolas Hayer, costumes by Marcel Escoffier, editing by Jacqueline Sadoul, and music again by Auric. The film featured Jean Marais as Orphée, Maria Casarés as the Princess, Marie Déa as Eurydice, François Périer as Heurtebise, Juliette Gréco as Aglaonice and Edouard Dermit as Cégeste. Among the minor roles

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were Henri Crémieux as the Monsieur du Café, Pierre Bertin as the police inspector, Jacques Varennes as the Premier Juge, the actor and stage director Roger Blin as the poet, Jean-Pierre Melville as the hotel manager, and as an extra the critic and future filmmaker Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. Although it did reasonably well at the boxoffice when released in September 1950, Orphée was certainly not the smash hit that Cocteau was hoping for. Indeed, it was received rather coolly by the press. Critics such as André Lang in France-Soir and Pierre Berger in Paris-Presse regarded it as an obscure, elitist work beyond the reach of the general public, despite its clear technical achievement. Yet at Cannes where it premiered, Orphée was awarded a special prize after a referendum of mass audiences and cinema managers, and the film went on to win the International Critics Award at the 1950 Venice Film Festival. Orphée refers back to Cocteau’s play of the same name, a play ‘in one act and one interval’, first staged at the Theatre des Arts in Paris in June 1926. It is not, however, a simple adaptation. The play had retained several of the major episodes of the ancient myth of Orpheus, notably the double death of Eurydice, the crossing of the Underworld (which gives rise to an ellipsis, the interval of the subtitle), and the murderous intervention of the Bacchantes who decapitate Orpheus out of jealousy. Yet Cocteau had radically weakened the figure of the poet of Thrace, priest of Apollo and mediator between the human and the divine whose singing charmed the Argonauts with more grace and efficiency than that of the Sirens. Indeed, the play was a de-idealising, satirical deflection of a classic theme. Orphée is now an irritable, indecisive writer beset not by fabulous monsters but by inner demons, specifically the spectre of creative weakness. Faced with a major crisis of inspiration he comes to rely on a strange, inverted form of Centaur, played on stage by an actor with a horse’s head. The animal submits poetic aphorsisms such as ‘Madame Eurydice reviendra des enfers’ (‘Madame Eurydice will come back from the Underworld’), the first letters of each word spelling merde (shit). Orphée holds such marvels as superior to his own and enters them in a poetry contest. The horse could be an ironic form of Pegasus, the winged symbol of inspiration that sprang from the severed head of Medusa. It is both a pantomime animal in appearance and a performing animal going through the familiar music-hall routine of nodding its head and tapping its hoof to spell out messages. It is also Orphée’s hobby horse, his ‘dada’, a visual

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pun on the Dada movement of the 1920s which preceded surrealism and where inspiration likewise has its source in the irrational and the subconscious (not unexpectedly, the play aroused the immediate suspicion of Breton). Because of the evil inspiration of the horse, Orphée is decapitated, his head substituted for the horse as a talking wonder, and he is ‘petrified’ (‘médusé’) as an official stone bust. When finally reunited with Eurydice, Orphée remarks that inspiration is ‘le diable sous la forme d’un cheval’ (‘the devil in the form of a horse’). Cocteau had also introduced the figure of Heurtebise into the structure of the myth as a guardian angel for Orphée and Eurydice. Together, the three figures form at the end an ostensibly chaste and touching ménage à trois. The conclusion thus reaffirms a rather conservative sensibility which can also be linked to Cocteau’s own personal situation at the time, his impending, albeit temporary, reconversion to Catholicism. Yet Heurtebise also emanates from Cocteau’s highly sensual 1925 poem ‘L’Ange Heurtebise’ (from the collection Opéra), which centred on the poet’s intense sensation of being possessed as if by a ‘lourd sceptre mâle’ (‘heavy male sceptre’), both a violent and creative spirit or angel and a sexually powerful man.1 The original play Orphée was a kind of tragi-farce that diverted myth towards boulevard comedy and yet also parodied the detective thriller genre. Historically it is notable for being one of the first modern reinterpretations of a Greek theme in the French theatre during the 1930s and 1940s (works by Giraudoux, Gide and Sartre soon followed). The film version, however, engineered new transformations of the myth and virtually dismembered the play’s dramatic mechanism: Orphée is not decapitated, the couple return to life, and the Centaur is 1

The poem also includes the lines: ‘L’ange Heurtebise, d’une brutalité/ Incroyable saute sur moi. De grâce/ Ne saute pas si fort. Garçon bestial, fleur de haute/ Stature’ (Cocteau 1995: 331) (‘The angel Heurtebise, with an unbelievable/ Brutality jumps on to me. Out of grace/ Do not jump so hard/ Bestial boy, flower of high/Stature’). In his fine comparative analysis of the play and film of Orphée, Edward Freeman has suggested that for Cocteau the figure of Heurtebise perpetuates Radiguet: he is both love and salvation. Perhaps, too, Heurtebise loves, and is loved by, Orphée through the intermediary of Eurydice. Either way, Freeman argues, the play is very confused, as if Cocteau were seeking to rediscover his spiritual unity following the death of Radiguet. Further, Cégeste is the name given in ‘L’Ange Heurtebise’ to the angel (likewise aged 18) who will replace Heurtebise, a point worth linking possibly to the arrival of Jean Desbordes in Cocteau’s life shortly after the play’s production.

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replaced by a car radio (the horse is present in the film but only briefly as a plaster horse’s head over Orphée’s garage). The roles have also been redistributed: Eurydice now becomes a secondary character; Algaonice, head of the Bacchantes, no longer poisons Eurydice out of jealousy but seeks personal revenge against the misogynistic Orphée (without, however, causing his initial disappearance); and, most crucially, the character of Orphée’s Death, also called the Princess, is developed from a largely decorative role in the play to a central figure in the film.2 The relationship between Orphée and his Death had already, in fact, been treated by Cocteau in another precursor to the film, Le Jeune homme et la mort, a ‘ballet-mime-drama’ produced in collaboration with Roland Petit and first performed at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in 1946 with Jean Balibée as the Young Man. Death there is a mask worn by the beloved, thus identifying passion with destruction. In the film, the signs of modernity are multiplied (a car with a rear-view mirror, a pair of surgeon’s gloves, a power-cut, etc.) and matched by the number of exteriors and changes of setting. The atmosphere of the work has similarly changed. Gone is the play’s frivolity, replaced by a mood of profound disappointment and pessimism that is only partly attributable to the film’s post-war context. The final denouement following Orphée’s deliverance from the Zone falls well short of an authentic happy ending. Indeed, Orphée’s return to Eurydice is rather a simulacrum of conjugal bourgeois happiness which, as we shall see, comes at a hefty price, that of amnesia and ignorance. There is also an undertone of extreme bitterness. One of Orphée’s first lines at the Café des Poétes is: ‘J’ai bu, c’était plutôt amer’ (‘I’ve had a drink, it was rather bitter’). Why? Orphée the film bears a directly personal stamp and may even be viewed as a self-portrait, that of the artist in crisis and harbouring deep resentment. Cocteau stated in a letter at the time that the film was ‘a kind of projection’ of the things important to him. Orphée, a middleaged poet past his creative prime, goes to a fashionable Left Bank bar, the Café des Poètes, modelled on the famous Café de Flore in SaintGermain-des-Prés frequented at the time by the existentialists. Here, the much younger artists he encounters form part of an arrogant and 2

The name ‘Princesse’ also conjures up one of Cocteau’s great heterosexual disappointments of the 1930s, (la) Princesse Natalie Paley, with whom he fathered a child although she did not wish to keep it and had an abortion. Cocteau claimed throughout his life that he was always looking for this lost child.

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contemptuous avant-garde, a transposition of the existentialists and surrealists and perhaps also the Lettrists led by Isidore Isou who, from the early 1940s, responded to surrealism by focusing on every aspect of the graphic sign and producing ‘sound poetry’. They are caricatured by Cocteau as spineless, lazy pretenders who regard poetry and artistic subversion simply as a pose (in one heavily loaded joke their magazine Nudisme contains only blank pages). Orphée, now ‘an official artist’, enters their den almost masochistically since, like Cocteau himself who was even made a Chevalier des Ordres during the making of the film, he is both too well known (by the police) and not known properly enough. It is as though Cocteau were representing himself here as the eternally solitary and misunderstood poet (Orphée’s words right at the end are: ‘Et on me deteste’ (‘I’m hated’)). An old friend, the Monsieur du Café, gives him two pieces of advice which are associated with Cocteau’s own life and legend: ‘Votre plus grave défaut est de savoir jusqu’où on peut aller trop loin’ (‘Your greatest defect is that you know just how far to go too far’), a negative version of Cocteau’s bon mot: ‘Il faut savoir jusqu’où on peut aller trop loin’ (One must know just how far to go too far’), and: ‘Etonnez-nous’ (‘Astonish us’), a variant of the phrase ‘Etonne-moi!’ uttered to Cocteau by Diaghilev in 1912 and which galvanised him into exploring modernism. The older writer played by Roger Blin has a virulence of the kind displayed towards Cocteau by Breton. Moreover, Cocteau had been excluded from Gaëton Picon’s important Panorama de la Nouvelle Littérature Française (1949) since he was considered after the war to be passé in an age of political engagement (although it is a fact that Sartre himself had given Cocteau his manuscript of Les Mains sales to read: literary history is never that simple). This general critical indifference and even dismissal, which Cocteau regarded as nothing less than persecution, was no doubt exacerbated by his war-time record. Cocteau, after all, had been an object of suspicion on all political sides during the war, and in the early days of the Liberation faced two purification committees (one for writers, the other for workers in the film industry). He was never ‘purged’ as such yet the threat of denunciation and inquisition hangs heavy in the air in the film’s tribunal scenes and in the anonymous denunciatory letter sent to Orphée. Cocteau’s satirical portrait of the Café des Poètes not only mocks therefore a certain type of arid modernism but also contains an element of personal self-derision bom of a genuine fear that he was simply out of step with the times and fast

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becoming irrelevant. Orphée is driven to the point of extracting the new blood necessary to regenerate himself from the body of his brilliant young rival, the arrogant 18–year-old Cégeste (an avatar perhaps of Radiguet who was also suddenly ravished by death). By listening to Cégeste’s haiku-like lines on the radio (read out by Cocteau), including the phrase ‘L’oiseau chante avec ses doigts’ (‘The bird sings with its fingers’) (sent to Cocteau in a letter by the poet Apollinaire in 1917), Orphée becomes a virtual vampire. The Monsieur du Café to whom he sends some of these lines which he has studiously transcribed will even implicate him in Cégeste’s death. There is a sense here of Cocteau feeling not only powerless but also perhaps a literary fraud, having failed to live up to his own ideal of making his work ‘invisible’ and safe from the demands of the marketplace. By inviting the chanteuse Juliette Gréco, symbol of Paris nightlife and the jazz cellars after the war, to play the part of Aglaonice he is clearly attempting to retain some kind of contact with the new generation, although some critics, mindful of the representation of the Bacchantes as humourless and vindictive trouble-makers, have regarded this more negatively as a form of revenge on Cocteau’s part. The stakes of Orphée are thus extremely high, both creatively and personally. The opening credits written in Cocteau’s own hand and accompanied by his own beautiful line drawings of Orpheus’s face, nine different views and angles that already establish the theme of doubling, repetition and variation, are the first steps he takes to reassert his artistic potency and stamp his seal of authorship. Both the words and images here are presented in the crisp graphic style of joined-up dots, suggesting that what follows will be a punctiliously composed yet also bold and transparent piece of work. After the written dedication to Bérard and before the first recorded image, Cocteau introduces the film by providing an ultra-rapid but efficient summary of the general Orphic legend over one of the drawings: Orpheus was a remarkable singer who charmed even the animals, became distracted by his singing from his wife whom Death then snatched away from him, descended to the Underworld and returned with her on condition that he never turn round to look at her. He did turn round, however, and was torn by the Bacchantes.3 Cocteau ends his résumé by placing 3

Cocteau goes further here than in the original telling of the myth where Orpheus was not allowed to look behind to see Eurydice until she was once again lit by the

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the legend and the film firmly into the audience’s lap: ‘Où se passe notre histoire, et à quelle époque? C’est le privilége des légendes d’être sans âge. Comme il vous plaira’ (‘Where does our story take place, and when? It’s the privilege of legends to be ageless. It’s as you like’). As we shall see, of all Cocteau’s films Orphée offers the viewer the largest possible scope for interpretation, yet Cocteau also intervenes directly in the film at regular intervals with authorial voice-overs that arrive even in the middle of spoken dialogues. The most common instance of Cocteau’s voice is in the form of the radio messages. The first message is presented in the screenplay as the Voice of the Author and could not be more self-reflexive or emphatic. The phrase: ‘Le silence va plus vite à reculons, trois fois. Je répète’ (‘Silence goes faster backwards, three times. I repeat’) is indeed repeated three times and establishes one of the key themes and movements of the play, that of reversal and inversion. Although it appears quite absurd, as always with Cocteau there is a measure of truth in this idea, as will become clear in our discussion of reverse motion in Chapter 6. Other instances of authorial self-reflexivity in the film occur around Heurtebise, the role Cocteau himself took in the 1927 revival of the play Orphée; here he is a recent suicide possessing secret knowledge (‘le secret des secrets’) (‘the secret of secrets’). These moments are more comically self-conscious, for instance, Heurtebise’s all-too-knowing advice ‘Méfiez-vous des miroirs’ (‘Beware of mirrors’) when Orphée points the anonymous letter written backwards towards a mirror in order to read it (‘Vous êtes un voleur et un assassin. Rendezvous sur votre tombe’) (‘You’re a thief and murderer. See you on your grave’). Similarly, Heurtebise’s ironic statement to Eurydice: ‘vous voulez garder sous la main un personnage de cette histoire’ (‘you want to keep to hand a character from this story’). By means therefore of the credit sequence, the character Heurtebise and his own personal interventions, Cocteau writes his way explicitly into Orphée as an all-around auteur. The Princess’s uncompromising demand for ‘une discipline méticuleuse’ (‘meticulous discipline’) defines exactly the mood of the film and Cocteau’s conscious control over it. This fact is represented graphically in the original posters of Orphée designed by J. Harold which pictured the faces of the actors caught within the clench of his oversized erect hand sun. By making the interdiction permanent, Cocteau may already be suggesting that the Poet will never be able to experience lasting heterosexual married love.

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(with the exception of Dermit whose supine body lies sprawled outside). In his short yet incisive account of Orphée in 1964 which presents the film in terms of cinéma-vérité linked inseparably to cinéma-mensonge, i.e. Cocteau’s own legend tied to the Orpheus myth, Jean-Luc Godard remarks that Orphée is a ‘magical’ film ‘oú chaqué image, comme l’alouette au miroir, ne renvoie qu’à elle-même, c’est-à–dire, à nous’ (Godard 1985: 252) (‘where each image, like the lark in the mirror, harks back only to itself, that is to say, us’). As we shall see, by virtue of being so self-reflexive Orphée addresses and implicates the viewer at every moment. The plot of Orphée starts off simply enough. While about to leave the Café des Poètes, Orphée witnesses the wounding of Cégeste who is run down by a pair of black-clad motorcyclists after attempting in a drunken stupor to break free from the police following their dispersal of a riot which he himself had provoked. A foreign princess also dressed in black takes forceful command amid the confusion and has the limp body carried to her large black chauffeured Rolls-Royce, ostensibly for transport to a hospital. She orders Orphée to accompany them, claiming she will need him as a witness. The severe yet beautiful Princess is, in fact, an emissary from Death sent to reap the young poet Cégeste. The motorcyclists, like the chauffeur, are in her service. Orphée soon realises that the limousine is heading away from the hospital and that Cégeste has already expired. The Princess rebuffs his entreaties for an explanation. As the vehicle crosses the railway line accompanied by the eerie whistling of a train, Orphée plunges us into unknown territory, a new zone – visually, aurally and generically. The film has, as it were, reached its biting point, and in record time. Cocteau now pushes the buttons of ironic juxtaposition and disjunction with sharp changes of rhythm and pace. The Princess’s command ‘Preñez le chemin habituel’ (‘Take the usual route’) is a cue for the limousine to be photographed in negative, albeit temporarily. Ordering the radio to be turned on (we hear Cocteau’s first mysterious message), the Princess, on her initial assignment, takes the dead Cégeste to an isolated and dilapidated manor where she resuscitates him in front of a full-length mirror (the magic of reverse-motion photography). He recognises her as his ‘Death’ and pledges to obey her command. We now hear the first of many repeated sequences of Auric’s orchestral score inspired by Gluck’s opera, Orfeo ed Euridice, although its highly

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stylised themes and central motif bear only a vague resemblance to the original. In fact, Cocteau, who recorded Auric’s music to a chronometer without the images, systematically reshuffled the themes, falling sometimes on unexpected synchronisms. (Later, for example, an exact coincidence occurs between the lament of Eurydice in the opera and the beginning of Heurtebise’s visit to the dejected Eurydice.) As soon as Orphée, who feels that he is sleepwalking, puts the radio on against the Princess’s wishes, we hear the phrase: ‘Les miroirs feraient bien de réfléchir davantage, trois fois’ (‘Mirrors would do better to reflect more, three times’). Before the phrase can be properly repeated the table mirror smashes. The effect of all this is of a well-oiled machine at once smooth and unstoppable. In terms of personal mythology, the champagne offered by the out-of-place Chinese servants in their white jackets probably symbolises opium, which Cocteau described in Opium as producing a craving like ‘champagne in the veins’. The walking-dead prodigy follows the Princess along with the two motorcyclists through the rippling surface of the mirror into the ‘Zone’. This first crossing through the mirror is accompanied by the prolonged sound waves of a tuning fork although without any Shockwave effect. Cocteau is initiating us into a heightened awareness of sound in the film that will include the magnified noise of rubber being stretched, the insistent tam-tam of African drums and percussion as Orphée re-enters the Zone, gun shots, and all kinds of screeching and whistling accentuated in volume by the hollowed-out space of the Zone. We shall return shortly to the action, but it is important already to acknowledge that Orphée goes through more forms and styles than any other Cocteau film, from scene to scene and even shot to shot. It started off as the quasi-reportage of a famous poet, segues into a crime mystery with policemen in trenchcoats, then moves through a range of different genres including secret agent/spy thriller, science fiction, melodrama, romantic comedy, farce (the talking car), low camp (Eurydice hiding under the table) and even documentary, most obviously of Paris in 1959 although unlike in the original play no place names are provided. In the October 9 issue of L’Ecran Français, Cocteau himself spoke of Orphée as a ‘film policier qui trempe d’un côté dans le mythe, de l’autre dans le surnaturel’ (‘detective film plunging into myth on the one hand, and into the supernatural on the

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other’). As Azoury and Lalanne have observed, with its very basic use of lighting in B-film style and its impressively elliptical narration (Eurydice’s death at the hands of the motorcyclists, for example, is conveyed merely by the offscreen sound of a crash and the after-shot of Eurydice’s bicycle rolling into a ditch), Orphée plays at times like an American action film, or rather a cinephile’s dream of American film noir (Azoury and Lalanne 2003: 80–1). There is even a very brief and rather superfluous flashback to underscore what the Premier Ecrivain tells the police commissioner in the company of the Monsieur du Café and Bacchantes: that he had picked up Cégeste’s sheets of writing from the ground during the riot at the Café des Poetes. In his detailed commentary on Orphée for the recent DVD version released by the British Film Institute, Roland-François Lack has emphasised further how Cocteau invokes contemporary realist photography, notably Brassaï, in some of the views of working-class Paris (for example, the covered market at Billancourt), thereby placing the film in a long history of literary and visual representation of Paris that includes Baudelaire (the ‘Tableaux Parisiens’ in Les Fleurs du Mal (1861)), Honoré Daumier and Apollinaire, author of the poem ‘Zone’ (1913) which includes references to the depressed ‘zones’ of makeshift housing installed on the perimeters of the old city. The effect is actually to highlight the quality of motion photography, a process recalling 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 plastercasts of famous figures) and his domestic lifestyle with Eurydice is the subject of a pastiche article in Vogue complete with pictures by Roger Corbeau (none other than the set photographer of Orphée). We can link Orphée’s progression in narrative and aesthetic form to Heurtebise’s statement to Orphée regarding Eurydice’s dead body: C’est une forme d’elle, comme la Princesse est une des formes de la Mort. Tout cela est faux. Votre femme habite un autre monde où je vous invite à me suivre’. 4 It is as if one arrives at the truth in 4 It’s a form of her, just as the Princess is one of the forms of Death. All that is false. Your wife inhabits another world where I invite you to follow.’

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representation only by passing through the false and artificial. Even in the opening semi-improvised sequence of the Café des Poètes, with its panning shots and use of handheld camera betraying the contemporary influence of Italian neorealism (Cocteau specifies in the screenplay an ‘ideal’ provincial setting although the scene was actually shot at Les Lilas in the Paris suburbs), we are obliged to view Orphée by means of odd and highly stylised framings. Take, for example, the extreme closeup shot of the Monsieur du Café speaking directly into Orphée’s right ear about Cégeste (‘On l’adore’) (‘He’s adored’), followed immediately by a shot of the same pair from above their shoulders. This awkward image, which positions the viewer ominously as an onlooker and potential voyeur (a position which the film will never allow us to escape), also establishes a temporary triangle of male desire, signalling Cocteau’s particular interest in conveying the underlying currents of male desire by means of both subjects and objects (we shall explore this untold story of eroticism in Chapter 6 in the context of cinematic form). As the opening scene continues, we become aware too of how, as Marjorie Keller puts it, the reaction shot (or counter-shot) arrives before the action: Orphée sees the Princess’s car before it is shown; the police and Orphée see Cégeste killed and look horrified before the assassins are pictured driving off past the dead body (see Keller 1986: 67). In other words, the privilege of witnessing events is given first to those within the film before it is extended to the viewer. This creates a hierarchy of vision that structures the whole film and accords power to whoever is able to see first. This effect is compounded by the play with open and closed space in the following sequence featuring Orphée in the Princess’s car, where the sides of the screen are redoubled by a perspectival mise en abyme that inscribes the image into the back window of the car. This closure of vision is reinforced by a game of reflections in the rear-view mirror. Hence, from the very outset the viewer is involved in a play of perception and vision that casts doubt on the easy legibility of the image. Having been instructed by Cocteau in the strangeness of form, we are now alert to the slightest quirk of camera angle and movement. Hence, the use of overhead shots during Heurtebise’s conversation with Eurydice is a subtle intimation that something unusual is taking place. When the Princess returns night after night to gaze upon the sleeping Orphée, her large blank eyes are revealed in close-up to be artificially painted. In contrast, other objects have become animate. Minutes later, we witness the telephone receiver

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return to its hook of its own accord (another instance of reverse motion). Similarly, the geography of Paris during Orphée’s manic pursuit of the Princess goes haywire as Cocteau cuts across different locations: the Grenelle steps, the Square Bolivar in the ButtesChaumont, the Place des Vosges and Billancourt. Cocteau’s cavalier approach to urban space is matched by his apparent disregard for the rules of cinema. Not only does he privilege counter-shot over shot and ultimately discard the subjective shot, but also he is happy to flout sacred taboos, for instance, the 180° rule. In a later scene where the Rolls carrying Orphée’s body pulls up on the road, three 180° shots follow in rapid succession. First shot: the car stops flanked by the two motorcyclists. Second: one of the motorcyclists, filmed from the opposite angle, approaches the door of the car and questions Heurtebise. Third: the camera, from the first angle, reveals Orphée lying stretched out on the car cushions. Fourth: a close-up, again diametrically opposed to the shot before, reveals the dead face of Orphée hanging down from the seat.5 Let us examine more closely Cocteau’s effortless ability to disorient the viewer and disturb narrative flow in Orphée by taking one extended scene, that of the Princess’s dispute with Heurtebise where we witness a contrast not only of lighting, angles and movements but also of colour.6 The Princess has come to claim Orphée’s wife Eurydice who has been ignored and verbally abused by her husband now obsessed by the magic of the radio. Upon entering Eurydice’s bedroom with a resurrected if somnolent Cégeste, the Princess orders all doors to be shut, including that of the mirror, and draws the blinds. Due to the position of the arc lighting above her, she proceeds to illuminate everything she approaches. A flickering play of shadows and silhouettes is cast around the wall and over Eurydice’s inanimate body lying on the bed while Cégeste taps his messages into a portable radiotransmitter. This pattern is matched by a series of low and high-angle shots that underline the power relations between the Princess and her 5 See Cocteau’s gleeful account of this scene in Cocteau 2003: 98. 6 This process of disorientation is occasionally aggravated by odd inconsistencies unusual in Cocteau’s work. For example, in his published notes to the film which now constitute a form of preface and shape our reading of Orphée, Cocteau endorses Cégeste’s statement during the trial of the Princess in the Zone that he alone was the source of the radio messages although these were clearly broadcast when he lay dead in the car before his resurrection.

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two minions, Cégeste and Heurtebise. The extreme fluctuations in the Princess’s emotions as she confronts Heurtebise’s resistance are expressed directly by her changes of costume. Her dress changes three times: from black (flecked by white at the shoulder) to white, then from white to black, and finally back to white. Yet contrary to the usual symbolic scheme of colour, white signifies here temper and rage. When the Princess shouts to Heurtebise ‘Taisez-vous’ (‘Shut up’), her dress is revealed through a flash of extreme light to be white and she promptly leaves the frame. When she re-enters the frame with Cégeste on the other side of the room, her dress is restored to its original black (this is still the same shot, in fact, the effect obtained through the use of a body double). Heurtebise’s response to his own anger at this point is very different. He disappears on the spot with a suspended ‘]e ...’ (‘I ...’), echoing the Poet’s truncated verbal phrase early in Le Sang d’un poète. Shortly afterwards, when the Princess warns Cégeste not to look back and she turns round to smash the mirror into pieces (the act takes place out of frame), her dress again becomes white, triggered perhaps by her invocation of those who have been changed into statues of salt (‘il y en a qui se changent en statues de sel’) (the story of Lot’s wife, the film’s only explicit biblical reference). The Princess, Eurydice and Cégeste leave in due procession through the central frame of the threepiece mirror which quickly and silently reforms by means of reversemotion photography. All this takes place before we have even set foot properly with Orphée into the Zone. The interior sets of Orphée deserve our special attention, in fact, since several sequences are simply not feasible in practice. However, as Cocteau knew only too well, because they appear to be real we take them to be such, so predisposed are we to believe what we see with our own eyes. One scene in particular stands out: the moment when Orphée first walks up to the mirror in the bedroom prior to entering the Zone for the first time. We see Marais’s reflection in the mirror as he walks towards it, arms outstretched. Then, by means of an overhead shot in close-up, we observe one pair of hands meeting another in perfect sync. It is clear, however, that the hands walking towards the mirror must be those of a stand-in since the camera would itself become visible at that point if the mirror were real. The reflection has been artfully staged yet works precisely because it seems plausible. Heurtebise’s next words to Orphée are fittingly about the need to believe: ‘II ne s’agit pas de comprendre. II s’agit de croire’ (‘It’s not a matter of understanding but believing’). Again,

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the film is performing self-refiexively for the express benefit of the viewer. Another example of artificial reality or ‘reality effect’ is the trial scene where real characters are substituted for their mirror reflections. We see what appear to be merely the reflections of the three judges, yet they are in fact the judges in person. The mirror did not exist: Cocteau had buüt a twin room and filled it with twin objects. In the same shot we see what appears to be one of the two motorcyclists standing in front of the mirror on the right, and behind him his reflection. Again, though, we are watching two actors who also happened to be brothers and closely resembled each other. Further, when Marais bangs his head against the mirror having been denied entry into the Zone, he is actually touching empty space; the sound of the collision was added later. Cocteau excelled at this type of simple fabrication and enjoyed talking about the games of reality and fiction played out on set, acknowledging that often even the actors and technicians had little or no idea what was being created (see Cocteau 2003: 82–4). It all came together in the editing room; in other words, montage itself serves to fashion reality. Cocteau’s overall term for these ‘trick shots’ is ‘direct magic’ since no post-production in the laboratory was involved. Here is how he summed up the process: ‘La force d’un film c’est son vérisme. Je veux dire qu’on ne raconte pas les choses, qu’on les montre. Elles existent done sous forme de faits, même si ces faits relèvent de l’iréel, de ce que le public n’a pas coutume de voir’ (Cocteau 2003: 103–4).7 Together with the other visual strategies we have been describing that put into question conventional forms of representation, the effect produced is a new kind of realism. As Cocteau put it specifically in relation to Orphée: ‘C’est un film réaliste et qui met cinématographique-ment en ceuvre le plus vrai que le vrai, ce réalisme supérieur, cette vérité que Goethe oppose á la réalité et qui sont la grande conquête des poètes de notre époque’ (Cocteau 1995: 61) (my emphasis).8 To appreciate what constitutes ‘superior realism’ in the narrative of Orphée let us pass finally through the Looking Glass with Orphée and Heurtebise and descend into the Zone. Instructed like children in 7

The strength of a film resides in its “truthism”, I mean in its showing us things instead of telling them. They exist therefore as facts, even if these facts pertain to the unreal or what the public is not accustomed to seeing.’ 8 ‘This is a realist film that puts into play cinematographically the truer than truth, that superior realism, that truth which Goethe contrasts with reality, and which together are the great achievements of the poets of our day.’

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the need to believe, we penetrate through the mirror propelled by Orphée’s hands armed with rubber gloves (left by Cégeste in error and applied by Orphée in reverse motion) as they cleave a large vat of mercury shot in close-up. Heurtebise guides him through from behind. Cocteau had originally resolved with Bérard to represent the Zone with stripped-down artificial sets. Following his death, however, Cocteau chose an entirely natural locale: the bombed-out ruins of the Saint-Cyr military academy. He used the best camera and lenses available – American-made and owned by Pathé – in order to convey the images with the greatest possible definition and exactitude. At the same time, he retained the original train whistles and loud factory sounds that intruded during the shooting of these scenes rather than try to postsynchronise the dialogues, since these regular sounds provided a ‘mysterious basis’ to the action. The fantastical Zone is thus rooted in post-war actuality. The car-radio messages that appeared at first to be pure nonsense – collections of words oddly juxtaposed like so much indecipherable surrealist prose – were actually inspired by the coded messages of the Resistance transmitted from London during the Occupation. Even when these degenerate into a series of numbers, they settle around historical dates: 38/39/40. Other concrete signs of war which must now be read in this context are the following: the begoggled motorcyclists dressed fascistically in black and operating as an independent militia ready to train submachine-guns even on the police; the black limousine that arrests the unsuspecting in the middle of the night; sudden power-cuts; a tribunal of old, faceless backroom men dispensing summary judgment on the accused (echoes here of the judges of the dead, Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus in the Orphic legend). The term ‘Zone’ itself, one of Cocteau’s wonderfully multivalent terms covering not only time and space but also photography (as in the ‘Zone System’), 9 refers in addition to the

9 The ‘Zone System’, perfected by the great American photographer Ansel Adams towards the end of the 1930s, allows photographers at the moment of taking a shot to translate their subjective mental impressions of the image to paper using a range of ‘zones’ of contrast available through camera control and different filmstock, filters, exposures, etc.. What is central about this complex yet highly influential technique, and why it bears directly on Cocteau’s conceptualisation of the Zone in Orphée, is that unlike automatic light meters it relies directly on the imagination and requires a personal, even emotional investment. It is not

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division of France during the war into two administrative zones: the Zone Libre and the Zone Occupée. If the haunting images of desolation of Saint-Cyr constitute the historical real of Orphée, they relay at the same time le merveilleux direct. Cocteau states in the screenplay that the ruined road down which Orphée and Heurtebise pass is similar to a street on the Left Bank undergoing demolition or ‘a Pompey from Gradiva’ (a reference to Jensen’s 1903 novel Gradiva about a German archaeologist encountering a woman who haunts him in a dream set in the ruins of Pompey). In practice, the Zone is a concrete space of play and invention. Orphée and Heurtebise experience different kinds of motion and on different planes. In the foreground, Heurtebise appears to be walking through ruins while stationary (‘une marche immobile’), like the poet passing through the Night in Le Sang d’un poète. He is moving against a silent wind and is thus true to his name: ‘Heurte[r] [la] bise’ (literally ‘to clash with the wind’, ‘la bise’ being a poetic term for the North wind). Behind him to the right, meanwhile, Orphée is walking forwards while the camera tracks backwards, yet the slightly faded quality of the image indicates that it has been prerecorded and projected on to a giant screen (a fact not directly acknowledged by Cocteau in the screenplay). The combined effect of the movement on the back screen behind Heurtebise and a wind-machine operating in front of him (the scene was shot in the studio) gives the impression that he is moving. Proof of the décalage in time and space is that Orphée does not have to contend with any wind, although his voice, like that of Heurtebise, appears magnified as if in an echo chamber. Cocteau indulges himself enormously in this sequence, virtually parading his ingenuity. At one point, a young glazier shouting out the name of his profession (a remnant from the play Orphée) passes first as a real presence in front of Heurtebise, then behind him in the form of the prefilmed back projection. This brilliant fabrication of depth of field exemplifies Cocteau’s natural tendency to variegate the image and create an open frame through an intricate montage of different elements and textures. It is further extended in the sequence of Orphée’s return to the Zone, where a special model set of the arcades insignificant that the one photographer Cocteau wrote about and whom he employed as a set photographer on Le Testament, Lucien Clergue ‘excellent photographe’ (Cocteau 1995:1327), also worked with Adams (see Cocteau 1963).

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of Saint-Cyr was painted and placed horizontally on the ground along which Heurtebise and Orphée slide lying down (again like the Poet in the corridor of the Hotel des Folies-dramatiques in Le Sang d’un poète). When filmed from above, they appear to be scaling along upright walls in which the figures of an old woman and two small children are briefly visible (two photographs mounted behind the set). The final return from the Zone to the bedroom is a slightly altered mirror reflection of the first descent. The split-screen effect is however maintained: Orphée’s counter-trajectory is shown by means of reversemotion photography projected on to a back screen, against which Heurtebise faces with arms outstretched as if pushing Orphée backwards. Again, the wind is against him, and again the glazier performs his slalom trick though in reverse. The Zone is therefore a highly ambivalent space formed of the most incontrovertible historical real (war) and the strangest unreal (fantasy), where human time does not pass or even exist (the clock in the bedroom remains fixed at 6 o’clock). It is as though one extreme were fully conditional upon the other. The result, obtained with almost mathematical precision and rigour by Cocteau, is a kind of hyper-real that makes the notion either of pure reality or pure fantasy meaningless. In answer to Orphée’s question ‘Où sommes-nous?’ (‘Where are we?’), recalling that of the Rose to Tiger-lily in Lewis Carroll (‘I wonder how you do it’), Heurtebise states: ‘La vie est longue a être morte. C’est la zone. Elle est faite des souvenirs des hommes et des ruines de leurs habitudes’ (‘Life is a long death. This is the zone. It is made of the memories of men and the ruins of their habits’). Cocteau goes further in his written notes to the screenplay: ‘La Zone [ ... ] c’est une frange de la vie. Un no man’s land entre la vie et la mort. On n’y est tout à fait mort, ni tout a fait vivant’ (Cocteau 1992: 64) (‘The Zone [ ... ] is a margin of life. A no-man’s-land between life and death, where one is neither fully dead nor fully alive’). In other words, the Zone remains perpetually indefinite and in process. It is a space of inversion and reversal (the Princess, for example, burns like ice) and with its own internal logic. For the return to the Zone, a journey which they have no right to take, Orphée and Heurtebise move together now in the same plane but in exaggerated slow motion: they are at once ‘prevented’ (‘empêchés’) and ‘carried away’ (‘emportés’) by ‘a large inexplicable breath’ (‘un grand souffle inexplicable’) (the music, too, is a slowed and almost slurred version of the music used for the first

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descent). The double and fluctuating ‘irrational’ universe of the Zone ultimately becomes an internal space, more a mental state of thinking than being. There is no other way to explain the last journey back from the Zone when Cégeste and Heurtebise must first smother Orphée to death at the Princess’s behest. Now donning ceremonial robes she commands in high, almost operatic tones: ‘Allez, murez-le. Il le faut! Sans la volonté, nous sommes des infirmes. Allez!’ (‘Go on, wall him up. You must! Without willpower we’re like weaklings. Go on!’). Cocteau likened this shared deadly act to the work by which Tibetan neophytes are put to sleep so they can travel in time. In conceptual terms, it is eminently reasonable and entirely concrete: in order for Orphée to live again after having being shot randomly by a young man when the Bacchantes burst into his home (another accident scheduled by the Princess), he must be killed again but even more deliberately. As Cocteau puts it, this is ‘la mort infligée à un mort’ (‘death inflicted on a dead man’). The Princess then instructs Heurtebise to think Orphée back in time: ‘Remontez le temps. Il faut que ce qui a été ne soit plus’ (‘Go back in time. What has been must be no longer’). This will be the Princess’s greatest crime. According to Heurtebise, nothing is more serious, in any world/ She continues: ‘Enfoncez-vous en vous-même et quittez-vous, courez, courez’ (‘Sink into yourself and part, run, run’). He answers finally: ‘J’arrive’ (‘I’m coming’). After a clinical wipe right to left across the screen, the film replays the first journey into the Zone but in reverse: we must be somewhere within Heurtebise’s mind. And when he has finally returned Orphée to the bedroom with everything now apparently forgotten, we are informed, at least in the screenplay, that we are still ... in the Zone. Of course, just like the increasingly porous boundary between the magical and ordinary worlds in La Belle et la bête, the difference between the Zone and ‘normal life’ was never that watertight in Orphée, and Cocteau, in his constant efforts to make us alert to the miraculous in the everyday, had deliberated staggered our entry into the Zone. We were, in fact, already within the territory of the Zone long before Orphée (a character who, ironically, could usually be found at the Hôtel des Deux Mondes, although not on this occasion). When the Princess ushered Cégeste through the mirror after resurrecting him, the camera was positioned ‘inside’ the mirror as if to welcome them both through. The Zone, a permanently transitional space between life and death, is truly a relative construct like Coctelian time. But if time and memory

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can both be cancelled out in the Zone, what exactly is the attitude of the film towards the past? The ruins of Saint-Cyr present, after all, a direct image of historical time, and it is entirely appropriate that they provide the setting for the periodic breakdown in the plot’s linear narration. Jacques Aumont has viewed Cocteau’s Zone in essentially negative terms, arguing that it is a space where time escapes time, memory is frozen and history is abolished. As such, it represents the recent Holocaust, the Lager of death, amnesia and forgetting, including that of the camps themselves. The Zone, Aumont argues, should therefore be considered a (half-conscious) ‘after-effect’ of the sudden anamnesis performed by so many films in the immediate post-war period, films that often depicted a journey through ruins associated with the theme of memory. One of the most celebrated, of course, was Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), a work greatly admired by Cocteau and which also featured a man trying to find his wife who is probably already dead. According to Aumont, just like Orphée’s highly paradoxical – though not literal – act of turning round to see Eurydice (an act both of love and non-love, memory and forgetting), so Cocteau’s film as a whole turns towards the ruins to preserve the memory of the camps yet in so doing abolishes it. 10 Unfortunately, Aumont makes no distinction between the experience of Orphée and that of the viewer who, as we have seen, is always positioned at an objective and ironic distance from the main characters. Even if Orphée is able to forget his experience of the Zone the viewer cannot, precisely because Cocteau will not allow us to disengage the Zone from its historical background. Moreover, we have a concrete memory of the film formed in and over time. To state the obvious but crucial fact, it is now ‘here’ with us. As Azoury and Lalanne have suggested, this type of approach to time and history links Cocteau to the cultural critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin. 11 Benjamin was already talking in 1929 of a new ‘declension’ of time which Cocteau effectively creates through film. Indeed, Cocteau’s Proustian journeys up and down the corridors of time exemplify some 10 Amount concludes by suggesting that when Orphée and Le Testament are recycled in Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema, ‘Orphée’ becomes also the code name for cinema that has the power to look behind it and, in the very same gaze, make history appear and disappear. 11 Azoury and Lalanne emphasise the importance to Benjamin of Paul Klee’s representations of the Angel (e.g. Angelus Novus, 1920), an angel turned to the past yet transported in a storm towards the future.

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of the anachronisms of the historian as defined by Benjamin: the memory of the future, the actualisation of past fairy tales, the crossing of centuries and their styles, and the interconnecting of different fates and prophecies. In short, the potentiality of cinema opens up a new way of writing history and even marks a historical break in the very manner of perceiving and projecting it. With regard specifically to Orphée, memory loss and amnesia are not presented as entirely negative values. Despite the rather corny overstatement of the final scene, Orphée returns to his wife a far less narcissistic and selfabsorbed individual and is receptive to the idea of fatherhood and its future pleasures (before he had refused even to listen to Eurydice’s news that she was pregnant). More than any other Cocteau film, the reading of this final scene comes down to the individual viewer, as Cocteau himself had predicted at the beginning (‘Comme il vous plaira’). What Cocteau seems to be saying here is that forgetting is also part of the process of human memory which is necessarily selective and naturally flawed. Hence, responsibility for one’s memory should also be based on a full acknowledgement of the human capacity, and sometimes vital need, to forget. With its simulated split-screen effects, reversals and resurrections, Orphée encourages us to develop such double mental vision. Yet this type of speculation raises the more general issue of interpretation in Orphée. Can we give a name, for instance, to the wind in the film against which Heurtebise is always struggling alone? Is this the proverbial wind of change against which he is now opposed, in contrast to Orphée who appears to ride with the wind buoyed with the hope of finding Eurydice (and the Princess) and his wish to believe in the mirror as a site of transformation and metamorphosis? Or is it, as Aumont would argue, time itself against which one must move and which all but effaces memory? Heurtebise himself declines to offer an answer when asked by Orphée, a character who, if we bear in mind Marais’s own role in the war (he joined the Union des Artistes supervised by the Resistance and was even awarded the Croix de Guerre), 12 might perhaps be construed as a resistance fighter in 12 In fact, having signed up in the early stages of the war to fight the Germans, Marais also wished to join the Resistance. He was denied this chance, however, on the grounds that his relationship with Cocteau would be a security risk (Cocteau, it was thought, would talk too much).

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occupied territory, and the film itself therefore as an allegory of the war and resistance. Focusing on the film’s final enigmatic act, i.e. Orphée’s torture and execution where the violence of sexuality is contorted into an erotics of sacrifice (he will love the Princess even if she condemns him to death), Lack has even suggested that Orphée is an allegory of violence linking the story of love directly to the violence of the Occupation and Liberation. Yet to read Orphée through a fixed prism is as problematic as treating the tale of impossible love in La Belle et la bête as, say, an allegory of the doomed love that dare not speak its name. The film critic Raymond Durgnat has rightly counselled against any over-eagerness to penetrate to the allegorical layer of a film, even one as charged with memories, signs and possible symbols as Orphée, since it can often lead to distortion. Durgnat lists some of the potential approaches inspired by Orphée. A Jungian reading would reveal the Princess to be the terrible mother, the witch menacing the child with an alluring possessiveness. In a standard Freudian account, ‘Death’ would symbolise the punishment for incestuous wishes towards the mother who is alleged to be responsible. The land of Death is repressed desire where nightmares come true (Durgnat 1967: 242). Among the notable published accounts of Orphée are those of Jean-Jacques Kihm, who takes his cue from Cocteau and develops close parallels between the film and The Tibetan Book of the Dead (see Kihm 1960), and Evans Lansing Smith who argues that the descent into Hades and the Underworld transforms the film into an allegory of poesis (Lansing Smith 1996: 249). Certainly, many images in the film are powerfully suggestive. The rail crossing, for instance, could be a modern river Styx (or Acheron). Yet the fact remains that the Princess and Heurte-bise are not ‘Death’; they are simply more advanced in death than the living and often pitted even against each other. Cocteau, who is almost always best taken at his most literal, never wavers from making the Princess the specific death of Orphée or of Eurydice since the notion of total death is inconceivable. There is thus a continuity between the dead and the living: the roving glazier believes that he is still alive due to his ‘déformation professionelle’. Old habits die hard. In his notes to the screenplay Cocteau offered his now standard counsel: ‘II n’y a dans ce film ni symbole, ni thèse’ (‘There is in this film neither symbol nor thesis’). He did, however, propose there three major themes: (a) the successive deaths that a poet must undergo in order to become immortal, or, in Mallarmé’s words, ‘Tel qu’en lui-

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même l’éternité le change’ (‘Such that at last eternity transforms him into himself’); (b) inspiration; (c) free will (‘libre arbitre’). These themes are interconnected and absolutely integral to the narrative of Orphée. Orphée attempts to escape everyday life and social responsibility in order to answer the call of a higher order. The problem of ‘bad faith’ begins, however, when he renounces his own internal messages and simply copies those of Cégeste which degenerate into a series of numbers. (Cocteau preferred the term ‘expiration’ to ‘inspiration’ to signify that this gift comes from within, ‘de notre nuit et non du dehors, d’une autre nuit soi-disant divine’ (‘from our night and not from outside, another so-called divine night’), and offers therefore a set of contradictions that must be fully assumed.) The philosophical question of free will is associated most with Heurtebise who attempts to frustrate the destiny initiated by the Princess by telling Orphée that the radio messages are worthless, or by trying to stop Eurydice leaving the house to see Aglaonice and thus risking certain death. As for the Princess, her crime of having Eurydice killed without orders is summed up by the tribunal as ‘Initiative’. By deciding eventually to sacrifice her love for Orphée and cancel herself out as the Death of the Poet, she ensures that he will become immortal and thus stay true to the legend. Yet Orphée is concerned above all with what it is to be human. During the tribunal the Princess and Heurtebise are obliged to confess that they are still under the sway of the human kingdom and thus sensate beings because they feel ‘l'ombre de l’ombre d’un sentiment’ (‘the shadow of a shadow of a feeling’). The Princess, victim of an all-too-human ‘enchainement de circonstances’ (‘chain of events’), acknowledges her love for Orphée as the motive for her crime. In fact, rather than symbolising some vague abstraction, each character in the film is, as, Durgnat claims, torn between conflicting desires and emotions. With his help we can list some of the contradictory aims and drives that divide the characters and force them to commit ambivalent acts, including ironic reversals of their stated positions. For example, Orphée is alive but loves his Death; his Death, because she loves him, kills his wife, and later, when he is killed, undoes his Death. In fact, Orphée’s Death keeps him alive against his own wishes. Heurtebise, whose very name signifies tension (‘Heurte[r la] bise’, which could also mean ‘to clash with the kiss’), is the virtual negative of Orphée since he adores Eurydice as hopelessly as Orphée loves the Princess. Cégeste is the darling of the avant-garde yet totally clumsy and before too long

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poetically bankrupt. The Princess is a patroness of the arts and craves Orphée’s human warmth yet some of her actions menace Orphée’s inspiration while others renew it. Although seeming to represent life and happiness, Eurydice tries to kill herself by startling Orphée into seeing her (her plan is foiled by a sudden power-cut). She is thus herself on the side of Death. Indeed, the Bacchantes whom Eurydice inherently trusts (she was once a servant of Aglaonice) eventually kill Orphée – death is the work of the living as well as of the dead. In short, in the style of its highly compressed formal structure, Orphée is a finely sprung coil of thematic tensions and paradoxes demanding dramatic release. What, therefore, are we to make finally of unseen Death which appears to reside at the end of the film’s infinite abyss? Before being escorted with Heurtebise by the motorcyclists to some ever deeper recess of Death’s catacombs – the final phosphorescent image of SaintCyr illuminated at night is almost a vision of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – the Princess explains to Orphée that this transcendent and elusive entity occupies ‘nowhere’. She states: ‘Some believe that he thinks about us [il pense a nous]; others that he thinks us up [il nous pense]. Others that he sleeps and that we are his dream ... his bad dream’. James Herbert has speculated that His name is Hitler, ‘that impossible individual behind the profound bureaucracy of death ... whose machinery of national expansion slipped in to assume control over the real when France’s version of nation retreated at the Chefsd’oeuvre de l’ Art Français [the French pavilion during the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques held in Paris in 1937] into the realm of the aesthetic’ (Herbert 1998: 169). For Herbert, Hitler implicitly becomes the personification of the transcendence attained by evil: ‘his [Hitler’s] is the name of that which cannot be named’ (Herbert 1998:169). Yet Orphée denies us the easy comfort of giving a name to the unnamed, and like Cégeste forced to watch the Princess and Heurtebise disappear in the final frame, we are deliberately left in limbo. Such is the liability of our position as the viewer of Cocteau’s work: we agree to enter the mysteries of cinema where no definitive interpretation is ever available. The monstrous is always lurking on the other side of the magical and it cannot be explained away. Orphée: ‘J’ai le droit d’exiger des explications’. La Princesse: ‘Vous avez tous les droits, cher Monsieur, et je les ai tous. Nous sommes quittes’ (‘I have

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the right to demand explanations.’/’You have every right, kind Sir, and I have them all. We’re quits’). Orphée is a resounding cinematic triumph, a tightly grafted work of almost classical perfection possessing a hypnotic sense of the marvellous. At the same time, its gleaming surface of doubles, replicas and reversals is shot through with an arch and self-parodic wit that undercuts what Neal Oxenhandler has referred to as its ‘modernist hoopla’ of beauty, truth and profundity (though whether this makes the film somehow ‘postmodernist’ is another question for another time) (see Oxenhandler 1997: 24). However, as we suggested at the beginning, Orphée is also a tale of genuine disappointment and even melancholy. The sublime is refused to Orphée and the Princess who are forcibly reintegrated into their respective realities even though they had both chosen love. Indeed, Orphée’s journey is the opposite of initiation, and following his release back into the world of humans or what Heurtebise terms their ‘mire’ (‘eau sale’), not only has the experience of the supernatural and amorous passion slipped through his fingers but so also has his capacity for curiosity. Writing becomes merely ‘work’, a far cry from Orphée’s earlier grand statement: ‘Etre poète, c’est écrire sans être écrivain’ (‘To be a poet is to write without being a writer’). We have arrived finally at a classic bourgeois set-up where Eurydice will do her part producing children. This leads us to the obvious problem of misogyny in the film. Eurydice never rises beyond a vacuous non-character ‘impermeable to mystery’ (Cocteau in his notes) whose one act is to disappear a second time for her husband by intentionally glancing in the mirror and vanishing on the spot. Orphée’s comment to Heurtebise about Eurydice – ‘Les femmes adorent les complications’ (‘Women adore complications’ ) – does nothing to dispel the feeling that sexual politics are of little interest to Cocteau. At the other extreme, the Princess incarnates the phallic gesture (‘Levez-vous’!) and verges on cruelty until she suddenly melts into love. As for the ‘all-powerful’ ‘Ligue de Femmes’ (League of Women) or Bacchantes led by the manipulative Aglaonice, it appears to be a vicious, man-hating sorority with lesbian undertones (for example, Aglaonice’s remark uttered with raw contempt: ‘Les hommes reviennent toujours. Ils sont tellement absurdes’ (‘Men always return, they’re so absurd’), followed later upon Orphée’s return by her acknowledgement that she is herself ‘indésirable’). The general

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impression created is that Orphée’s natural enemy, along with prosaic reality, is the presence of real women in contrast to the otherworldly Princess, his Death. Which is to say, negative reality is almost always codified in the film as female.13 Yet the Princess herself is also left as unfinished business by Cocteau. Her actions are taken of her own accord and free will. In Cocteau’s terms, she dares to substitute herself for destiny and to decide how things may be instead of accepting them as they already are. She becomes a spy in love with the man she was appointed to watch and whom she saves by losing herself. We never know the nature of her loss or new punishment, however. Cocteau acknowledged this fact, explaining that it was essential that some data be missing on his round trip into the inaccessible. It could simply be, though, that Cocteau is not sensitive enough to the fate of the dominatrix figure he has created. By the end she simply represents an idea: that it is both useless and impossible to resist by going against orders. There is no joy in transgression here, simply resignation and doom (Heurtebise’s phrase upon seeing Eurydice disappear for a second time is just as devastating: ‘C’était fatal’ (‘It was inevitable’)). Moreover, for all her knowledge and experience, the Princess still knows as little about the unknown as we do. The very value of acts is held to be suspect since so much activity in the film produces little of lasting worth. All is in vain and must be forgotten. In the most negative reading of the film, the fact that the conjugal bedroom also becomes part of the Zone ensures ironically, and tragically, that there is no valid escape from standard reality. It is as though the only resistance possible in Orphée is ultimately aesthetic, for example, in the hands of actors countering the material pull of mercury or else falling backwards in order for the camera to record, and the screen then to project, miraculous images. What is privileged in plastic terms beyond the film’s narrative and thematic concerns will later be explicitly foregrounded by Cocteau in Le Testament, where the Poet and Dermit realise pure cinematic acts and the film itself exemplifies the formal grace and beauty of free will (including also that of the cinematic machine). We shall explore in detail the erotic undercurrents of Orphée as well as Le Testament and Cocteau’s other films in Chapter 13 See Conolly 1999, who argues convincingly that, viewed in brutal terms, Cocteau simply reproduces three all-too-familiar misogynistic types: a submissive virgin, a man-hating bitch and a self-sacrificing whore (162).

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6. Before that, however, let us stay with Marais to consider in greater depth the particular value of his screen performances for Cocteau and what they reveal both of Cocteau’s practice of collaboration and his representation of the male body and gender.

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References Aumont, J., (1999), Amnésies. Fictions du cinéma d’après Jean-Luc Godard, Paris, POL. Azoury, P. and Lalanne, J.–M. (2003), Cocteau et le cinéma. Désordres, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Cocteau, J. (1963), Lucien Clergue: Numéro Uno, Paris, Forces Vives. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 1988), Du Cinématographe (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Pierre Belfond. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 2003), Entretiens sur le cinématographe (L’Edition anniversaire) (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Editions du Rocher. Cocteau, J. (1992), Jean Cocteau, Orphée: The Play and the Film (ed. E. Freeman), London, Bristol Classical Press. Cocteau, J. (1995), Jean Cocteau: Romans, Poésies, Œuvres diverses (ed. B.Benech), Paris, Le Livre de Poche ‘Classiques Modernes’. Conolly, R. (1999), ‘Servicing Orpheus: Death, Love and Female Subjectivity in the film Orphée’, in C. D. E. Tolton (ed), The Cinema of Jean Cocteau: Essays on his films and their Coctelian sources, New York, Ottawa and London, Legas, 145–62. Durgnat, R. (1967), Films and Feelings, Cambridge MA, MIT Press. Godard, J.–L. (1985), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard 1950–1984 (ed. A. Bergala), Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Herbert, J. D. (1998), Paris 1937: Worlds on Exhibition, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press. Keller, M. (1986), The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell and Brakhage, Cranbury NJ, Associated University Press. Kihm, J.–J. (1960), ‘Orphée et Le Livre des morts tibétains’, Cahiers du cinéma 106: 19–24. Lansing Smith, E. (1996), ‘Framing the Underworld: Threshold Imagery in Murnau, Cocteau and Bergman’, Literature/Film Quarterly 24(3): 241–54. Oxenhandler, N. (1997), ‘Cocteau on Video: This Tape Could be Hazardous to your Health’, Bucknell Review 41(1): 17–26.

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5 Cocteau, Jean Marais and collaboration

Mon Jeannot – ma force, c’est toi, ma patrie, c’est toi. (My Jeannot – you are my strength, my homeland.) (J. Cocteau) In a photograph by Robert Doisneau taken in 1949 during the shooting of Orphée and called simply ‘Jean Marais, Jean Cocteau’, Cocteau, looking towards the camera amusedly, directs the index figure of his outstretched right hand down towards the back of Marais who stands in front of him, apparently unaware. Marais is as though Orpheus being commanded not to look back by Cocteau who, with his phallic finger, seems to be appealing to the camera as a witness. What is the meaning of this gesture? An awareness by Cocteau of the power relations between himself as author/director and Marais as humble actor? As such, the image could be equated with the design by J. Harold for posters of Orphée that represented the faces of the actors trapped within the clench of Cocteau’s protruding hand (with the notable exception of Dermit whose supine body, as we stated earlier, lies sprawled outside it). Yet the eroticism of Cocteau’s phallic gesture also clearly relates in some way to Cocteau’s intimate friendship with Marais and the fact that until very recently they had been lovers in a ten-year relationship. The relations in Cocteau’s work between life and art are at their greatest in his films, and the photograph is inviting us to speculate on them. Is Marais, twenty-four years his junior, simply his projection of an idealised, virile and younger self? Such a question, of course, presupposes that Cocteau was Pygmalion and that Marais always played the same dramatic role for him, which, as we have seen, is patently not the case. In fact, Cocteau’s

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career in the theatre and cinema was partly dictated by Marais’s own highly active wishes and ambitions. L’Aigle a deux têtes, for example, written in 1943 at the time of Cocteau’s greatest passion for Marais and offered to him as a Christmas gift, reflects without doubt the intensity of their relationship in some of the explosive exchanges between the Queen and Stanislas, her executioner turned silent slave of her will who is left suffocating helplessly in love. At this point, we should resist the temptation, not uncommon in Cocteau studies, to read a real relationship directly through an invented one, a critical move that would seek to render the Cocteau-Marais couple as unhealthy and doomed as that of Stanislas and the Queen. Cocteau had already, of course, responded to Marais’s artistic requirements in 1938 with the play Les Parents terribles. Fearing typecasting as an action hero, Marais had wished to play a nervous and confused man, not pretty and prone to tears. (As it happened, Marais ended up playing a host of swashbuckling parts following his performance as the eponymous highwayman in Billon’s Ruy Blas (1947), scripted by Cocteau.) And it 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 bête three years later proved that he could play three different parts simultaneously and, as the Beast, potentially be anything. Marais’s role and status vis-á–vis Cocteau is certainly more significant than that of actor/model in the style, say, of Robert Bresson’s unknown ‘models’. Indeed, despite Marais’s disciplined, hardworking nature and his constant avowal that he owed everything to Cocteau, a father figure who had both formed and transformed him, there was always an underlying tension to their collaboration. In later interviews Marais explained that he had struggled against Cocteau in such early stage productions as Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde (1937) (where he had replaced another actor Jean-Pierre Aumont) precisely because he did not wish to be a mere cog in Cocteau’s artistic machine (Marais 1999: 26). In fact, according to Marais, Cocteau was never really able to direct young actors, male or female, and thus Marais found himself actively resisting Cocteau’s directions. Three years after asking Cocteau to record a ‘spoken preface’ for a production of Britannicus which he staged in 1941 at the Theatre des BouffesParisiens in Paris, Marais himself insisted (successfully) that Cocteau

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not direct the first production of Les Parents terribles. Marais makes the point repeatedly that the collaborative process with Cocteau proved easier in the films because he was more mature and strong enough – and by implication humble enough – to receive Cocteau’s directions and interpret them in his own fashion. By the time of Orphée he waxes lyrical about Cocteau’s direction, or rather lack of it: ‘His [Cocteau’s] method is different: to live, speak, look at beautiful things together, to cultivate the soul without thinking of art - which in his eyes is no more than a margin of life’ (cited in Gilson 1969:172–3). As for Cocteau, in his 1951 book simply entitled Jean Marais, a comprehensive portrait of Marais’s life and artistic activities including poetry and painting, he acknowledged Marais’s natural defensiveness towards him, including Marais’s systematic wish always to state and do the contrary. However, he also emphasised how Marais usually came round to his point of view in such a way that he didn’t betray bis own and unified both (‘de telle sorte qu’il [Marais] ne trahissait pas le sien [= son avis] et faisait, des deux, un mélange’) (Cocteau 1951: 16). This pattern of benign mutual resistance and partnership is extended by the many books and letters Cocteau and Marais wrote for and about each other, where they were at once affectionate, admiring and honest in their opinions. Here is not the place to explore in detail this unique body of intimate material that features, for instance, Marais’s L’Inconcevable Jean Cocteau (1993) and Histoires de ma vie (1975) (comprising a suite of 115 unpublished poems by Cocteau), and Cocteau’s Lettres à Jean Marais (1987), complete with Marais’shighly camp and ever so slightly kitsch drawings of Cocteau naked. Throughout these works, Marais is often addressed by Cocteau as ‘mon fils Jeannot’ (‘my son Jeannot’) and Cocteau is both Marais’s ‘nègre’ (‘ghostwriter’, literally ‘Negro’) and his ‘Jesus Christ’. It suffices to say that both men recognised that theirs was an ideal meeting of styles or ‘strong lines’, and even as late as 1960 Cocteau still regarded Marais as indispensable for the correct interpretation and promulgation of his work: ‘Car sans toi [Marais] mes pièces deviennent injouables’ (Cocteau 1987: 467) (‘Because but for you my plays are becoming unperformable’). Yet how exactly did Cocteau view Marais’s performances in his own films? Cocteau placed Marais in the context of other young actors and tragedians of his generation such as Gérard Philippe and Alain Cuny who, he claimed, had fallen foul of the cinema (Cocteau 1951: 25). In this new medium, mise en scène (costume, decor, lighting, etc.) had

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gradually usurped the power of the major roles championed by the previous generations of great French actors. According to Cocteau, this encouraged in young actors an inhibiting reserve and even sense of ridicule regarding the theatre. He sought to reverse this decline by drawing directly on Marais’s heroic physique. Already in his first stage performance for Cocteau as the completely silent Chorus in Œdipe Roi (1937), Marais embodied raw physicality and eroticism, his naked flesh strapped with bands of cloth. As the knight Galahad in Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde he sported a ripped tunic. Yet it was Marais’s performance in 1938 in Les Parents terribles that was to prove so historic for Cocteau. With his full support, Marais threw all caution to the wind and broke away radically from the ‘modern’ acting style. His was a totally new dramatic method centred on the body in action (agir) and, in the words of Cocteau, ‘sans goût’ (‘without taste’). It shocked those in the audience who perceived only bluff and insolence but it disarmed and seduced the majority, and immediately inspired the creation of new and far more challenging male roles. By the same token, Marais helped to retheatricalise French cinema in the best sense. His performance in La Belle et la bête, according to Cocteau, demonstrated that he could act like Edouard de Max and Lucien Guitry whose earlier prestige and glamour he was now establishing for himself. Cocteau elaborated further on Marais’s acting style, emphasising his natural ‘fire’ and excess, his absolute honesty (he would feel dishonoured if compelled to cry false tears), his capacity for self-criticism (he applied to himself the rules of a poet) and his total investment in a role. Indeed, in the immersion style of method acting, characters and roles sometimes went dangerously to his head so completely did he wish to encapsulate them (Cocteau 1951: 20). Marais also played against the expectations and blandishments of both the public and the critics: he never fell into the usual actor’s trap of wanting the audience to applaud, nor did he show off (although perhaps as a matter of artistic scruple Marais himself thought otherwise). A further sign of his greatness for Cocteau was the film version of Les Parents terribles where Marais returned to the role of Michel which he had played so instinctively as a young man and which he now completely reinvented (‘II compose le role, l’invente, le domine’) (Cocteau 2003:129–30) (‘He composes the role, invents it, dominates it’). Cocteau ascribed Marais’s hypnotic charisma and magnetic hold over both male and female spectators not to his obvious sensuality but

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to the childhood that ‘inhabited’ him. Marais himself regarded his Apollonian looks and ‘archangelic physique’ as a natural curse rather than a blessing, and this helps to explain his desire to take on very different, even unnatural, monstrous roles. Having failed to enter the Paris Conservatoire he never received formal training apart from some acting classes with Charles Dullin. He was thus, theoretically at least, totally malleable. Critics such as Georges Beaumes hailed Marais’s unique combination of strength and elegance crowned by lyricism, yet Cocteau was probably more accurate when he described Marais as an ‘amalgam’ of different elements rather than perfection itself (Cocteau 1951: 87–8). Mindful no doubt of the number of times he made Marais perform dual roles (in Ruy Blas he was both highwayman and humble student, for example), Cocteau once asked rhetorically: ‘Est-ce là le visage réel de Jean Marais. Un acteur a-t–il véritablement un seul visage?’ (Marais 1996: caption to first photograph) (‘Is that the real face of Jean Marais? Does an actor truly have a single face?’). With his often extreme theatricality and naturalistic body language, Marais was a multiplicity of styles rolled into one. In Orphée, for instance, he runs the full gamut of masculinity, from solitary, jaded and misogynist poet to close male buddy with Heurtebise, virtually hysterical man-child, passionate lover and sweet, slightly effeminate husband. The preparation and reception of such performances for Cocteau was clearly influenced to some degree by Marais’s own gayness, his life as Cocteau’s lover (or ex-lover) and public knowledge of it. Again and again Cocteau offered Marais’s body up as an object of the viewer’s gaze and desire. Let us explore therefore in greater detail two of Marais’s greatest screen performances for Cocteau, in L’Eternel retour and La Belle et la bête, two roles which on one level could not be more different in style and approach. Taken together, however, they will allow us to appreciate the complex relations between the male body and the performance of gender played out in Cocteau’s cinema. They will also lead us to understand the value and significance of artistic collaboration in Cocteau, not only with Marais but also during the 1950s and 1960s with Edouard Dermit.

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L’Eternel retour We saw in Chapter 3 that L’Eternel retour became an immediate hit when released in 1943 yet fell dramatically out of favour after the war for the same reason that made it famous: Cocteau’s desire that the film, and art in general, remain in the realm of the intemporal and thus beyond the reach of political and historical actuality. Another related reason for the film’s fall from grace, however, was its articulation of masculinity in the figure of Patrice played by Marais. Marais brought to his Tristan role a combination of high theatrical and popular cinematic acting, plus a new (albeit classical) style of physical beauty and muscularity. Yet rather than a fully active and dominant male hero of the kind offered by Delannoy’s earlier film of proto-resistance, Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire (1943), Patrice revealed himself to be fundamentally weak and passive. In this respect he was not entirely different from other emasculated male figures of Occupation cinema which, as Noël Burch and Geneviève Sellier have demonstrated, ushered in a new feminised form of the desiring male lover, or ‘l’homme doux’ (Burch and Sellier 1996: 154). This phenomenon can be linked to a general crisis of masculinity in France at the time induced by the massive collapse of confidence in the Vichy regime under the ageing General Pétain. In fact, French cinema of the period experienced a shift towards more ‘feminine’ genres such as melodrama, costume drama and fantasy where the paternal role is rendered effectively impotent, if not castrated (consider the infantile Georges in Les Parents terribles at the mercy of his sister-in-law Léo, or the ailing patriarch in La Belle et la bête). Certain contemporary reviewers of L’Eternel retour questioned Marais’s masculinity and even considered him an ‘angel’ of indeterminate sex, while one English critic even wondered if the film was deliberately pulling the Germans’ leg in scenes such as Marais bursting into tears when upset. (It is worth noting here that Vichy had made homosexuality illegal in 1942 for the first time since the establishment of the Napoleonic code.) In short, the reception of L’Eternel retour, a film that provided a public glimpse of Cocteau and Marais’s relationship in the form of their dog Moulouk, came down to how people regarded Marais as Tristan and his depiction of masculinity. Carrie Tarr (1998) has brilliantly highlighted some of the problems with Patrice. Patrice may fight with Morolt and penetrate

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Nathalie’s bedchamber in order to rescue her yet these events lack real conviction. Moreover, it is Nathalie rather then Patrice who engineers their escape from the island. His encounters with fate are often marked by incomprehension, passivity and failure, and position him more as the object than subject. He is also narcissistic and impotent in his dealings with the sadistic dwarf, Achille, who eventually shoots him in the leg. Similarly, he usually accepts defeat or offers at best only mild protest, unable even to contest the very weak patriarchal figures of the film such as his uncle Marc. Above all, he needs a magic potion to realise that he is in love with Nathalie, and his final phrase before expiring for ever underlines his recognition of personal weakness: ‘Je ne peux pas retenir ma vie plus longtemps’ (‘I cannot sustain my life much longer’). In short, the film is a narrative of failure, although the protagonists are absolved from responsibility for their actions and portrayed instead as innocent victims of a superior and malign fate. No effective resistance is ever possible. As Tarr correctly argues, Marais/Patrice’s ambivalent masculinity acted as a conduit for the specific fears and anxieties of the film’s Occupation audience. Yet the film also works to restore faith in conventional masculinity through the nostalgic return at the end of the just, caring father (uncle Marc), and by audiovisual strategies that reassert the male body’s hardness. Patrice’s aesthetically pleasing death in the boathouse-cum-mausoleum is the occasion for a fantastic and impossibly reified phallic masculinity represented through the fetishised body of Marais. Patrice’s fall and redemption is thus an expression of, and consolation for, the audience’s collective loss of belief in the fiction of phallic masculinity (Tarr 1998: 69). On a more progressive note, the film may be said to blur sexual difference: the equally blond Nathalie functions as a mirror to enhance the beauty and pathos of the feminised male, although neither figure is established as the erotic object of the other’s gaze. Moreover, through its representation of a new ‘douceur virile’, the film offers a critique of conventional patriarchal masculinity. The partnerships between Patrice and both Nathalies are based, like his friendship with Lionel, on equality and freedom from patriarchal expectations, although the reactionary polarisation of the good idealised femininity of Nathalie I and the bad female figure of Nathalie II prefigures the misogyny of post-war French cinema. What is most important here for our discussion is how the spectator is placed in a desiring relationship with Marais and his

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vulnerable body through the device of the woundings. Throughout the film, Marais’s body is passively displayed as a soft, available object of desire caught in the vision of others; he rarely if ever becomes an active bearer of the male gaze. Similarly, his speech is often hesitant and gently acquiescent. Cocteau invites both the male and female viewer to share in the pleasures of identification with, and desire for, a gentle, emasculated man who is not just a doomed victim but also the heroic agent of his now aestheticised death. In fact, Patrice’s last moments offer a synthesis of passivity and agency all the more powerful for Marais’s youthful vigour, height and physique. Indeed, what makes Marais’s performance so compelling in L’Eternel retour, beyond the obvious gender ambivalence of his character, is its potent combination of beauty and pain. His wounded athletic body simply dazzles in its 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 bodily and filmic ruins, scars, woundings, fissures and ruptures (for example, Le Sang d’un poète with its opening shot of an exploded chimney tower whose destructive fall is suspended until the very end). Gercke’s analysis is premised on a comparison of Cocteau’s notion of the great ‘night’ of the human body with Freud’s theory of the unconscious (Gercke 1993: 10). His central argument is that the 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 1

See Greene 1988 which employs Deleuze’s 1967 study of masochism. This hinges on the suffering child/masochist undergoing a process not only of deserialisation but even of death in order that a new self freed from the superego and sexuality can be born uniquely of the cold mother who, through disavowal, magically possesses a phallus (see Deleuze 1991). Greene argues that Cocteau’s masochistic film aesthetic is part of his general désobéissance regarding the rules of cinema. See also Hill 1999, which develops some of Greene’s key ideas and argues that

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masochist transforms living sensuality into fantasy and art, and the stylistic signs of this disavowal or neutralisation of reality in Cocteau’s film include dramatic suspense and suspension (literally of characters against walls), waiting and paralysis, the framing of mirrors and keyholes, statues and severed heads, and the creation of tableaux vivants, notably in the Hotel des Folies-dramatiques of Le Sang d’un poète. Both these accounts are equally valid and confirm Danielle Chaperon’s increasingly influential claim that all Cocteau’s work is the production of a victim perpetually condemned to ascetic and abortive encounters with the unknown (see Chaperon 1994). What is crucial to grasp, however, is that images of pain and physical discomfort in Cocteau exemplify his cinematic aesthetic of ordered disorder, incompletion and imperfection, or what he called ‘limping beauty’. As we have already seen, as a self-styled ‘amateur’ of film Cocteau actively eschews the bind of perfection and deliberately opens his work up to chance and accident – the mysteries of the machine and the invisible – as well as to fragmentation and the ellipses and discontinuities of montage. Even when he is describing the process of adaptation between himself as writer and another director, he has recourse to the metaphor of limping: ‘II existe entre ma langue et celle du metteur en scène quelque chose qui boite’ (Cocteau 2003: 24) (‘There exists between my language and that of the director something that limps’). In performances such as that of Patrice in L’Eternel retour, Marais is thus offering Cocteau the most graphic means – an exquisite male body racked and distorted by marvellous misfortune – with which to register a cinematic absolute.

La Belle et la bête The possibilities for reconceiving masculinity afforded by Marais’s supremely manipulable body are taken further in La Belle et la bête where he is the male suitor Avenant, Prince Charming and the linguistically confounding la Bête in masculine/feminine/animal garb all rolled into one. Marais here is surely Cocteau’s projection of an ideal cinema at once fascinating and terrifying, a unique hybrid of paradox and contradiction, experimentation and possibility. Susan Hayward has explored the film’s different forms of a fractured mirror in Le Testament frustrate spectatorial identification and with it the drive towards primary identification.

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homoerotic gender performance, concentrating in particular on the moments of la Bête’s narcissism, autoeroticism and erotico-voyeurism (Hayward 1990:130). She reveals the degree to which the linguistic conditions that govern recognition and identity have been removed: la Bête is referred to simultaneously as ‘il’ and ‘elle’, a fact complemented by his/her/its queer visual appearance which we noted above in Chapter 3. Hayward argues that ‘misrecognition occurs through the shifting of the representations of la Bête’s “otherness”‘ (Hayward 1990:130). Hence, although all three main roles unite at the point of transformation into one (Marais), this cannot be considered pure narcissism because reflection can no longer occur. Hayward concludes very persuasively that the final dizzying exchange of bodies and personae at the end of the film – the transformation of la Bête into the Prince provoked by Diana’s shooting of Avenant in the back (or, more accurately, the resurrection of the Prince from la Bête at the same moment as the bloody fall of Avenant (the false image of the Prince) who acquires in death the face of la Bête, i.e. a double process of reversal) – represents homoerotically the release into beauty and love of one man by another. Such a positive reading encourages the beautiful idea that, just as Belle with la Bête, so too the viewer can ultimately sail off to new erotic lands and leave behind the troubled legacy of the patriarchal family, the perversion of restricted forms of sexual identity and the disabling fear of all forms of difference. Yet this leaves out the crucial matter of Marais himself who did not simply don a mask but, through long uncomfortable hours of make-up applied almost by surgical operation, actually incarnated la Bête. Naturally enough, the physiognomy of la Bête bears a striking resemblance to Marais who typically took his role to the extreme, even lapping stagnant water from a pond to emphasise la Bête’s feline characteristics.2 As another critic, Daniel Fischlin, has observed, la Bête is on one level the imaginary other of the director and the film’s camerawork a sensuous point of contact between Cocteau and his lover. Fischlin considers Cocteau’s desire for Marais as a perverse desire for the monster as projected through Belle. Once Cocteau’s directorial eye is incorporated into the context of Belle’s desiring gaze, la Bête becomes an ambiguous sexual construct, especially if we bear in mind that la Bête is already a bisexual object of simultaneous desire, 2

Later in the same film during the scene of Avenant’s killing by Diana, a real arrow was even fired into Marais’s back protected by cork.

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anxiety and revulsion and thus not to be read in simple binary terms (whether a witch if it is a her or a rival if a him) (Fischlin 1998: 80).3 Fischlin suggests that the queer dimensions of Marais’s multiple roles even as Avenant and the Prince inflect the film with a powerful emblem of fluid sexual identities that resist simple categorisation in the modes of mere hetero- or homo-normativity. Interestingly, Fischlin also associates the queer margins of La Belle et la bête with the film’s Jewish sub-texts which we highlighted in Chapter 3, in particular regarding the final denouement where Belle reveals she is more attracted by the bestial than by the idealised Prince. The sudden transformation will require her, as she puts it, to ‘adjust’. Fischlin writes: Thus, even as monstrous love is being erased, the film reinstates it in Belle’s retrospective attraction to the difference(s) incarnated in the Beast and in the serial, performative presence of Marais. Out of monstrous love emerges Cocteau’s critique of normative values but in a way that none the less reproduces, by way of an ineluctable narrative logic, the very dissonances which underpin the troubled idealism that brings the film to a close. The queer and the Jew enact those dissonances as the film struggles into the discomfort of its classic opportunism. (Fischlin 1998: 80) Fischlin poses finally two highly charged questions that presuppose the definite answer yes: ‘Does the Beast’s transformative erasure at the film’s end mirror the doubly erased figure of the Jew hidden in the margins of the film? Have Beast and Jew merged in the symbolics of the film as emblems of an always threatened, always threatening difference?’ (Fischlin 1998: 83) One could pursue still further the queer margins of Cocteau’s gaze forming and deforming the body of his lover through the manipulation of the camera’s gaze. Rebecca M. Pauly, for instance, has proposed that La Belle et la bête is essentially an incestuous mirror of 3

Fischlin demonstrates that two of the roles – Avenant and the Prince – physically resemble the father as a type of perversely heterosexual masculinity. Avenant’s perversity lies in his desire to interfere between father and daughter, while the Prince’s, barely figured in the film, lies in his immediate desire for Belle who has been the object of both bestial and incestuous loves (i.e. from the father). Hence, Belle’s object-relation to both Avenant and the Prince is conflated in the figure of the Beast, who is both the ideal (the Prince) and the threatening lover (Avenant) by virtue of being played by the same actor.

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Cocteau’s Oedipal compulsions regarding his own mother (Pauly 1989: 87).4 Such biographical speculation, however, lies beyond the scope of this study. To return specifically to the issue of Marais’s body: through la Bête his beauty is visible precisely at the point of the grotesque. Moreover, performing with ardour at the limits of his powers, Marais, as Cocteau put it, imposes ‘une maladresse de gros chien et des excés de fauve’ (my emphasis) (Cocteau 2003: 118) (‘the awkwardness of a large dog and the excesses of a wild beast’). This again is a manifestation of Cocteau’s principle of asymmetric, limping beauty. Which is to say, the performativity of Marais, his ability to don a series of variously masculine roles simultaneously (including also that of Cocteau’s lover), is dependent on his remarkable capacity to undergo extreme physical stress. His is a ‘body-in-process’ at the most concrete level, one that has the impressive potential not simply to work through individual pain but also to register and display it accessibly as sexual and aesthetic difference. This is the real measure of Marais’s versatility and it renders irrelevant any technical limitations that he may have had as an actor. The fact that Cocteau also suffered major physical discomfort during the shooting of La Belle et la bête is not simply a mimetic effect but confirms an extraordinary symbiosis between actor and director in terms of artistic vision. Marais, after all, was the type of actor who, like Cocteau, embraced the aleatory nature and spontaneous incidents of a production. If together they extended the boundaries of male roles in film as well as traditional notions of masculinity, it is precisely because they revealed masculinity to be a complex and contingent set of performances directly rooted in the body and its aesthetic transformation through physical trial and suffering. This is what makes Marais’s collaboration with Cocteau so different from that between Cocteau and Dermit. By the time of Le Testament d’Orphée, the complex physical/aesthetic amalgam of Marais had broken down into its constituent parts: the smooth, muscular body of Dermit/Cégeste who performs a series of physical feats, and the personal aesthetics of pain embodied directly in the lost and wandering biographical figure of the Poet (Cocteau). This is not to downplay or 4 Pauly details the major differences in approach between Cocteau and de Beaumont and highlights Cocteau’s own admission that the legend of Psyche, who survives trials and tribulations to find divine love, is ‘word for word’ that of Beauty and the Beast.

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minimise Dermit’s contribution. Far from it. We have already seen in Chapter 3 how Dermit enabled Cocteau to take his cinema of pure acts to new limits. In fact, Dermit’s very lack of artfulness and ambiguity in comparison with Marais functioned as the direct means for Cocteau to project and realise new filmic acts, thus allowing him to advance further with his own experiment in self-performance. In other words, what made Dermit’s acting style usually seem so false and wooden, for example, his earnest, rather unsmiling face and overall lack of subtlety, is precisely what made it so right for Le Testament. Indeed, Cocteau insisted on Dermit for the part of Paul in Les Enfants terribles for the reason that he embodied the spirit of ‘the Game’, defined as the state of semi-consciousness of children, and possessed natural intelligence and instinctive goodness as opposed to acquired knowledge. Yet by propelling Dermit into an active artistic role, Cocteau was also attempting something new in his cinema: to displace and even undermine some of his own authorial importance. It is Dermit/ Cégeste whose spectacular reversal of roles after Orphée to become guide to Cocteau’s blind seer in Le Testament ensures that Cocteau is constructively ‘turned inside out’ by his own film like a glove. This is the new art of reverse motion superseding Marais’s more theatrical craft of agir. To take the case of Cocteau’s virtual ‘crucifixion’ by Dermit at the end of Le Testament: this is not simply an exposition of the Poet’s idea that works of art, even if they create themselves, are always dreaming of killing both father and mother. Which is to say, it is not the same old Freudian or Sophoclean story of doom, either of Oedipus or Orpheus. Rather, during moments like this Cocteau appears to be attempting to reverse in art the power dynamic that clearly exists in life with his loverscum-collaborators where, as illustrated in the photograph of Marais with which we began, he effectively always holds the phallus. Dermit, who remained a model of discretion right up until his death on 15 May 1995, revealed in one interview published posthumously the full scale and reach of that phallus which reigned from their very first meeting: ‘Jean, lui, il savait ces choses. C’est lui qui a voulu, c’est lui qui a decide. Sinon, ça ne se serait pas passé si vite. Ce n’est sûrement pas moi qui aurais choisi Jean. Je n’aurais jamais osé. Moi, j’aurais bien voulu mais lui peut-être pas’ (Soleil 2003:103).5 Cocteau’s supreme confidence in his 5

‘Jean knew these things. It was he who wanted, he who decided. If not, it would not have happened so quickly. It certainly would not have been me who chose Jean. I

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own power over Dermit then and later (as Cocteau’s official heir and literary executor Dermit served as the guarantor of his futurity) is surely what helped him to consider divesting himself of his own directorial authority in Le Testament, an approach that goes hand in hand with his general wish to submit to the mysterious powers of the cinematographic machine. The precise point at which such authorial loss becomes immediate creative gain is something we shall consider in our analysis of cinematic form and eroticism in Chapter 6. Certainly, by facilitating new artistic sites not of power but of powerlessness, Dermit became a vital collaborator for Cocteau, his literal and metaphorical ‘compagnon de route’ in Le Testament, even though they wrote no books on or about each other in the style of Cocteau and Marais (strangely not even one formal tribute by Cocteau to Dermit could be found for the volume Du Cinématographe). We see, therefore, that for very different reasons Marais and Dermit were active collaborators at the very centre of Cocteau’s film work and not simply idealised mirror images of Cocteau himself. Dermit replaced Marais as the number two in Cocteau’s films for specific aesthetic reasons and effects, not because Cocteau wished merely to substitute the younger body of his current lover for that of his ex– (a process played out hypervisibly and ironically in Orphée where Marais nevertheless still remains the leading man). Marais would remain in constant awe of Cocteau until his own death on 8 November 1998 at the age of 85. Like Dermit with whom he remained a loyal friend to guard the Cocteau flame, Marais preserved Cocteau’s memory by defending it against detractors. He continued to act in revivals of Cocteau’s plays and produced stage shows about their relationship such as Cocteau-Marais, first performed in Paris in 1983 and conceived in collaboration with Jean-Luc Tardieu. These facts combined contradict the impression often given of Marais and Dermit as minor figures, an would never have dared. I would have wanted to, but he probably not.’ In this private interview recorded by Christian Soleil in October 1990, Dermit reveals that Cocteau had actually predicted his arrival and that he would be the Cégeste of his early poem ‘L’Ange Heurtebise’. Even following Cocteau’s death, married and with children, the influence of Cocteau on Dermit was total: ‘C’est lui qui m’y oblige [ ... ] C’est lui qui me guide encore dans la vie de tous les jours, qui m’indique ce qu’il faut faire, qui m’envoie des amis’ (‘It’s he who forces me to do this [ ... ] He who still guides me in my daily life, who indicates what I should do, who sends me friends’). For a celebration of Dermit’s friendship with Cocteau, see Caizergues 1988.

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idea superficially encouraged by Cocteau’s preference for diminutive first-names, Jeannot and Doudou respectively (he had already lopped off the two final silent letters ‘he’ from Dermit’s original surname of Dermithe), as well as by particular scenes such as the end of Le Testament where the Poet accidentally walks past Marais as the blind Oedipus, remarking: ‘Ceux qu’on a trop voulu connaitre, il est possible qu’on les rencontre un jour sans les voir’ (‘It is possible that one day we can meet those we’ve been too anxious to know and not see them’). In fact, Cocteau needed both men to be creative forces in their own right, a point made explicit in La Villa Santo-Sospir where Dermit is introduced primarily as a painter (a collection of Dermit’s paintings opened in Paris in 1959). The result in both cases was an open, engaged and fully assumed act of collaboration that never wished away the small matter of power and the responsibility that goes with it, and which also avoided the kind of sexual subterfuges, repressions and denials that can arise through close collaboration between (heterosexual) male writers, a process brilliantly analysed by Wayne Koestenbaum in his 1990 book, Double Talk: The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration. Cocteau’s collaborative practice with Marais and Dermit may usefully be contrasted in this respect with that of another French ‘literary filmmaker’, Marguerite Duras, who spent the last sixteen highly public years of her life with a gay man almost half of her age. This was Yann Andrea, about whom she wrote at length in both novels and essays and who featured in some of her later films. As I have argued elsewhere, theirs was an intertextual collaboration across age, gender and form whereby Andrea, or ‘Y. A., homosexual’, functioned as the silent and abject – because homosexual – background to her work. He served, in fact, as a reliable source of ‘realness’ ripe for sublimation (then desubhmation and resublimation) through textual processes of metaphorical equivalence and conversion (see Williams 1997: 139— 59).6 In the filmic terms proposed by her 1981 short film, L’Homme atlantique, which features shots of Andrea in its first part and only black screen in the second, he was both an absent image and a fully inked-in 6 I argue further that Andréa becomes a simulation and parody of the Real Thing, rendered like Charlus’s ‘almost symbolic derrière’ in Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu both hypervisible and invisible. Already the name Andréa, gendered feminine when used as a first name in German and charged with Proustian resonances, constituted a literary troping by Duras on Andrea’s original surname, Lemée.

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screen of black writing. At stake here was not simply the unequal power relations existing between a famous heterosexual writer and her ‘secretary-cum-companion’. If Andrea’s identity with Duras was never stable, it is because Duras was never quite at the same stage of artistic sublimation. Thus, Andrea could range in status from editor of her journalism to minor technical assistant and silent amanuensis during interviews, as well as from sexual partner and even Jewish husband in one work (Yann Andrea Steiner (1990)) to simply ‘friend’ in another. He could also function as a privileged agent of sublimation, adapting and abstracting the fantasy structure of one text (L’Eté 80 (1980)) for Duras to read aloud on audiocassette (La Jeune fille et l’enfant (1981)), and occasionally perform, if only briefly, a paternal gesture. 7 For these reasons, Andrea was effectively both abject and sublime, and ironically could represent writing for Duras even though he did not write in his own voice (at least until her death in 1996, although even in self-penned works like Cet Amour-là (1999) this still remains a matter for debate). In short, Duras’s textual erotics with Andrea exemplified her sublimation of form as a kind of textual cure whereby difference is always rhetorically reappropriated, despite her repeated claims and ambitions to the contrary. In the case of the gay man, Duras installed him as a point of impossibility within the symbolic system, i.e. as its ‘other face’. Cocteau’s constellation of gay lovers, angels and protégés in the cinema, a line that stretches back to Jean Desbordes and Enrique Rivero in Le Sang d’un poète, was never subjected to such warped games of power and manipulation. Indeed, it may be regarded as Cocteau’s concerted answer to the avant-garde depicted with such derision in Orphée with its echoes both of the earlier surrealists led by the intensely homophobic Breton and of the contemporary straight-laced existentialists who attempted to recuperate the gay evil of Genet for their own philosophical purposes (although we note that long before Sartre began work on his monumental sanctification of Genet entitled Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952), he and Cocteau came together in July 1943 to testify in favour of Genet, then on trial for stealing). Of course, Cocteau never sought to create a film movement, a ‘school of Cocteau’, 7

In Duras 1987, Andréa proved himself capable of achieving a conclusive act (opening and closing the door in ‘La population nocturne’) and thereby facilitating narrative closure. Duras reminds us here, however, that Yann will never be a ‘real man’ (159) (original emphasis).

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any more than he intended to act as a kind of Gallic George Cukor or ‘male midwife to the stars’, as one critic once meanly put it. Rather, he was attempting to initiate new forms of creative friendship which cinema, as an essentially collaborative enterprise based on mutual trust and forthrightness, encouraged and facilitated. Cocteau, we recall, took great care in choosing his crew and learning the strengths and weaknesses of each member. The only way to touch men’s minds was, as he put it, to express oneself at peak pitch and dare to encounter souls tuned into his wavelength. Le Testament, a film expressly about the relations and generations of time and people and the very process of continuity through transformation, confirmed that his artistic identity was also formed directly and indirectly through others (Dermit ushers in the film, the Poet’s ‘friends’ appear at the end, etc.), and that it was their kindness and collaboration that helped to propel him forwards. Nevertheless, we do need to make a careful distinction between Cocteau’s mobile corps of gay lovers/actors/collaborators and heterosexual male friends such as Picasso, Dominguin and Aznavour who are positioned and fixed in Le Testament more as the fascinated spectators of the Poet’s death and resurrection (though without the cruel indifference of the theatregoers in Le Sang d’un poète). In the case of Picasso whom Cocteau admired for being a completely free artist ‘beyond time’, the two men experienced a difficult collaboration during Parade in 1917 (Cocteau’s multiple contribution was relegated in the credits to simply that of graphic artist) and they fell out with each other in later years. Another exception to the above would have to be Genet, for whom Cocteau performed a range of roles – literary agent for NotreDame-des Fleurs (1946), illustrator of Querelle de Brest (1947), supervisor of the shooting of Un Chant d’Amour (1950), possibly even transient lover – but who did not always reciprocate in kind. Indeed, Genet often badmouthed and even stole from Cocteau, the very man who proclaimed him unconditionally as a genius.8 Might it be possible to regard the gay ‘fraternity’ which Cocteau creates from film to film, and which ranges from former to current and 8 See Dyer 2003: 76. For his part, Genet wrote a play for Marais in 1943 entitled Héliogabale (never published), his play Les Bonnes (produced by Cocteau’s collaborator Louis Jouvet in 1946) was closely inspired by Cocteau’s spoken song Anna la bonne, and he wrote a fulsome eulogy of Cocteau in 1950 for the Cocteau special issue of the Belgian magazine Empreintes.

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ex-lovers as well as ‘naturalised sons’, in terms of sublimation, specifically the sublimation of the sexual into a communal form of friendship? In such a reading, Cocteau’s cinematic practice of collaboration would allow him to move beyond the fatal bind of passionate love, that amour/mort syndrome which he suffered from repeatedly in real life. I am thinking most obviously here of the tragic early death of Radiguet in 1923 from food poisoning, followed by that of Marcel Khill in 1940 and Desbordes in 1944 at the hands of the Gestapo. Indeed, while the self-image usually presented by Cocteau insists on the centrality of his sexuality to creativity, it also links both to pain and destruction according to a brutally simple equation: sex/passion = death = poetry. Death is to be found in beauty, particularly the fatal beauty of young men (see Galand 1979). Conceived as a form of art, sustained collaboration in the cinema can instead engender new configurations of life and love. It is not insignificant that the chapter immediately following his seminal essay ‘Du merveilleux au cinématographe’ in La Difficulté d’être is entitled ‘De l’amitié’, where Cocteau praises friendship as a gentle and continuous ‘spasm’ without the dangers of fleeting passion (‘L’amour est à base de spasmes brefs [ ... ] L’amitié est un spasme tranquille. Sans avarice’) (Cocteau 1995: 895) (‘Love is essentially a series of brief spasms ... Friendship is a calm spasm. Without avarice’). In the case of Marais, that bond of loyal friendship and good faith lasted twenty-five years and says as much about Marais, who calmly steered Cocteau through the darkest days of the Occupation and even brought him back from the brink in 1940 by encouraging drug rehabilitation, as it does about Cocteau. In L’lnconcevable Jean Cocteau, where he underlines Cocteau’s natural generosity and beneficence in overseeing the literary work of lovers such as Radiguet (Le Diable au corps) and Desbordes (J’adore), Marais puts it like this: ‘mon père avait raison: j’étais né pour l’amitié et pour la vivre avec intensité’ (Marais 1993: 24) (‘My father was right: I had been born for friendship and to experience it intensely’). The writer Monique Lange once described the CocteauMarais relationship as ‘a superb history of love-friendships [amouramitiés] which heterosexuals often find difficult to understand’ (see Lange 1989). Cocteau himself, who viewed Marais’s ‘enduring soul’ as a model, recognised the ‘hygienic’ and moral aspects of their unique work of collaboration which at once shaped their friendship and finetuned his working practices. He expressed it like this: ‘L’amitié [pour

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Marais] me vint de cet aménagement de notre ceuvre, aménagement réglé, à notre insu, par ce qui veille en nous sur son hygiène. Il rassurait ma crainte de mêler de petites ames a mes entreprises’ (Cocteau 1951: 71).9 Marais, in fact, personified Cocteau’s aim not to predetermine the performances of his actors so as to elicit from them a set of ‘vibrations’ matching his own. Yet Marais also encapsulated for Cocteau the primary function of art which, he claimed, was only truly valid if also a projection of morality. Cinema is fundamentally a sexual and erotic mechanism, most obviously due to the power and lure of the scopic drive, yet it functions ideally for Cocteau as a space of open exchange where everyone involved in the production process, including himself as author, is placed on an equal level, that of humble receiver (of mystery, of revelation, of gifts from the unknown), which is to say, the Other. Indeed, the practice of cinema privileges and extends what Cocteau sees as the key stage in any project, the moment of completion when we become ‘other’: ‘je fais confiance à cet autre, á cet étranger que nous devenons quelques minutes après avoir créé un ouvrage’ (original emphasis) (Cocteau 2003:144) (‘I trust this other, this stranger that we become a few minutes after completing a work’). For all its specular, and often spectacular, high-art trappings, Cocteau’s is a cinema of plurality pitched beyond narcissism and always in expansion.10 As such, 9 ‘My friendship for Marais derived out of this arrangement of our work, an arrangement ordered without our knowledge by that within us which takes care of its smooth working. He allayed my anxieties of bringing lesser souls into our projects.’ 10 One might profitably compare this type of post-narcissistic engagement with otherness with Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s concept of difference as a ‘nonthreatening supplement to sameness’ in their study of a more recent gay filmmaker, Derek Jarman. In Bersani and Dutoit 1999, they privilege those moments in [arman where tenderness is revealed as dependent on a certain degree of self-recognition in the object we reach towards, Unlike specular narcissism, the narcissism represented during such moments facilitates contacts with the world rather than imprisoning the subject in solipsistic relations to others. A nonantagonistic relation to difference, they argue, ‘depends on this inaccurate replication of the self in difference, on our recognising that we are already out there. Self-love initiates the love of others; the love of the same does not erase difference when it takes place as a dismissal of the prejudicial opposition between sameness and difference. Difference can then be loved as a non-threatening supplement to sameness’ (71–2).

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it may be said finally to provide for Cocteau a perfect personal response to Sartrean engagement: ‘Sartre sait ce que j’en pense. Mon engagement est de me perdre jusqu’à l’extrémité la plus inconfortable de moi-même. Si je m’engageais au-dehors, soit je trahirais les exigences de mon engagement interne, soit celles de mon engagement externe’ (Cocteau 2003: 46).11 How this existential process connects precisely with the specificities of cinematic form and style in Cocteau’s cinema, ranging from physical resurrections through reverse motion to the endless traffic of objects between men, will be the subject of our next chapter.

References Bersani, L. and Dutoit, U. (1999), Jarman, Caravaggio, London, British Film Institute. Burch, N. and Sellier, G. (1996), La Dróle de guerre des sexes dans le cinéma français 3930–1956, Paris, Nathan. Caizergues, P. (1998), Jean Cocteau Edouard Dermit. Un demi-siècle d’amitié 1947– 95, Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry. Chaperon, D. (1994), ‘Les Parques seraient-elles monteuses? Note sur le cinématographe’, Revue des Sciences Humaines 233: 71–87. Cocteau, J. (1951), Jean Marais, Paris, Calmann Lévy ‘Masques et Visages’. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 1998), Du Cinématographe (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Pierre Belfond. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 2003), Entretiens sur le cinématographe (L’Edition anniversaire) (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Editions du Rocher. Cocteau, J. (1987), Lettres à Jean Marais, Paris, Albin Michel. Cocteau, J. (1995), Jean Cocteau: Romans, Poésies, Œuvres diverses (ed. B. Benech), Paris, Le Livre de Poche ‘Classiques Modernes’. Deleuze, G. ([1967] 1991), Masochism (trans. Jean McNeill), New York. Duras, M. (1987), La Vie matérielle, Paris, POL. Dyer, R. ([1990] 2003), Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay film, London and New York, Routledge. Fischlin, D. (1998), ‘Queer Margins: Cocteau, Le Belle et la bête, and the Jewish differend’, Textual Practice 12(1): 69–88. Galand, R. (1979), ‘Cocteau’s Sexual Equation’, in G. Stambolian and E. Marks eds, Homosexualities and French Literature, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 279–94.

11 ‘Sartre knows what I think. Engagement for me is losing myself even in the most uncomfortable extreme parts of my being. If I committed myself to the outside, I would betray either the demands of my internal engagement or those of my external engagement.’

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Gercke, D. (1993), ‘Ruin, Style and Fetish: The Corpus of Jean Cocteau’, Nottingham French Studies 32(1): 10–18. Gilson, R. ([1964] 1969), Jean Cocteau: An Investigation into His Films and Philosophy, New York, Crown. Greene, N. (1988), ‘Deadly Statues: Eros in the Films of Jean Cocteau’, The French Review 61(6): 890–8. Hayward, S. (1990), ‘Gender politics – Cocteau’s Belle is not that Bête: Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la bête (1946)’, in S. Hayward and G. Vincendeau eds, French Film: Texts and Contexts, London and New York, Routledge, 127–35. Hill, I. A (1999), ‘“Stranded Bodies: Found Objects”: The Masochistic Aesthetic in Le Testament d’Orphée’, in C. D. E. Tolton ed., The Cinema of Jean Cocteau: Essays on His Films and their Coctelian Sources, New York, Ottawa and Toronto, Legas, 181–92. Koestenbaum, W. (1990), Double Talk. The Erotics of Male Literary Collaboration, London: Routledge. Lange, M. (1989), Cocteau. Prince sans royaume, Paris, J.–C. Lattès. Marais, J. (1993), L’Inconcevable Jean Cocteau, Monaco, Editions du Rocher. Marais, J. (1996), Mes Métamorphoses, Paris, Editions de la Martinière. Marais, J. (1999), ‘Entretien’, Cinémaction 92(3): 22–7. Pauly, R. M. (1989), ‘Beauty and the Beast: From fable to film’, Literature/’Film Quarterly 17(2): 84–90. Rolot, C. and Caizergues, P. (eds) (1994), Le Cinéma de Jean Cocteau, suivi de: Hommage à Jean Marais, Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry. Soleil, C. (2003), Raconte moi Jean Cocteau, suivi d’entretiens inédits avec Edouard Dermit, Lyons, Ancre et Enere. Tarr, C. (1998), ‘L’Eternel retour. Reflection of the Occupation’s Crisis in French Masculinity?’, SubStance 87: 55–72. Williams, J. S. (1997), The Erotics of Passage: Pleasure, Politics, and Form in the Later Work of Marguerite Duras, Liverpool and New York, Liverpool University Press/St Martin’s Press.

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6 For our eyes only: body and sexuality in reverse motion En effet, dans un film, le texte est peu de chose. II importe de le rendre invisible. La primauté de l’œil sur l’oreille oblige le poete á raconter en silence, à enchaîner les images, á prévoir leur moindre reeul et leur moindre relief. (Indeed, in a film, the text doesn’t amount to much. It is essential to make it invisible. The primacy of the eye over the ear obliges the poet to tell his story in silence, to connect images, to provide for their slightest backward motion and their slightest relief.) (J. Cocteau) Merde! Merde! Merde! Merde! Merde! (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 guntoting, whip-lashing, all-round active Queen in L’Aigle à deux têtes, the imperturbable and statuesque Léo in Les Parents terribles, the cruel and glacial Princess of Death in Orphée, and Minerva in Le Testament d’Orphée leaning on her spear in her frogman’s suit and carrying a shield embossed with a Gorgon’s head. Frederick Brown talks of Cocteau’s ‘belles dames sans merci’ who unsex men as another instance of his decadent romanticism and his vocation for ecstatic selfmartyrdom (Brown 1968: 378). The gay film critic Al LaValley has taken a rather different and more positive approach, arguing that much of the eroticism of the Princess in Orphée resides in her bodyguards dressed in leather who, at one point, carry Cégeste aloft and prostrate between them, his head tipped backwards (a gesture later repeated by Orphée when he is smothered to death by Cégeste and Heurtebise in

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the Zone) (cited in Dyer 2003: 84). Like the penetration of the mirror 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 cited in Dyer 2003: 84). This is confirmed by another gay film critic Richard Dyer who emphasises in regard to the same film that the Poet’s imagination as presented at the Hotel des Foliesdramatiques contains images with sadomasochistic, lesbian and androgynous overtones as well as of death. For Dyer, the ‘surrender to a heightened eroticism, believed in enough to be a turn-on, goes hand in hand with a full consciousness of the artifices of the role playing and ritual style involved’ (Dyer 2003: 84). These sexually direct readings of Cocteau’s films help to propel them a little unexpectedly into the heady world of Genet’s Un Chant d’amour and testify to the homoerotic force and seductiveness of Cocteau’s imagery (see also Chapter 3 in Saunders 2000). As such, they offer a powerful corrective to the pervading view that Cocteau presents a negative self-image of homosexuality (see, for example, Robinson 1995:49–57). Bearing in mind what we established in Chapter 5 of Cocteau’s multiple use of Marais and Dermit, it is, however, perhaps more difficult to substantiate La Valley’s related claim that in Orphée the heterosexuality of the Orpheus-Eurydice legend is simply displaced into a relationship between Eurydice and Heurtebise, while Orphée’s passion is reserved jointly for Death (the Princess) and Cégeste whom he has seen die in an accident. No relationship of any kind really develops between Orphée and Cégeste beyond that of poetic rivals, their joint obedience to the Princess, and Orphée’s obsession with Cégeste’s cryptic lines of poetry emanating from the car radio. More crucially, zones of uncertainty and ambiguity exist within Cocteau’s cinema that are simply left out of such exclusively thematic accounts of sexuality and (sado)masochism, however compelling. Nor do these zones correspond neatly to the usual norms of gay aestheticism, for example, the exaltation of the false as beautiful as proposed by Marcel Eck in Sodome (1966). Resisting the temptation merely to search for hidden or repressed gay images and symbols in Cocteau’s work, an approach that can often turn into a futile hunt for symptoms, what are we to make, for

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instance, of those equally erotic moments of apparent narrative breakdown that are so visible in Cocteau’s films but which have never been properly addressed? I am referring in particular to the extensive use of reverse-motion photography which, as we saw in Chapter 3, can cause moments of real confusion (is filmic time going forwards or backwards?) and becomes so endemic to Cocteau’s method that there is often no indication in the published screenplay that many of the events described are created through this process: moments in Le Testament like Cégeste’s magical arrival from the sea, the coming into life of a hibiscus flower petal by petal, and the sudden upright resurrection of the Poet following his violent ‘death’. Daniel Gercke has characterised Cocteau’s use of such effects as naive, arguing that the filmic apparatus, by suspending or reversing moments of prior collapse, shows disavowal as the temporal inversion of castration. The ‘uncanniness of the special effect’, Gercke argues, ‘obliges the viewer to perceive the (res)erection as illusory. The erection is put under erasure, and the male body is reborn as its own fetishistic double, manifestly unable to coincide with itself (Gercke 1993: 17). It may be true, as Gercke asserts, that the stiffly erect male bodies in Le Testament end up merely ‘miming’ the fetishised female phallus of the hibiscus flower. Certainly, Cégeste rising from the sea ‘like a stamen’ to land ‘under the flashing beam of the lighthouse’ (Cocteau’s words in the screenplay) is whoppingly phallic, and it vies in mocking extravagance with the ascension by Belle and the Prince at the end of La Belle et le bête (also shot in reverse motion). Gercke’s appealing idea is, however, complicated by the obvious fact – not usually acknowledged – that just as there are different types of trucage in Cocteau’s films, whether produced through mise en scène, the camera or (very rarely) the laboratory, 1 so too there are distinctive forms of reverse-motion photography. The first kind are clearly those moments of resurrection and metamorphosis that were already complex manoeuvres during their filming and which required the actor to fall backwards without bending his or her knees. These can be linked to those dramatic feats of mise en scène which Cocteau inherited from the theatre (e.g. Marais falling 1

See Dittrich 1997. Dittrich shows the occasional degree of confusion and overlap in Cocteau’s use of the terms trucage, truc and (la) truca (special laboratory effects), which cover both discoveries and ‘errors’ and which can also refer to sound-effects. Cocteau claimed never to indulge in truca although this is manifestly not the case, as the stupendous final image of La Belle et le bête proves.

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backwards down a flight of stairs in L’Aigle à deux têtes) and which he brings together under the term ‘le merveilleux direct’, Yet there are also other far more subtle moments that privilege less the dynamic flow of movement produced (the surging jump forwards into the frame, for instance) than the object undergoing such motion. I am thinking of such instances in Le Testament as Cocteau’s self-portrait slowly coming into being by means of a rag, a fire burning as if backwards on to itself, or Cégeste’s verbal accusation against his creator played in reverse and thus totally scrambled. Nothing particularly remarkable was witnessed in order to produce such moments. They belong to ‘reel time’ in the sense that they are a pure phenomenon of the camera, at once impersonal and objective, and otherwise invisible. As with the first set of cases, however, they entail some form of initial chute or pre-collapse, as if the act of erasing, dismantling or destroying (and that even includes destructive words against one’s creator) were intrinsic to creation. In view of the complexities involved, can we approach the use of reverse-motion photography in Cocteau’s films without deferring immediately to the phallus, even in its castrated form? After all, to film a fall in reverse also seems to accelerate the movement’s speed since inverted time does not pass at the same speed as forward time, a fact which Orphée itself hints at with the mysterious phrase relayed from the Zone, ‘Le silence va plus vite á reculons’ (‘Silence goes faster backwards’). Cocteau himself never explained in any great detail his reasons and motivations for using reverse-motion photography. Here is one brief moment, however, when he discusses its use in Le Testament, concentrating on the second type we have formalised. He appears to deny the possibility of ascribing any particular meaning or interpretation to the process other than as performance: II n’y a jamais de symbole. II n’y en a pas dans la fleur. J’ai choisi l’hibiscus, parce qu’il y a des hibiscus chez Mme Weisweiller, parce que c’est commode à déchirer. De plus c’est la fleur de Cagliostro. Quand je la reconstitue, mes mains sont des animaux. Elles sont détachées de moi, elle vivent comme des bêtes. Mais il ne suffit pas de tourner à l’envers, il faut, tout le temps, que je joue avec mes mains de telle sorte que ça n’ait pas l’air d’etre tourné á l’envers. II y a la autant de creation que dans une scène jouée par Madame Réjane ou par Madame Sarah Bernhardt. Je ne me vante pas: j’essaie de vous montrer combien tout cela représente de travail. (Cocteau 1960: 10)2 2 ‘There is never a symbol. There isn’t any with the flower. I chose the hibiscus because

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The Cagliostro reference is to the eighteenth-century Count Alessandro Cagliostro (1713–95), an Italian adventurer notorious throughout Europe as a necromancer and alchemist who narrowly missed death by the Inquisition in 1791. Although fleeting, it is enough to place Cocteau’s use of reverse-motion photography firmly within a general metaphysical context of death and transfiguration. For indeed, not just the events of phallic rising obtained through reverse motion but all moments of film record a process of resurrection and metamorphosis. In Le Testament, when asked by the Princess during his mock-trial to define ‘film’, Cocteau as the Poet talks in the oxymoronic and quasierotic terms of a static ejaculation: ‘Un film est une source pétrifiante de la pensée. Un film ressuscite les actes morts – Un film permet de donner l’apparence de la réalité à l’irréel’ (‘A film is a petrifying source [and fountain: source] of thought. A film revives dead acts – A film allows one to give a semblance of reality to unreality’). Cocteau is again referring here both to cinema’s documentary aspect and to the fact that reality and action have first to be sacrificed and ‘shot’ (cinema is death at work, to cite Cocteau) in order to be resurrected by the projector on the screen. Hence, all events of resurrection in the film may be said to figure the filmic process itself. Yet the real force of Cocteau’s words in the quoted extract is both his admission of stagecraft required to make the manual process of restoration appear as if natural, and his very incomprehension and fascination at the strange, animal and beast-like forms produced by film stock moving in reverse. These images are like vesicles of raw data waiting if not to be interpreted then at least processed in some way as concrete evidence. But evidence of what precisely? How literally should we take Cocteau’s wish to go into, and as it were ‘behind’, people and objects? Let us explore these questions in the particular context of Cocteau’s presentation of the male body which is intimately linked to the events of reverse-motion photography even when the human figure is not actually visible. We shall see that because there are hibiscus flowers growing at Mme Weisweiller’s, and because it’s convenient to tear apart. In addition, it is Cagliostro’s flower. When I reconstitute it, my hands are like animals. They’re detached from me and live like creatures. But it’s not enough simply to film in reverse motion; I must all the time play with my hands in such a way that it doesn’t seem as if it has been shot in reverse. There is as much creativity here as in a scene played by Madame Réjane or Madame Sarah Bernhardt. I’m not boasting. I’m trying to show you how much work it all constitutes.’

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the many risings, rebirths and resurrections of the Poet, along with his fateful encounters with super-phallic women – events by which most critics recognise a Cocteau film – represent merely a lavish decoy, one that is ultimately ‘immaterial’ to the viewing experience and yet akin to the false ‘happy ends’ between man and woman that seal La Belle et la bête and Orphée. Indeed, by foregrounding the ‘monstrous’ nature of reverse motion we shall discover that there is another sexual economy operating in Cocteau, one that has very little to do either with the spectacle of the phallic regime or of masochism conventionally defined. To begin with the immediate physical effects of reverse-motion photography practised by Cocteau: reverse motion pushes the body and object to the verge of abstraction and, by providing a new angle on reality, reveals what is normally hidden from view: the material, open core of the real, or what Cocteau calls the ‘invisible’ or ‘inevitable invisibility’ (Cocteau 1972:17). It is, in essence, a use of trucage to uncover the true, or the materiality of the thing, for if Cocteau provides glimpses of accidental beauty and charm, he also reveals the ugly and formless, even the grotesque and abject. The unforeseen frothing up of the water during Cégeste’s jump in reverse motion is described variously by Cocteau as a ‘monstrous’ and ‘atomic flower’ (Cocteau 1960:10). More troublingly insistent and invasive, however, because more protracted, are those shots of the weird, bulbous shapes of the already obscene hibiscus petals somehow crystallising in Cocteau’s hands, or the smudged black lines of his drawing taking painful, humanoid shape. These images appear gross and disgusting, like a ghastly sub-stage or perhaps remainder of creation. They echo in form the rock-strewn cavernous spaces of the quarries in Baux-de-Provence so graphically visible in Le Testament. In this last film, the collection of shifting, amorphous images seem like the many dissolves to have been generated out of the particles of spray that curl and linger after the opening image (also shot in reverse) of a soap-bubble hitting a pointed knife, a motif culminating in the smoke that wafts gently out of the Poet’s open mouth 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 bête but also the evil dwarf Achille in L’Eternel retour, the vengeful

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Présidente in L’Aigle à deux têtes, and the stifling and wretchedly jealous Yvonne in Les Parents terribles (the latter two roles played by Yvonne de Bray, Cocteau’s archetypal ‘grand fauve’). This degree of abandonment to the monstrous surprises of the machine is a sign of Cocteau’s absolute commitment to ‘monstration’, or the act of showing forth (Latin: monstrare, to show), that is, to presenting events mimetically in individual shots as opposed to narratively (Cocteau talked expressly of ‘images décousues’ (‘disconnected images’)). Film offers an endless ‘petrifying’ source of thought because it can engineer moments of non-control when matter takes over, and moreover show the results. It delivers proof of the impossible. So potentially momentous is this process that for his encounter in reverse motion with a hibiscus flower Cocteau will even don a professor’s gown (the same gown he wore when he collected his honorary degree from the University of Oxford in 1956). As he states in his preface to Le Testament, ‘si le film l’avait voulu á l’origine, c’est qu’il avait ses raisons ou la raison n’avait que faire. Et je me contentáis de lui obéir’ (‘if the film wanted it that way to begin with, it must have had its reasons, where reason had nothing to do with it. And I was content to obey’). The whole mysterious effect is poetry itself, as Cocteau explains in Du Cinématographe where he underlines the peculiar balance of control and chance that is involved: ‘au lieu de perdre tout controle comme il arrive dans le rêve, je célebre les noces du conscient et de l’inconscience qui mettent au monde ce monstre terrible et délicieux qu’on appelle poésie’ (Cocteau 1988: 150).3 What excites Cocteau above all is that indeterminate zone between creation and decreation, formation and deformation. If he never discussed this process at length in his own work, he recognised and celebrated something equivalent in the art of El Greco where, in paintings like The Martyrdom of St Maurice and his Legions, the male body is presented as a frozen, deathly eternity that can also burst forth in a kind of vibrant sexuality or ‘explosion of the line’ (see Cocteau 1943). Claude Foucart (1997) has already shown with regard to Cocteau’s poetry that, just as an El Greco painting comes into being when the body is ‘unmade’ and transformed into an élan as if by a 3

‘instead of losing all control as happens in dreams, I celebrate the marriage of the conscious and unconsciousness that gives birth to this terrible and delicious monster called poetry’.

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thunderbolt, so the Coctelian male body mutates and vibrates in ‘exquisite decomposition’ as the poem develops, becoming even ‘a single monster of joy’. At the root of La Belle et la bête, according to Cocteau, lay a work by Gustave Doré comprising Perseus, Andromeda and the dragon which he had just had cast into bronze. Virtually erect in his stirrups between the wings of his horse Bellerophon, Persues holds a steel lance prising the monster’s jaws as he swings above the mêlèe of Andromeda and the volutes of scales. It is as if the lance were itself vibrating and the hero and horse quivering in unison (Cocteau 1958: 219–20). Yet how ought we to view Cocteau’s materialist method of film which takes us directly into the ecstatic flux of both human and non-human objects? We could perhaps view the process of resurrection through reverse-motion photography in religious terms on account of the Christian associations and iconicity evident in Cocteau’s film work (associations which, it must be said, Cocteau never actively sought to advertise). One thinks of the many trials and sufferings of the Poet in Le Sang d’un poète and Le Testament where he is killed like a martyr to the artistic cause for which he was born and perpetually reborn. At the end of Cocteau’s last film, the Poet, expecting to be arrested by the angels of Death from Orphée, lifts up his arms in front of the two police motorcycles as if to plead for mercy before being ‘crucified’ by Cégeste on the rocks of the road in a potentially ecstatic Passion. In fact, if we retain the strong pictorial aspect of Cocteau’s filmmaking, it may be possible to view the presentation of the monstrous as further evidence of that ‘enigmatic’, ‘paradoxical’ body which Jean Louis Schefer opposes to traditional (‘doxical’) figuration in western painting rooted in perspectival and volumatic space. Schefer champions works of art like Uccello’s The Deluge and films like Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) that provide figurations of unformed, deformed or freakish bodies, all attached in different ways to the processes of time and memory (see Schefer 1995: 37–53 and 108–38). Such a comparison is encouraged by the fact that Le Sang d’un poète offers itself as a ‘collection of allegories’ dedicated to the memory of Uccello as well as Pisanello, Piero della Francesca and Andrea Del Castagno, all of whom Cocteau characterises as ‘painters of coats of arms and enigmas’. As we highlighted earlier in Chapter 2, the fourth episode of Le Sang d’un poète is called ‘The Profanation of the Host’ after Uccello. The particular episode chosen by Cocteau is notable for its self-consciously stray sense of perspective in

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the foreground depiction of the usurer’s home. This is a moment when Uccello, a master of the art of perspective, chose to play against his usual rules.4 While this combined religious-aesthetic reading would have the virtue of insisting on Cocteau’s controlled play with non-control, it would still not do full justice to the physical and sensory experience of watching reverse-action moments that demand our rapt attention to objects in process. In their sheer materiality and strangeness, such moments could be said, in fact, to have more in common with Arcimboldo’s human heads formed of animals, flowers, fruits and stones, that is to say, with the expression of a pantheistic vision of the world. Nor would such a reading take into complete account Cocteau’s own precise statement regarding Le Sang d’un poète that, while every poem is a coat of arms and must be deciphered (the first words of the film), his cinema deliberately rejects symbols, ‘substituting acts, or allegories of these acts, which the spectator can make symbols of if he so wishes’ (‘et leur substitue des actes ou allegories de ces actes, sur lesquels puisse symboliser le spectacteur, si bon lui semble’). In fact, Cocteau’s moments of reverse motion bring the viewer face to face with an otherness which he or she can neither incorporate nor expel. For these events, along with the constant transfer in Cocteau’s work of sounds, smells and sensations between and across surfaces – the many close-ups of eyes and mouths in action, the sound of rubber gloves being stretched, gloved hands entering a vat of mercury, a half-naked body jumping into a tank of water, a face hugging the mouth of a car radio, a beast clasping a quilt impregnated with the odour of a woman’s skin, 4 Uccello’s predella depicts in anti-Semitic terms the profanation of a consecrated host. A Jewish usurer throws onto the fire a consecrated host which he had obliged a Christian woman to give him and it soon begins to bleed. The woman is eventually hanged, and, in the particular episode chosen by Cocteau, soldiers assail the usurer and his family in their home. The usurer will eventually be burned alive just as he had burned the host. The ‘host’, of course, while a specific reference to Christ whose sacrifice upon the Cross and in the breaking of bread at the Last Supper is commemorated liturgically in the Eucharist, is derived more generally from the Latin ‘hostia’, meaning a victim sacrificed to the gods to propitiate their anger. In Le Sang d’un poète, the host can be read as the schoolboy struck down and ‘profaned’ by his schoolfriend Dargelos’s snowball. We might link Cocteau’s selective use of this highly disturbing representation by Uccello with his recourse to anti-Semitic stereotypes and tropes in La Belle et la bête examined above in Chapter 3.

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the magnified sound of human breathing, etc. – throw objects into dramatic ‘relief (a major critical and evaluative term for Cocteau) and transform the filmic medium into a living organism. Not just the mirror in Orphée but the entire screen of a Cocteau film can undulate like water to become a giant, lubricated lung of movements and drives, inflations and deflations, penetrations and ejections, most spectacularly the reverse action moments of expulsion from the mirror in Le Sang d’un poète and from the sea in Le Testament. The real interest of mirrors for Cocteau is less ultimately their play of reflection and specularity than the direct human contact which they can provoke. It is, for instance, the means of participation in desire which Cocteau describes in Le Livre blanc (1928), the moment when a young man unknowingly presses his fully naked body against a two-way mirror on the other side of which stands the narrator. One thinks also of the camera’s attention to Marais’s moist breath secreted on the surface of the mirror during his first reflection in Orphée, an image which has too quickly been classified as a case of male narcissism yet which merges through superimposition into an outside puddle of murky water. So overwhelming, in fact, is the power of objects in Cocteau that, in the case of Le Testament, the shot of the Poet’s blood causes the black and white screen to break out into colour. Indeed, the image of blood runs through the very veins of Cocteau’s films, beginning with the blood seeping painfully and yet erotically from the mouth of the schoolboy struck down in Le Sang d’un poète. The screenplay reads: ‘Le sang lui coule de la bouche et y forme des bulles. Il gémit. Il entr’ouvre les yeux. Cette image doit être pénible’ (Cocteau 1995: 1299) (“Blood is flowing out of his mouth, forming bubbles. He moans and half-opens his eyes. This image should be painful to see’). If the rhythm of flowing blood ‘makes us turn our head away’ (Cocteau), it also contributes directly, like the breath of wind in Orphée and Le Testament, to the peculiar mood and atmosphere of Cocteau’s films, both thematically and at the most visceral level. Cégeste to the Poet in Le Testament: ‘cette fleur est faite de votre sang, elle épouse les syncopes de votre destín’ (‘that flower is made from your blood, and has adopted the same rhythms as your destiny’). For blood is linked to the ‘syncope’, a recurring word in Cocteau and frequently used in its meaning of a loss of consciousness due to a sudden (transient) failure of blood supply to the brain. Here is how Cocteau describes the phenomenon of the syncope as it relates to film:

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L’espèce de ravissement qui nous transporte au contact de certaines œuvres provient rarement d’un appel aux larmes, d’un effet de surprise. Il est plutôt, je Ie répète, provoqué de maniere inexplicable par une breche qui s’ouvre á l’improviste (...) Cette breche se produira dans un film au même titre que dans une tragédie, un roman ou un vers. Le ravissement ne viendra pas des facilites qu’il offre aux stratagèmes. Il viendra de quelque faute, de quelque syncope, de quelque rencontre fortuite entre l’attention et l’inattention de son auteur. (Cocteau 1995: 892)’5

The unforeseen gaps and errors Cocteau is talking about here are precisely those spasms and vibrations of energy produced by the glissandi of reverse motion, in conjunction with the always unanticipated slowing down of characters’ movements through slow motion, the occasional quick-fire zoomings in and out of the camera, the slow emergence and melting away of people and objects through dissolves, and the often vertiginous camera angles and framings of his films (in particular high and low angles) that bestow on every frame such a knowing and ironic edge. The extreme, physical ‘rapture’ of form this creates is perhaps best described by Steven Shaviro in The Cinematic Body, a study of embodied cinematic vision that proposes a dynamics of film viewing at once mimetic, tactile and corporeal (Shaviro 1993: 60). Shaviro does not discuss Cocteau’s work, yet long before Cronen-berg, Fassbinder and Warhol Cocteau was creating a ‘proliferation of affect’ by facilitating multiple interactions, affects and transformations of bodies on screen. His films institute for extended moments a similarly ambivalent, viscerally real and at times terrifying, non-signifying body, defined now not as an object of representation but as a zone of affective intensity. Such moments of excitation, according to Shaviro, can offer the intoxicated viewing body a ‘shattering’ 5

‘The sort of rapture which carries us away on contact with certain works rarely results from an appeal to tears or an effect of surprise. To repeat, it is rather provoked in an explicable way by a gap opening on to the unexpected [ ... ] This opening will occur in a film just as in a tragedy, a novel or a line of verse. The rapture will not arise out of the film being amenable to stratagems. It will arise out of some error, some syncope, some lucky encounter between the attention and lack of attention of its author’. Interestingly, Cocteau uses the term ‘syncope’ in the next chapter of La Difficulté d’être entitled ‘De l’amitié’ to try to explain the fact that he is always misunderstood (Cocteau 1995: 895), proof again of the inherent link between cinema and friendship for Cocteau.

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masochistic pleasure of obsessive passivity and abjection due to the spectactor’s abandonment to free-floating sensation and visual fascination. Shaviro’s concept of masochism in film has little to do with the elaborate contracts of Sacher-Masoch. Underpinning his idea of masochistic excitement is fean Laplanche’s theory that fantasy, or the imaginary expression and fulfilment of a desire, is itself a sexual ‘perturbation’ (ébranlement) related in its origin to the emergence of the masochistic sexual drive. This psychic disturbance is essentially an experience of pleasure as pain, and thus already a form of masochistic sexual excitement (see Laplanche 1976). Shaviro’s ‘cinematic body’ brings out the truly radical nature of Cocteau’s investment in reverse-motion photography as an ‘image-enprocès’ whereby film literally regresses (becomes ‘in-fans’) and provides disturbing glimpses of primary erotic matter. Is it possible though to accord in addition some type of sexuality to such regression? Cocteau never ventured into this area, although in one account of Le Testament, as if aware of the film’s internal, diffuse eroticism, he had recourse to the then new word ‘gamberger’ (‘to think hard’) which he attempted to define typically in terms of (non–)control and which carries clear echoes of ‘gerber’, slang in French for ‘to vomit’ and also (of women) ‘to masturbate’: Cette fois, dans mon film, j’ai pris bien garde à ce que les trucages soient au service de la ligne interne et non pas de la ligne externe de la bande. Ils doivent m’aider à rendre cette ligne aussi souple que celle d’un homme qui ‘gamberger’, pour employer ce terme admirable mais qu’on ne trouve pas dans notre dictionnaire [ ... ] Gamberge signifie laisser l’esprit suivre son cours sans contrôle et sans correspondre ni au rêve, ni á la rêverie, ni à la rêvasserie, permettre à nos idees les plus intimes (les plus emprisonnées en nous) de prendre la fuite et de passer sans être vues devant les gardes. Tout le reste n’est que ‘thèse’ et ‘brio’. L’un et l’autre me rebutent. (Cocteau 1988:143)6 6 ‘This time, in my film, I took great care to ensure that the tricks were in the service of the internal line of the reel and not the external line. They must help me make this line as supple as that of a man who “thinks hard”, to use that admirable term which is not in the dictionary. To think hard means to let the mind follow its course without any control and without corresponding either to dreaming, or rêverie, or daydreaming; to allow our most intimate ideas – those most imprisoned within us – to take flight and pass without being seen by the guards. Everything else is merely “thesis” or “brio”, and both these repel me.’

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If we remind ourselves of the pressing, proximate images and forms liberated in reverse motion, many possess a strong oral component, notably the close-up of reversed words on Dermit’s lips and, one might argue, his vomiting up by the sea onto land. These complement the many oral images conceived in forward motion, including the disembodied mouth drowning in the Poet’s hand in Le Sang d’un poète (an effect of superimposition) and the Tiresias-type statue of the Idol in Le Testament from whose three mouths spew ribbons of writing. Yet there is another more urgent dimension and valency to the viewer’s experience of reverse motion in Cocteau’s films. This will become clear if we consider the reactions Cocteau himself claimed to have witnessed during a particular screening of the rushes of Le Testament when one reel was played backwards: Tournée à reculons, par exemple, une bande révèle un univers, une maniere d’agir et une langue si plausible que cette langue bizarre se pourrait apprendre et que, me voyant partir du bord du vide sans crainte, les projectionnistes ne pouvaient s’empêcher de pousser un cri d’avertissement chaqué fois que le recul me faisait m’approcher de dos du même vide. (Pillaudin 1960: II)7

This anecdote is instructive for illustrating again just how keen Cocteau is to extend and universalise the wondrous world of reversemotion photography. Yet it also – and this is a standard Cocteau manoeuvre – insists simultaneously on uniqueness and difference, since it indicates the particular danger that lurks at the rear in his films. All the various formal gaps and openings in Cocteau’s cinema are linked in some way to this virtual, yet utterly physical, concrete gulf that can suddenly open up from behind the human figure. What is even more mysterious is that this gaping void impinges almost exclusively upon Cocteau’s male characters. Indeed, we need to draw a clear and necessary distinction between reverse motion as a principally male phenomenon in Cocteau and those more routine dissolves and superimpositions that affect male and female figures alike and are often the simple result of a negative mood or unhappy instance of 7

‘Rolled backwards [ ... ] a reel reveals a universe, a form of behaviour and such a plausible language that this bizarre language could even be learned. Seeing me depart from the edge of the abyss without any fear, the projectionists couldn’t prevent themselves from shouting out warnings each time my withdrawal made me approach the same abyss backwards.’

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power relations; for instance, Heurtebise’s sudden self-eclipse during his dispute with his superior, the Princess, in Orphée (highly ironic if read retrospectively through Le Testament where he refers during the trial to ‘the phenomenon that makes lovers so self-effacing before the object of their love’). Let us pause for a moment to consider more general aspects of mise en scène and framing in Cocteau’s films, since the very act of looking and turning back in Cocteau is defined as a locus of male activity and enticement. In the first exterior scene of Le Testament the Poet slowly turns around as if to begin cruising the ‘man-horse’ he has just passed. This is a young man dressed in a black leotard with a long black horse’s tail and head who also stops to turn around and lift off his mask. The Poet then follows him into the gypsy camp where he is photographed provocatively combing his mane, the mask resting on his knees. Following the Poet’s eventual retreat from the camp under the manhorse’s intense gaze, Cocteau’s voice-over commentary states: ‘Cet homme-cheval m’avait déplu. Je devinais qu’il m’attirait dans un piège et que j’aurais mieux fait de ne pas le suivre’ (‘I did not like that manhorse, I guessed that he was drawing me into a trap, and that I would have been wiser not to follow him’). The drama of the male gaze is later repeated in the scene in the quarry where the Poet meets his double (i.e. the image the public has fabricated of him), who looks at him only when he turns his back. It is in Orphée, however, that the dangerous attraction and fascination of looking and turning back is most developed. Just as Eurydice enjoins Orphée not to look back in accordance with the Orpheus legend and the law (which Orphée will thereby subvert), so the Princess of Death warns Cégeste of the terrible risks at stake by referring to the Biblical myth of Lot in which Lot’s wife was turned into a statue of salt for daring to look back at the city of Sodom (Cocteau 1992: 100) (‘Apprendrez-vous jamais à ne pas regarder en arrière. A ce petit jeu, il y en a qui se changent en statues de sel’) (‘Will you never learn not to look backwards? There are some who play this little game and are changed into statues of salt’). The male gaze thus carries a dangerous, sodomitical charge, one that is continually felt and played out in Cocteau. Orphée himself is obsessed with the ramifications of looking back long before the legendary injunction is even declared, as evidenced in his early rebuke to Heurtebise who counsels rest: ‘Merci! pour que les phrases recommencent dès que j’aurai tourné le dos’ (Cocteau 1992: 88) (‘Thanks! For sentences to

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begin again as soon as I’ve turned my back’). When Orphée does finally entrap himself by looking at Eurydice, it is naturally in the rear-view mirror of Heurtebise’s talking Rolls. At that moment, the image of Eurydice disappears immediately, yet what is left on the viewer’s retina is the oval shape of the mirror itself which stands metonymically for the car with its gliding curves and folds. This is the car which first brought Orphée and Heurtebise together and in the specific context of reverse motion. When he was first driven to the Princess’s residence, Orphée was sitting with his back to Heurtebise, the driver. At the same time, the landscape into which the car was moving was shot in negative as a rear projection. At one stage, as the car crosses a railway line and pulls away into the distance, we see Orphée and Heurtebise in alignment through the back window of the car, leaving us again with a circular oval image that decreases in size as the car progresses forward. The gaze of Heurtebise visible in the rear-view mirror is formally extended by the back window, thus creating an all-male space of shapes and forms in which the Princess, sitting on the back seat, barely figures. The viewer participates directly in this circulation of male gazes because positioned behind the car and directed to look through the window at Orphée towards Heurtebise. We might compare this dense image with the quick succession of four male servants’ behinds in La Belle et la bête, lined up in a series through the windows of the carriages as they bend down to transport Belle’s sisters. Similarly in L’Aigle à deux têtes, the naked legs of one male statue provide the frame for Felix’s gaze at the queen as she moves up the corridor, followed later by the scene when the Comte de Foëhn, preparing to descend the ladder of the King’s cosy boyhood tree-house, is pictured through Marais’s legs stretched wide open and filmed from behind. (We note also in L’Aigle à deux têtes that the first image Stanislas sees when he comes round after falling asleep in the Queen’s chamber is not the Queen herself but the semi-naked torso of her mute black servant Tony, provoking a mini-crisis of the male gaze: Stanislas: ‘Qu’est-ce que c’est?’) (‘What’s that?’).) The clear implication of such stylised scenes of male vision and formation is that looking from an angle, on the move, and most importantly from behind is the privileged viewing position in Cocteau’s cinema. This is never resolved or straightened out by means, say, of a standard shot-counter-shot arrangement which, as we have seen, is rare to non-existent in Cocteau who avoids the subjective presumption of

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point-of-view shots and ensures that his characters retain their material status as ‘creatures’. This goes hand in hand with a type of reverse contact with objects enjoyed uniquely by Cocteau’s male characters and which is entirely separate from their mock-tragic ceremonies with women. Eurydice and even the Princess remain oblivious to the complex male movements and configurations available in the Zone where, for example, during Orphée’s first descent, a boy glazier passes first in front of Heurtebise as a real presence, then behind him in the form of a pre-filmed rear projection. (Marais, according to Cocteau, particularly relished those moments in Orphée where he played the part of his own reflection in order to create a mirror effect.) Moreover, only men can experience together the magnetic forces of attraction and repulsion with objects. In Le Testament, the Poet picks up the little box of freedom which the Professor has dropped and caresses it ‘amorously’ (‘Je la caressais amoureusement’). In the case of the ‘unreasonable’ hibiscus flower, this is first presented by Cégeste to the Poet as an emblem of the Poet’s destiny. During the mock-trial it immediately disappears when the Poet puts it down on the table at the Princess’s command as though acting in resistance. We discover at the end of the scene that Heurtebise was guarding the flower all along. When he attempts to return it as a gift to the Poet, the latter immediately refuses it and the camera promptly zooms back away from the object as if in curious empathy. In fact, once back in the Poet’s hand the hibiscus flower can often vanish of its own accord, as when later during the descent towards the sea it wafts away under the sign ‘Pièges’ (‘Traps’) (the gentle musical ringing here reprises the sound that greeted our very first sighting of the flower in Cégeste’s hand). It has become the object of some mysterious male force, ‘comme si Heurtebise, invisible, la lui enlevait’ (‘as if Heurtebise, invisible, were lifting it away from him’) (Cocteau’s screenplay), eventually to reappear at the end of the film when the Poet’s ID card, on the point of falling to the ground between a policeman’s boots, is suddenly transformed into a hibiscus flower. In Orphée, gloves do more than simply penetrate the mirror. Before they enter the Zone together Heurtebise appears to throw Orphée the gloves for him to wear, yet the action has actually been shot in reverse, accentuating their rubbery effect. The same action is replayed at the end of the film, as though the two characters are ‘in’ on a trick together. First Marais takes off the gloves in ‘normal’ forward motion, then they are thrown to Périer in reverse motion. Or at least

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that is how we perceive it, since the second action seems more rapid than usual. There remains a lasting ambivalence here: recto is, or could be, verso, and vice versa. Such composite moments of mutual recognition between men in Cocteau’s films have never really been acknowledged, yet they constitute an indefinable current of male desire with its own secret code and knowledge. This is formalised explicitly in Orphée, just after Eurydice has been spirited away by the Princess and Orphée and Heurtebise finally meet together in close proximity in the conjugal bedroom. As Heurtebise comes up to Orphée from behind and slides his hand slowly into frame to rest on Orphée’s shoulder, Orphée asks: ‘Comment savez-vous toutes ces choses redoutables?’ (‘How do you know such formidable things?’), to which Heurtebise replies: ‘Ne soyez pas naïf. On n’est pas le chauffeur que je suis sans apprendre certaines choses ... redoutables’ (‘Don’t be naive. One isn’t a chauffer like I am without knowing certain ... dreadful things’). (Eurydice will herself later acknowledge the special power of Heurtebise’s male knowledge when she says to him: ‘Vous le savez, Heurtebise... Vous savez où il [Orphée] va. Dans sa voiture’ (original emphasis) (‘You know it, Heurtebise ... You know where he’s going. In his car’). 8 As with the multiple penetrations of the mirror into the Zone in Orphée, where we linger behind the character long enough to share the experience of hands making contact with mercury, the viewer participates directly in this process. The Princess’s passage through the mirror is perfunctory by comparison, as is the speedy, almost clinical restoration by reverse motion of the mirror which she smashes into pieces prior to her return to the Zone. This demonstrates once again that the real focus of interest in Cocteau is not the direction of the movement (here, the rather obvious phallic gestures of penetration) or the sudden appearance/disappearance of objects and characters (two-a–penny in

8 It is not insignificant that this scene during which Eurydice gives vent to her suspicions and fears regarding Orphée is immediately followed by the moment when she witnesses Orphée shouting out in a dream the question addressed to the Princess by the Premier Juge during her trial: ‘Aimez-vous cet homme? Je vous demande si vous aimez cet homme?’ (‘Do you love this man? I’m asking you if you love this man?’). While clearly disconnected, these words uttered in their new context serve nevertheless to heighten the homoerotic tension between Orphée and Heurtebise.

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Orphée and Le Testament), but rather, as in reverse motion, the presence of the object in all its new-found richness and posterior depth. The secret knowingness of male characters by means of objects is tied up directly with a Cocteau film’s own playful, erotic knowledge of itself when it goes into reverse motion and makes objects out of human forms. This process culminates in the climactic scene of Orphée when, at the Princess’s command (typically she is not herself physically involved in the action), Orphée is ‘killed’ in the Zone in order that he might literally ‘climb back up time’ (‘remonter le temps”). Shot from behind with his back to the wall, Orphée is suffocated by the hand of Heurtebise who appears almost to take him from behind while Cégeste, kneeling down, clings to his legs. Here is how Cocteau savours this mock, gay Pietà in his screenplay: Heurtebise, brusquement, se glisse derrière Orphée, lui ferme les yeux et la bouche avec les mains. Cégeste arrive en courant par la gauche et empoigne les jambes d’Orphée à pleins bras. Ils l’immobilisent [ ... ] Heurtebise lache la bouche et les yeux d’Orphée qui laisse sa tete pendre en arrière, comme endormie [ ... ] On voit Orphée endormi debout, la tête en arrière sur l’épaule de Heurtebise, Cégeste contre les jambes d’Orphée où il demeure, recroquevillé, immobile [ ... ] L’appareil cadre les deux profils. L’un droit, l’autre à la renverse, de Heurtebise et d’Orphée. (Cocteau 1992:122)9

The ravishing of Orphée has obvious counterparts, of course, in Cocteau’s other films: in Le Sang d’un poète the body of the black angel shot in negative over the schoolboy lying prone on the ground; in Le Testament the final shot of Cégeste holding the Poet down against the rocks before they both dissolve. In the case of the latter, what is stressed visually is the pushing of Cocteau’s rear onto the stone surface, as though the only way out is via the rear. This is a kind of anal dissolve back into the bowels of the earth. At the same time, the gestures of the two men seem almost in preparation for a scene of oral sex, with 9 ‘Heurtebise slips abruptly behind Orphée, closes his eyes and puts his hand over his mouth. Cégeste runs up from the left and holds down Orphée’s legs with his outstretched arms. They immobilise him [ ... ] Heurtebise lets go of Orphée’s mouth and eyes and Orphée lets his head hang backwards, as if asleep [ ... ] Orphée is seen asleep standing up, his head resting backwards on Heurte-bise’s shoulder, and Cégeste is close up against Orphée’s legs where he remains, curled up and still [ ... ] The camera frames the two profiles – one upright, the other turned upside down – of Heurtebise and Orphée.’

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Cégeste’s legs bent down ready and the Poet’s hands outstretched as if oh a rack and perhaps waiting, like Ganymede, for Zeus to lift him away. Such remarkable erotic focus on the male behind, part of a concerted desire if not compulsion in Cocteau to look and take a tergo, is connected directly to the only image in Cocteau’s cinema which he himself identified as sensual: the moment in Le Sang d’un poète when the Poet, having ‘crawled, rolled and rubbed’ his way along the corridor of the Hotel des Folies-dramatiques, is shot from behind on his knees as he peers through the keyhole of Room 23, the room of the Hermaphrodite. Rivero is half-naked, his arms outstretched, and his buttocks protruding potently in his tight, pulled-up trousers. Cocteau’s description in the screenplay is precise and to the point: ‘Gros plan du poète qui met ses mains contre la porte et s’y applique. Son dos se creuse. L’image doit être sensuelle’ (Cocteau 1995: 1291) (‘Close-up of the poet putting his hands against the door and leaning against it. His back arches. The image should be sensual’). If this arresting image of sensuality and Cocteau’s comment on it have been taken critically on board, they have not been followed up. Milorad is content to note ‘an audacious allusion, exceptional in the author, to passive homosexuality’ (which Milorad himself qualifies as ‘frightening’ (Milorad 1981: 304).)10 I propose that we rest a little longer on the image of Rivero’s arching back, however, in order to appreciate its particular anal force within the context of the Hotel des Folies-dramatiques. For here Cocteau offers a mise en scène – as well as a concrete mise en abyme – of the scopic drive normally defined as phallic: we are invited to fix our eyes in close-up on the Poet as he steals a gaze through the various keyholes. The process is made fully self-reflexive at the keyhole of ‘Room 19, Celestial Ceiling’, where, as he tries to gain a better view of the Chinese opium den, the 10 In another article entitled ‘Esquisse d’une theorie de la sexualité’ (1979) which brings together a variety of published and unpublished texts by Cocteau, Milorad argues that the literary representation of gay sex in poems like ‘L’Ange Heurtebise’, where the passive partner is not at all feminised or effeminate, contrasts with Cocteau’s other recorded view of homosexuality as primarily an ‘exchange of forces’ and a matter of virility (Milorad 1979:135). Milorad suggests, probably correctly, that when Cocteau celebrates sexual force and the active penetrative role, he is really indulging in wishful thinking and secondary rationalisations. The biographical specifics of Cocteau’s sexuality lie, however, beyond the interest and scope of this study.

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Poet’s gaze is met, according to the screenplay, by the ‘close-up, in a mask shaped like a keyhole, of a slanting eye approaching from the opposite direction’ (‘en gros plan, dans un cache en forme de trou de serrure, un œil bridé qui s’approche en sens inverse’ (Cocteau 1995: 1290)). It is not clear for the viewer whether this is a reverse shot of the Poet’s eyes or another pair of eyes. All we know is that at this particular moment the subject of the gaze appears to become the object, active becomes passive, and the slanted eye takes on the shape of the Poet’s slit and curved behind. The act of vision thus reveals itself as both reversible and anal, a point which is underscored shortly afterwards when the Poet is expelled backwards out of the mirror into his room (accompanied for those brief seconds by ‘a religious choir of children’s voices’). As such, it is intimately related to the sexual ambivalence of the hermaphrodite who, with an incomplete, disembodied torso featuring a ‘real male leg and real male arm’, lifts up a loin cloth covering his/her crotch and discloses a sign announcing the threat s/he represents: ‘Danger de mort’ (‘Danger of death’). Undifferentiation, at its most threatening perhaps in anality, is the real attraction and temptation – at once ‘abysmal’ and irresistible – which Cocteau’s cinema sustains and is sustained by.11 That we should view this complex sensual moment in Le Sang d‘un poète as emblematic of a general anal erotics of viewing in Cocteau’s cinema (as opposed, say, to being simply another expression of Cocteau’s theory of art as hermaphroditic self-fertilisation) is confirmed if we go briefly ‘behind’ the main corpus of films and revisit the rarely seen short, La Villa Santo-Sospir. This avowedly amateur work, where the elements of male body, natural object, physical space, rear viewing and the material effects of the camera are all simultaneously set in play, indicates the path where Cocteau’s cinema is really always heading, and it is perhaps why he viewed it as an ‘indiscretion’. Again, Cocteau ensures from the outset, almost effortlessly, an eclipse of the phallus: the new lighthouse on the Cap 11 It is perhaps worth noting here Cocteau’s generalised notion of sexual activity. Already in Opium he proposed that a ‘normal man’ ought to be capable of making love with anyone and anything, since all that really counts is the sexual act itself, not the particular person or individual involved. As Milorad rightly remarks, this bears comparison with Freud’s polymorphous pervert and may help to explain in part Cocteau’s abiding interest in Walt Whitman (Milorad 1981:136–7).

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Santo-Sospir is shown hidden in scaffolding, an image that is constantly repeated in the film. There are recurring shots, too, of a water-sprinkler revolving deliriously in a virtual send-up of virile male sexuality while waves break orgiastically on to the rocks below in periodic inserts. In addition, and clearly pushing the limits of conventional good taste, Cocteau pictures himself campily mounted on life-size sculptures of animals, like a magic, prehistoric grotto of marvels, the drawings and silhouettes of naked men which he has assembled and superimposed over the surface of the villa’s walls draw us deeper into the villa’s own recesses, its ‘tatooed’ skin constituting the very surface of the film. This creation of a continuous, sensuous and entirely self-reflexive viewing environment into which we are invited to sink with voluptuous pleasure expands the endlessly enticing vat of mercury in Orphée and the ‘night’ through which the Poet glides back and forth in slow motion in Le Sang d’un poéte. It might even be said to correspond to Aaron Betsky’s general concept of mirror space in his recent study of the relationship between architecture and same-sex desire. Queer mirror space is free and open, Betsky writes, and its goal is orgasm. It is a ‘space in which your body dissolves into the world and your senses smooth all reality into continuous waves of pleasure. It only lasts for a moment, but during that movement you give yourself over to pure pleasure made flesh’ (Betsky 1997: 21). Cocteau deliberately sows doubt in the viewer’s mind at the very beginning of La Villa Santo-Sospir. After the opening series of views of a water-sprinkler in manic motion, we gradually realise in retrospect that it was rotating unnaturally in an anticlockwise direction. This realisation undermines any confidence we may have in the direction of future shots, a dilemma Cocteau renders explicit when he films himself at one point in a high-angle silhouette giving an account of the geography of the area that cannot be followed, still less verified. This process of gradual realisation recalls in pictorial terms that of anamorphosis, whereby a picture (or part of one) provides a distorted image of the object represented until it is seen from a particular angle or by means of a special lens or mirror, whereupon it appears in lifelike aspect.12 We recall the weirdly abstract opening shot of Les Parents terribles where Georges is filmed sideways in extreme close-up as he 12 See, for example, Cocteau 1981, where Cocteau extends the notion of anamorphosis to include also the perception of time, or what he calls ‘ce capharnaüm du temps’.

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peers armed with a diver’s mask through a large lens. Unlike the classic example of anamorphosis, however, Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, which leads the viewer to a distorted skull, symbol of the brevity and nullity of all terrestrial goods, there is no obvious meaning to be read in Cocteau’s perversion of cinematic form in La Villa SantoSospir where object and aim are made continually reversible. Instead, we are forced to contemplate and accept permanent confusion and uncertainty. Yet paradoxically this reality also ensures that we react with heightened sensitivity to all the visual forms henceforth displayed, which we can now receive on their own terms and enjoy, simply and erotically, for what they are or might be. It is precisely the reversible, material effects of the cinematic machine in Cocteau’s films, where we are brought face to face with the black hole of the real, that encourage us to read the rear and reverse forms of movement and vision involving the male body through mise en scène, angle and framing as part of a mobile, anal erotic zone. The anal zone constitutes, like the oral and phallic, one of the three main stages in the subject’s libidinal economy determined by Freud, and it functions in Cocteau’s films as the loose, indeterminate ground of all activity, long before the phallus can even attempt to rise (or fall). Which is to say, the more intrinsically filmic film becomes in Cocteau – to repeat: the strange forms produced in the camera are not available or even conceivable during shooting – the more focused it is on what lies at the rear. The true, literal force of the Zone in Orphée as both a ‘no man’s land’ and a site of ruination of men’s habits is thus fully revealed. If Le Testament marks the culmination of Cocteau’s experimentation in film, it is also because it takes to a new level the process of anal erotics set in motion by Le Sang d‘un poète with its view of the framed, tight ass – the curve and slit – of the young Poet. Ironically, the female figures in Cocteau’s cinema end up incarnating the phallic instance because they are denied the additional anal pleasures of desymbolisation and undifferentiation, to the point that chaste Minerva announces herself outside the quarries in Le Testament as ‘La colonne triste. La vierge au masque de fer’ (‘The sad column. The virgin with an iron mask’). In an interesting twist to the often levelled charge of misogyny, Cocteau never allows his female characters the possibility of voluntary selfreification. When not turned into items of exchange (Heurtebise to

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Orphée: ‘Je vous l’offre [= Eurydice]’ (‘I’m offering her to you’)),13 they are instructed to get down on all fours like an animal simply to remain hidden from view. If women are active at all in Cocteau’s films, it is only in traditionally penetrative ways and deadly acts of reason (piercing, wounding, etc.). Hence, Mme Weisweiller as the distracted Lady may appreciate the queerness of the moment in Le Testament when two virtually naked male swimmers in spotted trunks get down doggy-style, the first donning a mask of Anubis, the other wearing a dog’s tail and holding him by the hips. She may even exclaim: ‘Décidément, aujourd’hui, tout marche de travers’ (my emphasis) (‘I must say, everything is topsy-turvy today’). However, she remains at a safe distance from this scene of male simulation and clutches her erect parasol tight. With its multiple manual protrusions from behind, sideways and below (disembodied muscular arms appearing through holes in walls, a forearm thrust from underneath the table, smoking mouths and eyes of female caryatids or perhaps atlantes), La Belle et la bête does no more than thematise and render explicit what is always throbbing beneath and behind the surface of the screen in Cocteau’s cinema: the erotic lure of the anal other. The recurring visions of terrible and abject matter in Cocteau may be viewed, in fact, as an irresistible drawing out of the rectum in rectus, literally so in Le Testament when the man-horse takes the javelin slowly out of the Poet’s stomach but from behind. Queerness so defined is able, in return, to proliferate and establish itself as the ‘normal’. At the end of Orphée, after Heurtebise and Orphée have returned from the Zone, the bedroom is itself described as the Zone. The term ‘Zone’ applies thus not simply to the other world beyond the mirror but to the entire enchanted and ultimately unknowable space – that literal, erotic mise en abyme – of a Cocteau film. As the Poet puts it so suggestively in words cited by the Princess in Le Testament: ‘“Ce corps qui nous contient ne connait pas les nôtres./ Qui 13 Typically with Cocteau, this idea is also extended concretely by means of an object. During the scene outside the garage when Orphée makes Heurtebise complicit with his plans to deceive Eurydice, his hand is placed over the shoulder of a statue of Artemis to which both men are completely oblivious yet which links Orpheé at least physically, if not also erotically, to Heurtebise. Orphée reasons: ‘Nous sommes bien d’accord ... Ma femme ne comprendrait rien à cette histoire’ (‘We’re in full agreement ... My wife wouldn’t understand anything of this story’).

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nous habite est habité./ Et ces corps les uns dans les autres/ Sont le corps de l’éternité”’ (‘“This body which contains us does not know ours./ What lives in us is lived in./ And these bodies, one inside the other/ Form the body of eternity”’). The viewer is obliged to enter this end-zone and experience the reversal and dispersal of the One, that is to say, following on from our discussion of male collaboration in Chapter 5, a pre-specular, post-narcissistic regard for the Other derived through the framed male body. If Cocteau allows us to enjoy these at once regressive and generative moments, he also demands that we treat them seriously for what they are. They are not available for interpretation precisely because they are beyond interpretation or symbolisation, as vague and limidessly suggestive as the very terms true, bête and Zone. The viewer is made privy to this process and wholly complicit with it, far more intensively even than Belle who takes a while to grasp the complex nature of the pleasures handed to her in the warm, lush habitat of la Bête. The theoretical implications of such non-phallic pleasure will become still clearer if we turn briefly to Lee Edelman’s remarkable study of the visual rhetoric of anality in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), a film directly concerned like Cocteau’s cinema with vision and the scopic drive (Edelman 1999: 83). Edelman shows how an anal eroticism structures the rhythm of the entire film, disrupting narrative momentum in order to offer the glimpse of a purely rhythmic repetition that includes flashes of light and the shots of a blinding hole. The logic of the unconscious, he argues, manifests itself in each of the protracted fade-outs punctuating Rear Window, fade-outs that articulate cinema’s primal cut, the enabling fissure holding us tight with the strength of a sphincteral grip before its redemption through marriage to the order of visual productivity in the form of continuity editing and the hetero-genetic castration fetish (Edelman 1999: 83). The anal rhythm of Rear Window thus contradicts the clear-cut definition of sexed human characters invested with sexual identities through the logic – redemptive because also reproductive – of the castratory cut. According to Edelman, Hitchcock’s film possesses an awareness of the anal hole as the lining of vision itself. Moreover, ‘[t]his return of the hole to consume the visual images it invariably frames testifies anew to the doubleness of vision, to the contradictions of desire, by which an anal libido compulsively burns its way through the Symbolic screen’

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(Edelman 1999: 90). In short, what Rear Window reveals is the ‘originary’ cut that threatens to rupture the Symbolic’s signifying structure from within, the cut that marks the place of drives resistant to signification. In other words, to quote Edelman, ‘[a]ll vision takes place through the rear window it proposes to take the place of’ (original emphasis) (Edelman 1999: 92). Edelman’s account of Rear Window bears out what we have observed in Cocteau’s films, namely the anal foundation of vision and its central status as a compulsion. It allows us to appreciate even such odd scenes as that of the Poet waiting inside the empty caves in Le Testament, which is structured as a series of long and extra-long shots where the dramatic detail is humorously delayed. This turns out eventually to be the backside of the court usher (Yul Brynner) which occupies the frame while he bows down slowly in front of the table, an action that gradually reveals the Poet’s face in the upper portion of the frame. In a mockery of the shot-counter-shot formation, we are then positioned behind the Poet’s derrière as he bends down at the table, at which point he is instructed by the usher not to sign his name (‘Inutile. Entrez sans frapper’) (‘No point in that. Go in without knocking’). What this brief sequence actually exposes are the repudiated pulsions of the anus and the syncopated rhythms of withholding and producing. Cocteau does not disavow or deny this anal dimension. There is no blind spot here as such. All his films invite us at different levels to look through the rear-view mirror and contemplate the originary castration of which the hermaphrodite in Le Sang d’un poète is but a spectacular denial yet also clear acknowledgement. Indeed, like Dermit’s slowly gliding Sphinx at the end of Le Testament (and Edelman reminds us that ‘sphinx’ is etymologically cognate with ‘sphincter’, derived from the Greek sphingein, ‘to hold tight’), Cocteau positively revels in those moments of ambivalence and anal play when it is not certain that what we are watching is in the process of being formed or deformed – moments that totally undermine narrative continuity yet also, perversely and miraculously, ensure it. It might even be argued that when in Le Testament Cégeste dons the mask of death and speaks from behind it to the Poet, he is acting as the voice and image of the Real in Cocteau’s entire project since, following the departure of the Poet’s Death (the Princess) at the end orphée, it is he now who ‘knows’ and

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who, as we noted in Chapter 3, becomes the emblem of reverse motion in the film (he even exits Le Testament walking backwards). Cocteau’s dazzling array of phallic shapes and forms – part of the Poet’s interminable, tragic ceremonial of life, death and resurrection, the bread and butter of his personal symbolic – constitutes, in the final analysis, nothing more than a customised, ornamental frame for these other deeper, more inherently filmic pleasures generated internally within the camera and externally between men. Indeed, the apparently extraneous, minor moments of rear and reverse motion in Cocteau’s work actively challenge the castratory clarity of the more spectacular, frontal risings and resurrections produced through the very same process. It is not merely that Cocteau ensures a ruination of phallic masculinity, but that he actually proposes the site of this ruination – the insecurity and uncertainty of the abject and anal – as the very ‘seat’ of filmic thought. In view of the many close-up moments of intricate arm, hand and finger play in reverse-motion photography – the rows of disembodied male arms hoisting candelabra that become suspended and allow fingers to point the way, the Poet’s restoration of the hibiscus flower next to the open rim of a flowerpot, his drawing of the portrait by means of a rag, etc. – might we not also view these primary pleasures as a filmic version of ‘fisting-as-écriture’, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s term for Henry James’s more private literary moments?14 What else is one to make, after all, of those shots in Orphée of gloved hands slowly penetrating into resistant mercury and also penetrating out of it (the same shot in reverse)? For when Orphée and Heurtebise head backwards (literally) through the mirror at the end of the film, first Marais’s buttocks slide in gently towards the centre of our line of vision, then, in the shot that follows, his hands slowly extract themselves from the mercury. Filmed in close-up and in reverse motion (the ripples are moving in the opposite direction), it is as if the projection screen had become one enormous swelling membrane, a dilatation of the back passage of Saint-Cyr in the Zone through which Heurtebise and Orphée had been blown along, holding hands and in ‘bizarre poses’, as if by an immense force of suction. 14 See Sedgwick 1993. Referring in particular to James’s ‘Notebooks’, Sedgwick shows that James’s highly charged associations concerning the anus clustered not around images of the phallus but rather the hand (99). Crucially for our discussion, Sedgwick argues that the fisting image offers a switchpoint between those polarities which a phallic economy defines as active and passive (101).

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Sublimation in Cocteau can therefore never be as simple as saying that filmic inversions and reversals provide formal evidence of his own sexual inversion, or that they create a tension of styles between the straight and vertical (penetration, phallic piercings, risings) and the curved and circular (the gyrating spiral of the hermaphrodite, the rolling Rolls, the dislocated mouth cupped in the Poet’s hand, a revolving pipe-cleaner figure, swirling water-sprinklers, etc.). Certainly that tension exists in Cocteau’s films, and it is already there in the opening credits where he usually writes the title and often more in a cursive, childish writing before sealing it with his star signature. Yet from the very beginning of his film practice, in his prefatory remarks in Le Sang d’un poète, Cocteau had a profound and prescient sense of what really lies behind phallic ‘axes’, ‘muzzles’ and ‘towers’ of artistic sublimation – the raw material of blood and tears. He conveys this in the form of an exclamation: ‘Que de sang, que de larmes, en échange de ces haches, de ces gueules, de ces licornes, de ces torches, de ces tours, de ces merlettes, de ces semis d’étoiles et de ces champs d’azur!’ (Cocteau 1995: 1279) (‘How much blood, how many tears in exchange for those axes, those muzzles, those unicorns, those torches, those towers, those martlets, seedlings of stars and those fields of blue!’). In a much later general account of artistic sublimation, an article entitled ‘Inédit féodal’, he insists unequivocally on the ‘depraved’ sexual basis of supreme artistic endeavour: [C]ette spirítualité sublime [Shakespeare, etc.] est encore, je le répète, une débauche, une dépravation monstrueux de l’esprit. Au reste, tout lyrisme est une débauche de l’esprit et résulte d’une dépravation. Si cette depravation se cache, elle donne à l’œuvre qu’elle habite un secret qui l’imprègne, s’en échappe, l’enveloppe d’une phosphorescence mystérieuse. C’est de la sorte que certaines ceuvres calmes proposent une énigme et deviennent un véhicule entre l’âme tumultueuse d’un artiste et d’autres âmes qui lui ressemblent. Ce doit être un mécanisme de ce genre qui vaut à la Joconde la place exceptionnelle qu’elle occupe. Bref, une manière de pourriture où viennent se mettre les mouches. (Cocteau 1979:143) (my emphasis)15

15 ‘[T]his sublime spirituality is again, I repeat, a debauchery and monstrous depravation of the mind. Moreover, all lyricism is debauchery of the mind and results from depravation. If this depravation is hidden, it gives the work it inhabits a secret which impregnates it, flees from it, and envelops it with a mysterious phosphorescence. It’s in this way that certain peaceful works propose an enigma

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In Cocteau’s own case, poetic gloss and phallic lift provide merely the distraction for a work shimmering in ambiguous textures and anfranctuosities. This may help to explain his continued, almost pedantic insistence on the dense and richly mysterious term derived from writing, le cinématographe. Furthermore, while he may refer almost instinctively to the process of creation and reception in phallic terms, reiterating phrases such as ‘erections of the soul’ and the ‘hardening’ of the work’s moral progress, it is always with a giddy and excited veering towards potentially uncontrollable ‘insignificant lines’ (see ‘De la ligne’ in Cocteau 1995: 962–6). In his astonishingly frank acceptance speech upon receiving his honorary degree from Oxford, Cocteau reminded his academic audience that we are both stirred by art as if by an ‘internal erection beyond our control’ (my emphasis) and provoked by ‘a kind of psychic sexuality’ (Cocteau 1956). The success of a Cocteau film is to be measured directly by the very ‘insurmountable disturbance’ it produces, since, as we have seen, it can never be isolated from the immediate viewing experience where so much is reserved for the special pleasure of our eyes only.

References Betsky, A. (1997), Queer Space: Architecture and Same-Sex Desire, New York, Williams Morrows. Brown, F. (1968). An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau, New York: The Viking Press. Cocteau, J. (1943), Le Mythe du Gréco, Paris, Au divan. Cocteau, J. ([1946] 1958), La Belle et la bête. Journal d’un film, Monaco, Editions du Rocher. Cocteau, J. ([1951] 1972), Cocteau on the Film: Conversations with Jean Cocteau Recorded by Andre Fraigneau (trans. V. Traill), New York, Dover. Cocteau, J. (1956), Discours d’Oxford, Paris, Gallimard. Cocteau, J. (1960), ‘Entretien avec J. Domarchi et J.–L. Laugier, Cahiers du cinéma 109: 1–20. Cocteau, J. ([1968] 1985), Two Screenplays: The Blood of a Poet/The Testament of Orpheus (trans. Carol Martin-Sperry), New York, Marion Boyars. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 1988), Du Cinématographe (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Pierre Belfond. Cocteau, J. (1979), ‘Inédit féodal’, Cahiers Jean Cocteau 8:142–4. and become a vehicle between an artist’s stormy soul and other souls like it. It must be a mechanism of this kind which accords the Mona Lisa the exceptional status it occupies. In short, a kind of rottenness where flies come to gather.’

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Cocteau, J. (1981), ‘Notes autour d’une anamorphose: un phénomène de reflexion’, Cahiers Jean Cocteau 9: 245–57. Cocteau, J. (1992), Jean Cocteau, Orphée: The Play and the Film (ed. E. Freeman), London, Bristol Classical Press. Cocteau, J. (1995), Jean Cocteau: Romans, Poésies, œuvres diverses (ed. B. Benech), Paris, Le Livre de Poche ‘Classiques Modernes’. Dittrich, D. (1997), ‘Les Chiffres du poète – Les “Trucs” du cinématographe’, Œuvres et Critiques 22(1): 170–84. Dyer, R. ([1990] 2003), Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film, London and New York, Routledge. Edelman, L. (1999), ‘Rear Window’s Glasshole’, in E. Hanson ed., Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film, Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, 72–96. Foucart, C. (1997), ‘Cocteau et l’écriture du corps’, Œuvres et Critiques 22(1): 185– 96. Gercke, D. (1993), ‘Ruin, Style and Fetish: The Corpus of Jean Cocteau’, Nottingham French Studies 32(1): 10–18. Godard, J.–L. (1998), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard II (1984–1998) (ed. A. Bergala), Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Laplanche, J. (1976), Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (trans. J. Mehlman), Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins Press. Milorad (1979), ‘Esquisse d’une theorie de la sexualité’, Cahiers Jean Cocteau 8: 132–141.

Milorad (1981), ‘Le Sang d’un poète: Film á la première personne du singulier’, Cahiers Jean Cocteau 9: 269–334. Pillaudin, R. (1960), Jean Cocteau tourne son dernier film (Journal du Testament d’Orphée), Paris, La Table Ronde. Robinson, C. (1995), Scandal in the Ink: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-century French Literature, New York and London, Cassell. Saunders, M. W. (2000), Imps of the Perverse: Gay Monsters in Film, London and Westport CT, Praeger. Schefer, J. L. (1995), The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts (trans. P. Smith), Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1993), ‘Is the Rectum Straight?; Identification and Identity in Wings of the Dove’, in Tendencies, Durham, NC and London, Duke University Press, 73–106. Shaviro, S. (1993), The Cinematic Body, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press.

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7 En route

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 himself as a living anachronism, a modernist perpetually in league with antiquity. As Cégeste/Dermit stated at the end just before he transported the Poet/ Cocteau away: ‘La terre après tout n’est pas votre patrie’ (‘After all, this earth is not your country’). Cocteau himself remarked that all his films, with the exception ironically of Le Testament which was immediately embraced by the Nouvelle Vague, were to some degree 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 critical void (Cocteau 1988: 160). This is not the end of the Cocteau story, of course, for as we have witnessed throughout this study, Cocteau is always orientated towards the future due to his undimmed faith in the medium and its potential. The final note sounded in Le Testament is not of sadness or remorse but joy, due to the shared, communal experience of the film’s production: ‘Une vague joyeuse vient de balayer mon film. S’il vous a déplu, j’en serai triste, car j’y ai mis toutes mes forces comme le

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moindre ouvrier de mon équipe’.1 In fact, shortly before his death in August 1963, Cocteau recorded one last film, a twenty-five-minute short entitled Jean Cocteau s’adresse à l’an 2000. It was wrapped up, sealed and posted, to be opened only in the year 2000. As it turned out, it was discovered and exhumed a few years shy of that date. The film comprises one still and highly sober shot, that of Cocteau facing the camera head on to address the youth of the future (for a full transcription see ‘Mon testament pour l’an 2000’ in Cocteau 2003: 125–40). He immediately acknowledges his phantom-like state: by the time the viewer sees this image he will be long dead. Temporality is typically skewed: speaking both from 1963 and 2000, Cocteau is at once nostalgic for the present that will have passed and prophetic about the future. There is thus a documentary aspect and projective thrust to the film, a new configuration of realism and fantasy enhanced by the author’s seamless performance as himself, already ‘immortal’ (he had been a member of the Académie Française since 1955). He reiterates some of the recurring themes of his film work: there is no simple inside or outside, death is a form of life, a poet is merely an intermediary and medium (and therefore not responsible for what he says), poetry is beyond time and also a kind of superior mathematics, we are all a procession of others who inhabit us, errors are the true expression of an individual, and so on. The tone is at once speculative and uncompromising, as when he pours vitriolic scorn on the many awards bestowed upon him, which he calls ‘punitions transcendantes’ (‘transcendent punishments’). He celebrates the fact he can say now what he likes in absolute freedom since he will not be around to suffer the consequences. The status of Jean Cocteau s’adresse à l’an 2000 remains ultimately unclear. Is it a new testament or confession, or a ‘farce of antigravitation’ as he puts it? Or both? What is certain is that Cocteau is again reborn before our eyes and remains ever present and potent. He is always of our time. Indeed, an entire study could be devoted to the many ongoing chains and networks of Cocteau’s filmic influence. We have already mentioned his clear gay line of descent featuring Jean Genet and Kenneth Anger, whose Un Chant d’amour and Fireworks respectively draw out in different ways the homoeroticism of such 1

‘A joyful wave has just swept through my farewell film. If you didn’t like it, I will be sad because I put all my energy into it, as did the humblest worker in my team.’

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works as Le Sang d’un poète and Le Livre blanc. To this we could add Derek Jarman who, as Steven Dillon has convincingly shown, is linked with Cocteau at the junction of the accidental and the secret (Jarman’s last film Blue (1993) ends with a direct invocation of Cocteau: ‘I smiled at Jean Cocteau. He gave a sweet smile back’).2 The erotic charge of Cocteau’s cinema has also recently inspired two young American queer directors, Dan Boord and Luis Valdovino, to make Cocteau Cento (2003), a six-minute video short that dexterously mixes footage from Cocteau’s films with recorded snippets of his writings and those of his contemporaries transformed into a musical libretto by Tom Wells. In the same vein, the contemporary music composer Philip Glass has produced a trilogy of musical theatre pieces based around Cocteau’s work, notably an opera of La Belle et la bête (1994) designed to be performed with the film (it now substitutes for the original Auric score on a Criterion DVD). This is only one ‘zone’ of Cocteau’s filmic influence, however, which is vast in its range and forms. Azoury and Lalanne (2003) have provided a useful list of some of the major links and filiations 163–79) which we can categorise and develop further in the following way: 1

direct promotion: a good friend of Orson Welles with whom he participated on the jury of the 1948 Venice Film Festival, Cocteau wrote the preface to Andre Bazin’s 1950 essay Orson Welles (republished in its final version in 1958), where he talks admiringly of the syncopated rhythm of Citizen Kane (1941) and the ‘calm beauty’ of The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Not unexpectedly, Cocteau also expresses his friendship with Bazin in terms of rhythm. 2 ties with the North-American avant-garde: Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) by Maya Deren contains very similar imagery to Le Sang d’un poète (mirrors, angels, statues, etc.), and strangely prefigures Le Testament with its images of Death possessing a mirror instead of a face and holding out a flower. Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), which includes shots of a woman moving forwards with 2

See Dillon 2004: 23–9 (29). Dillon, who presents Cocteau as ‘the profound cinematic theoretician of lyric accident’ (57) and ‘the poet of the mirror of the sea’, argues that Cocteau’s films, by performing the poetic accident of magical contingency and temporal reversal, also announce potentially the deliberate questioning of social norm and hierarchy that Jarman will come to reflect upon in his own mirrors and abstract poetry (61).

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outstretched hands, also forecasts Orphée. More recently, in addition to the links with Warhol adumbrated above in Chapter 3, the Canadian Michael Snow’s colour short The Living Room (2000) re-imagines the claustrophobia of the Hotel des Folies-dramatiques from a fixed camera position that never allows us to escape. iconic images: the hand penetrating the mirror, for example, is ubiquitous in contemporary Hollywood cinema, notably John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness (1987), Jo Dante’s Gremlins (1984) and The Matrix by the Wachovski brothers (1999). adaptations: not only of Cocteau’s plays, novels and musical compositions such as Rossellini’s Una voce umana (1948) (of the play La Voix humaine) starring Anna Magnani, Georges Franju’s Thomas Vimposteur (1965), Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers (2003) (an incestuous love triangle inspired by Les Enfants terribles and set in Paris in May 1968), and Claude Jutra’s Anna la bonne (1959) (inspired by Cocteau’s theatrical poem of the same name), but also of his own films: Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Oberwald Mystery (1980) (a version of L’Aigle à deux têtes), Eric Rohmer’s L’Anglaise et le due (2001), which reworks the opening scene of L’Aigle à deux têtes and bears many thematic resemblances (false doubles, miraculous resemblances, etc.), and Josée Dayan’s Les Parents terribles (2003) starring Jeanne Moreau and François Berléand. remake as homage: the case of Jacques Demy who, having already respectfully adapted in 1957 Cocteau’s 1939 play Le Bel indifférent, extended Cocteau’s cinema in new ways with Peau d’âne (1970) and Parking (1985), both remakes of Orphée that featured Marais in more active roles: in the first, as the father, he incarnates the Law himself and usurps the role of the Beast; in the second, he restores poets and rockstars to life. stylistic nods and winks: Truffaut’s La Siréne du Mississippi (1969) contains references to Cocteau’s films, notably Orphée (e.g. the ‘Clinique Heurtebise’), as do Pasolini’s Theorem (1968), Fellini’s La Dolce vita (1960) and Almodóvar’s The Law of Desire (1986) (which includes a home-style tracking shot in the manner of Le Sang d’un poète). Less direct allusions can be found in the work of Wim Wenders, Raul Ruiz, Chris Marker, David Lynch (Eraserhead’s Orphic image of a decapitated head (1978)), Philippe Garrel, and young French filmmakers such as Laurent Perrin, Olivier Assayas,

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Virginie Thévenet and Leos Carax whose 1986 film Mauvais Sang fantasised that Cocteau was still alive. 7 film theory: Pasolini took up Cocteau’s notion of ‘poésie de cinéma’ which he reconceived as ‘the cinema of poetry’, while Bazin and Robert Bresson developed in different ways Cocteau’s key term of ‘le cinématographe’ (see Robert Bresson’s Notes sur le cinématographe (1975)).3

Cocteau and Godard/Back to Back It is with one particular contemporary filmmaker, however, that the special power and significance of Cocteau’s legacy is most keenly felt. According to film legend, when Jean-Luc Godard first arrived in Paris clutching a rose, he proclaimed: ‘Je serai le Cocteau de la nouvelle generation’ (‘I shall be the Cocteau of the new generation’) (Astruc: 123). Whether this statement is true or apocryphal, Godard has always acknowledged his respect and awe for Cocteau as an exemplary auteur and film poet. Cocteau represents for Godard a model of creative longevity and survival, a fact emphasised in Godard’s King Lear (1987) where we see photographs of Cocteau at different stages of his life. Indeed, Godard has turned increasingly in his work to Cocteau’s trope of the eternal return and stories of resurrection, most obviously in Nouvelle Vague (1990), and this interest is surely linked to the biographical figure of Cocteau who was perpetually in the act of reinventing himself and returning into fashion. Moreover, as we mentioned in Chapter 1, Cocteau is part of Godard’s illustrious ‘Gang of Four’ alongside Duras, Guitry and Pagnol. For these and many other reasons the Godard corpus is starred with references to Cocteau, from the early short Charlotte et son Jules (1957), an adaptation of Le Bel Indifferent dedicated to Cocteau, and Le Petit soldat (1960), which directly cites Thomas I’imposteur, through to the Orphée-imbued Alphaville (1964) (arguably the first in a long line of remakes of Orphée 3

See also F. Amy de la Bretèque, ‘La descendance de Jean Cocteau au cinéma, ou les enfants d’Orphée’ (Rolot and Caizergues 1994: 59–72), which focuses in particular on the Cocteau-Pasolini connection, and Y. Beauvais, ‘Family Jewels: The Influence of Jean Cocteau on Experimental Cinema’ (J. Cocteau 2003b: 79–82), which considers Cocteau’s influence on the second American film avant-garde that began during the 1940s.

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that includes Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro (1991) and Hélas pour moi (1993)) and finally Godard’s own monumental cinematographic testament, Histoire(s) du cinéma, a work of intensive videographic montage that takes to new technical levels Cocteau’s work in de– and re-creation and includes varied and multiple use of Cocteau (his voice, photographs, stills, film extracts and direct textual citation) The influence of Cocteau’s techniques of film montage on Godard’s own evolving practice would require long and detailed discussion. What is remarkable, however, is how Godard is often content simply to repeat the most visible aspects of Cocteau’s filmic style. King Lear, for instance, imitates perfectly a classic moment of Coctelian reverse motion (tulips coming into being petal by petal), and it is presented in the film as one of the few privileged visual signs to be salvaged from the recent dead past by William Shakespeare the Fifth. This sequence of magical resurrection recalls directly the hibiscus petals coming to life in Cocteau’s hands in La Villa Santo-Sospir and Le Testament. The process of resurrection carries multiple meanings in late Godard and it is linked to the fundamental idea he shares with Cocteau of cinema as a means of reprojecting the world once it has been shot by the camera and subjected to processing and editing. In King Lear the message could not be more clear: Cocteau, as an emblem of free and independent filmmaking, will always be reborn, a point underscored by the ringing of Easter bells and consolidated intertextually by the film’s inclusion of Leos Carax (see ‘nods and winks’ above). Yet what precisely does it mean for Godard to enter into contact with Cocteau by rehearsing a moment of resurrection? To replay an almost generic sequence from Cocteau and then reproject it is effectively to hand him back the flower and thus participate in that magical exchange of objects by men (guns, gloves, etc.) which, as we saw in Chapter 6, is such a distinguishing feature of Cocteau’s films. If the flower stands for time and its reversibility in Le Testament, it is also a supremely erotic object when stripped naked of its petals and resurrected into plenitude through reverse motion. To put all this in more Coctelian terms: in what type of ‘zone’ – intertextual, intersexual – do Cocteau and Godard circulate, for Godard, after all, is one of the most defiantly straight of contemporary filmmakers? Let us enter briefly the Cocteau-Godard bind by focusing on just one instance of Godard’s engagement with Cocteau in Histoire(s) du cinéma, in the chapter 1B entitled Une histoire seule. The meeting here

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between Godard and Cocteau around Orphée is of crucial importance because it connects with the key scene from Le Testament where Cocteau is pierced from behind by Minerva’s javelin, an image already coopted by Godard in Chapter IA as part of his discourse on the betrayal of the French nation and cinema in general. In the early stages of 1B Godard refers to his own later film Soigne ta droite, ou une place sur la terre (1987), specifically his use there of François Périer who, he explains, also starred as Heurtebise in Orphée (as well, of course, as a Judge in Le Testament). At the same moment, we are shown an extract from the opening scene of Orphée, the riot at the Café des Poètes during which Heurtebise calls the police. Godard states on the soundtrack: ‘J’ai demandé à celui qui fait le chauffeur de la Mort dans le film de Cocteau de dire cette phrase et j’ai appelé le film, Une place sur la terre’ (‘I asked he who plays the chauffeur of Death in Cocteau’s film to say this line and I called the film, Une place sur la terre’). How should we interpret this exchange of ideas and associations between Cocteau and Godard via Heurtebise? In a fascinating piece on the role of the back and the behind in Godard, Jean-Louis Leutrat (2001) considers this sequence in the precise context of the javelin scene from Le Testament and traces a relay of writers and artists, notably Hermann Broch and his 1945 novel, The Death of Virgil. What Leutrat reveals is that the ‘line’ Godard is referring to and which is repeated as a central metaphysical statement throughout Histoire(s) – ‘[mais] c’est dans le dos que la lumière va frapper la nuit’ (‘[but] it’s in the back that light is going to strike darkness’) – is not from The Death of Virgil at all, although it is integrated into the various blocks of extracts which Godard stitches together from the novel. The formulaic phrase is therefore a false link in the chain but nevertheless germane to a whole set of connections featured at the end of Chapter 1B, where Godard includes an extract of himself as the Prince/Idiot falling down an aircraft ramp in Soigne ta droite while carrying the reels of his own film. This climactic sequence alternates with Paul Klee’s image of The Angel (the fallen angel Lucifer? The angel of history?) which, as Leutrat reminds us, can be linked back to Cocteau’s poem of male passion, ‘L’Ange Heurtebise’ (discussed above in Chapter 4). Despite his exclusive focus on the back and the behind (the article is accompanied by a still from Le Testament where Cocteau walks past his own double with Dermit at his side), Leutrat sees no homoerotic charge to Godard’s sollicitation of Cocteau. I think, however, on the

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contrary that Godard is willingly seduced into Cocteau’s obsessive play with the behind, even to the degree that he will associate with Cocteau his vital supplementary phrase on light striking darkness in the back. As we have seen, la nuit was Cocteau’s preferred term for the unconscious or subsconscious, and Godard may be viewed on one level as plunging directly into Cocteau’s nocturnal desire. This is a highly ambivalent artistic gesture, for Godard seems to identify with Cocteau as the passive victim, yet at the same time it is he – the new generation following on from the old as surely as night follows day –who, to put it crudely, ‘shafts’ Cocteau by means of a sexual assault à la Heurtebise, since presumably the passive figure is not offering his consent. Or is he? Does the ghost of Cocteau perhaps want this all along, another manifestation of the ‘fatal beauty’ of Cocteau’s work and its consistent staging of the creative will? The question cannot be adequately answered. What is certain, however, is that Cocteau inspires a sublime act on Godard’s part – let us call it a phallic act of poetic will – since Godard is inserting his own invented phrase within Broch’s passage and thereby simultaneously troping on Broch. In so doing, Godard becomes the author of a singular act of montage which constitutes his videographic signature in Histoire(s). Visual identification and verbal aggression thus coexist here in a double movement of desire that transports us back to the endlessly rich Coctelian realm of anality which we explored in Chapter 6. Godard is also interested in matters anal, of course most graphically in films like Numéro Deux (1975), Sauve qui peut (la vie) (1979), and Passion (1981),4 and like Cocteau acknowledges the centrality of violence to the artistic process. For both artists, the sublimating project of creating forms is derived precisely from a profound understanding of its anal lining or ‘depravation’ (Cocteau). In Histoire(s) Godard taps primarily into the prehistory and spatial hinterland of high moments of Coctelian resurrection, that is to say, he takes Cocteau just as the Poet’s back is 4 Numéro Deux contains scenes of troubled masculinity, sexual/social blockage and (heterosexual) anal rape (the sequence of Pierre sodomising Sandrine is consistently repeated); Sauve qui peut (la vie) features an intricate Sadeian combinatoire and assorted scenes of female prostitutes baring their behinds (to male clients, farm cattle, etc.). In Passion, Isabelle (Huppert) consents to being taken sexually by Jerzy (Radziwilowicz) first from the front and then from the rear, while |ean-Francois Stévenin repeatedly commands to an assistant ‘Dis ta phrase’ (‘Say your line’) while sodomising her.

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transfixed by Minerva’s javelin and when, with blood oozing from his stomach around the reverse point of entry, we hear the repeated words: ‘Quelle horreur! Quelle quelle horreur! Quelle horreur!’. Such is Godard’s process of ‘zoning’ Cocteau: plugging into him as an everreproducible object of the real that can be eternally doubled, replayed, expanded and reversed in order to sustain and develop his own creative project. Indeed, Godard’s erotic play with Cocteau installs Cocteau as a guiding principle for his experimental practice such that Cocteau himself becomes a primary agent of sublimation for Godard. The resurrection of flowers in King Lear is an utterly concrete demonstration of Cocteau’s filmic process of thinking through one’s hands, an act to which Godard directly aspires through means of montage. In short, Cocteau functions for Godard as both sublime and abject, ideal and false, as suggested even by Godard’s early review of Orphée when he refers to the film as ‘poésie de contrebande’ (a possible play on the verb ‘bander’, slang for ‘to have a hard on’) and to Cocteau’s confessional statement that he entered the cinema fraudulently (‘en fraude’) (Godard 1985: 252– 3). Indeed, by taking Cocteau from behind in the shared, potential space of film and video, Godard forges a safe passage through and out of the tensions not simply of (gay) male sexuality but also, perhaps, of sexual desire tout court. That, of course, would be another discussion. Godard’s highly involved encounter with Cocteau is exemplary in its formal inventiveness and commitment. He approaches Cocteau’s films as a composite whole in order to achieve a genuine cross-fertilisation of ideas and sensations. He also takes into full account the radical ambivalence of Cocteau, the fact that his work is always an ‘aigle à deux têtes’ (‘eagle with two heads’). To recapitulate: Cocteau’s cinema demands the real and conventionally non-poetic in order precisely to discover the marvellous and invisible; it displays classical themes and values (there is always a beginning, middle and end, for example) yet is distinctly modern, effortlessly blurring the standard distinctions between high and low culture; it can be coy and even teasing but is flagrantly open about its own self-construction and composition; it can appear machine-like and occasionally aloof yet is rooted in the human fibre and flush with the shock of reality; it wears the clothes of authorial mastery and control yet is perpetually courting error and passivity; it is highly staged and deliberate yet welcomes the random and spontaneous; it can be luminous and radiantly minimalist yet is

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haunted by memory, pain and death; it is utterly concrete yet also already highly abstract; it can flaunt iconoclasm whilst still following certain rules of film grammar with mathematical, even deadly precision; it can reproduce highly precious dialogue and theatrical gestures yet demonstrate an intuitive grasp of the very nature of filmic expression. And so on and so forth. The extent of Godard’s engagement with the infinite variety of Cocteau contrasts greatly with the major exhibition held in 2003/4 at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and then the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts entitled Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle. This mammoth show covered virtually all aspects of Cocteau’s work and sought to promote him as a quintessential postmodern artist avant la lettre. Certainly it is important and appropriate to celebrate Cocteau’s versatility and sense of creative freedom, his wish to be everywhere at once and so bypass all linear thinking of time. However, it is not enough simply to project on large screens and in a loop the same climactic moments from Cocteau’s narrative films when other essential elements of Cocteau’s erotico-aesthetic project are either ignored or elided. The show, for example, both downplayed the historical ramifications of Cocteau’s work and consigned his erotic drawings to a separate space behind high walls with a warning to minors, as if these were only of marginal interest anyway and not fit for serious postmodern minds. This is again to ignore the blood, sweat and tears which Cocteau lays direct claim to in his first crucial voice-over in Le Sang d’un poète, and the fact that realism in all its modes and forms is the crimson thread of his materialist cinema. The result is ultimately a sanitising of his corpus not too far removed from the tried and erroneous image of Cocteau as an uncommitted dilettante and aesthete. In every area of experimentation that we have explored during this study, including sound, time and speed, reverse motion, film genre, the representation of the body, performance and collaboration, Cocteau’s multi-cinema – there is no other word for it – inspires new and fertile paths of enquiry. Through his example and rigour, Cocteau acts as a kind of filmic conscience, challenging all involved in the cinema, its practitioners, theorists and spectators alike, to function at the very limit of their creative powers. Nearly half a century after his death, his capacity to shatter our preconceptions and illusions, not only about his own work but also about the cinematic apparatus itself, is quite extraordinary. Moreover, the spirit of mystery, wonder and

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freedom which he prioritises in the cinema is a gift we can retain and

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celebrate. For Cocteau’s ultimate visionary goal is perhaps our own: to discover what film can reveal of time, beauty and consciousness. Sometimes, if only for a few, fleeting and precious moments, the production of new thoughts, acts and emotions is worth the heavy toil and effort. En route.

References Astruc, A. (1975), La Tête la première, Paris, Olivier Orban. Azoury, P. and Lalanne, J.–M. (2003), Cocteau et Le cinéma. Désordres, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Bazin, A. ([1958] 1978), Orson Welles: A Critical View (trans. J. Rosenbaum), London, Elm Tree Books. Introduction by J. Cocteau, foreword by F. Truflfaut. Bresson, R. (1975), Notes sur le cinématographic, Paris, Gallimard. Cocteau, J. ([1973] 1988), Du Cinématographe (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Pierre Belfond. Cocteau, J. (1995), Jean Cocteau: Romans, Poésies, Œuvres diverses (ed. B. Benech), Paris, Le Livre de Poche ‘Classiques Modernes’. Cocteau, J. (2003a), Jean Cocteau. 28 autoportraits (ed. P. Caizergues), Paris, Ecriture. Cocteau, J. (2003b), Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle (English Edition) (ed. D. Moven) (trans. T. Selous), London, Paul Holberton. Dillon, S. (2004), Derek Jarman and the Lyric Film: The Mirror and the Sea, Austin, University of Texas Press. Godard, J.–L. (1985), Jean-Luc Godard par Jean-Luc Godard 1950–1984 (ed. A. Bergala), Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. Leutrat, J ,–L. (2001), ‘“Mais c’est dans le dos que la lumière va frapper la nuit”’, Vertigo 22: 93–102.

Rolot, C. and Caizergues, P. (eds) (1994), Le Cinéma de Jean Cocteau, suivi de: Hommage à Jean Marais, Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry.

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Filmography Films written and directed by Cocteau Note that with the exception of the shorts, Cocteau’s major films are readily available on video. The BFI has also released some excellent DVD collections: La Belle et la bête (featuring a newly restored print commentary by Sir Christopher Frayling and Projection au Majestic (1997) by Yves Kovacs), Orphée (commentary by Roland-François Lack), as well as Les Enfants terribles (commentary by Gilbert Adair) and Les Dames du bois de Boulogne. Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma, 1925 (short now lost), 16 mm, b/w Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet), 1930 (release 1932), 53 mins, b/w Production: Vicomte de Noailles Screenplay: Jean Cocteau Photography: Georges Périnal Editor: Jean Cocteau Set: Jean d’Eaubonne Music: Georges Auric (conducted by the Edouard Flament orchestra under the technical direction of Michel Arnaud) Sound: Henri Labrely (using the RCA photophone process) Principal actors: Enrique Rivero (the Poet), Lee Miller (living statue), Jean Desbordes (the Poet’s friend), Féral Benga (guardian angel), Francis Rose (the hermaphrodite), Pauline Carton (the young girl’s trainer) La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast), 1946, 90 mins, b/w Technical assistant: Renê Clement. Production: André Paulvé Screenplay: Jean Cocteau, based on the original 1757 tale by Madame Leprince de Beaumont

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Photography: Henri Alekan, Henri Tiquet Editor: Claude Ibéria Set: Christian Bérard, assisted by René Moulaert Music: Georges Auric Sound: Jacques Lebreton Principal actors: Jean Marais (la Bête, Avenant, the Prince), Josette Day (Belle), Marcel André (the father), Mila Parély and Nane Germon (Belle’s sisters Adélaïde and Félicie), Michel Auclair (Ludovic), Raoul Marco (usurer, voice by Cocteau), Gilles Watteaux, Noë Blin L’Aigle à deux têtes (The Eagle with Two Heads), 1947 (release 1948), 94 mins, b/w Technical assistant: Hervé Bromberger Production: André Paulvé Screenplay: Jean Cocteau, based on his own 1946 play Photography: Christian Matras, Alain Douarinou Editor: Claude Ibéria Set: Christian Bérard, assisted by Georges Wakhévitch Music: Georges Auric Sound: René Longuet Principal actors: Jean Marais (Stanislas), Edwige Feuillère (the Queen), Sylvia Monfort (Edith de Berg), Jean Debucourt (Félix de Willenstein), Jacques Varenees (Comte de Foëhn), Yvonne de Bray (la Présidente), Edward Stirling (Adam’s), Abdullah Ahmed (Tony), Edouard Dermit (officer of the guard), Gilles Quéant (Rudy), Maurice Nazil (Gentz) Les Parents terribles (The Storm Within aka Intimate Relations), 1948, 98 mins, b/w Technical assistant: Raymond Leboursier Production: Ariane (Alexandre Mnouchkine and Francis Cosne) Screenplay: Jean Cocteau, based on his own 1938 play Photography: Michel Kelber, Henri Tiquet Editor: Jacqueline Sadoul Set: Christian Bérard, assisted by Guy de Gastyne Music: Georges Auric Sound: Antoine Archimbaud Principal actors: Jean Marais (Michel/Mic), Yvonne de Bray (Yvonne/Sophie), Marcel André (Georges), Josette Day (Madeleine), Gabrielle Dorziat (Léo(nie))

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Orphée (Orpheus), 1950, 91 mins, b/w Technical assistant: Claude Pinoteau Production: André Paulvé and Les Films du Palais-Royal Screenplay: Jean Cocteau Photography: Nicolas Hayer Editor: Jacqueline Sadoul Set: Jean d’Eaubonne, with models conceived by Christian Bérard and costumes by Marcel Escoffier Music: Georges Auric Sound: Pierre Calvet Principal actors: Jean Marais (Orphée), Maria Casarès (the Princess), Marie Déa (Eurydice), François Périer (Heurtebise), Edouard Dermit (Cégeste), Juliette Gréco (Aglaonice), Henri Crémieux (the Monsieur du Café), Pierre Bertin (police inspector), Roger Blin (poet), Jean-Pierre Melville (hotel manager), Jacques Varennes, René Worms and André Carnège (the Judges), Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Claude Mauriac, JeanPierre Mocky, Renée Cosima, René Lacour, Claude Boreilli Coriolan, 1950 (never released short), 16 mm, b/w Production: Henri Filipacchi Starring: Jean Marais, Josette Day and Jean Cocteau La Villa Santo-Sospir, 1951 (never released short), 36 mins, 16 mm, Kodachrome col. Technical assistant: Frédéric Rossif Starring: Jean Cocteau, Edouard Dermit, Francine Weisweiller Le Testament d’Orphée ou Ne me demandez pas pourquoi (The Testament of Orpheus), 1960, 79 mins, b/w (with one brief scene in colour) Technical assistant: Claude Pinoteau Production: Jean Thullier (Les Editions Cinégraphiques/Les Films du Carrosse) Screenplay: Jean Cocteau Photography: Roland Pontoiseau, Raichi Editor: Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte. Set: Pierre Guffroy, with costumes and sculptures by Janine Janet Music: Georges Auric Sound: Pierre Bertrand, René Sarrazin Principal actors: Jean Cocteau (the Poet), Jean-Pierre Léaud (schoolboy), Henri Crémieux (the Professor), Edouard Dermit (Cégeste, the Sphinx), Maria Casarés (Princess), François Périer (Heurtebise), Yul Brynner

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(Usher), Jean Marais (Orpheus), Antigone (Brigitte Morissan), Francine Weisweiller (the distracted Lady), Maître Henri Torrès (television presenter), Michèle Comte (young girl), Gustave (Philippe), Claudine Auger (Minerva), Daniel Gélin, Françoise Christophe, Philippe Juzau, Daniel Moosmann, Guy Dute and J.-C. Petit, Alice Heyliger, Michèle Lemoig, Pablo Picasso, Jacqueline Picasso, Lucia Bosé, Luis-Miguel Dominguin, Charles Aznavour, Serge Lifar Jean Cocteau s’adresse l’an 2000, 1963 (never released short), 25 mins, b/w Production: Pierre Laforêt Text published in P. Caizergues (2003), ed., Jean Cocteau. 28 autoportraits écrits et dessinés (1928–1963), Paris, Ecriture, 125–40. Films on which Cocteau collaborated La Comédie du bonheur, 1940 (release 1942), 108 mins, b/w Directed by Marcel L’Herbier Production: Discina Screenplay: Marcel L’Herbier, from a play by Nicolas Evreïnoff Supervision of the dialogues: Jean Cocteau Principal actors: Michel Simon (M. Jourdain), Ramon Novarro (Félix), Jacqueline Delubac (Anita), Micheline Presle (Lydia), Sylvie (Mile Aglae), Louis Jourdan (Fedor). Le Baron fantôme (The Phantom Baron), 1942, 100 mins, b/w Directed by Serge de Poligny Production: Consortium de Production de Films, Jean Sefert Screenplay: Serge de Poligny, Louis Chavance Dialogues: Jean Cocteau Principal actors: Odette Joyeux (Elfy), Jany Holt (Anne), Alain Cuny (Hervé), André Lefaur (Eustache Dauphin), Marcel Pérez (Leopold), Aimé Clariond (bishop), Gabrille Dorziat (Mme de Saint-Hélie), Jean Cocteau (ghost of Baron Carol) Le Lit à colonnes, 1942, 107 mins, b/w Director: Roland Tual Screenplay: Charles Spaak Supervision of dialogues: Jean Cocteau (Cocteau does not feature in the list of credits) Principal actors: Jean Marais, Odette Joyeux, Fernand Ledoux, Mila Parély

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L’Eternel retour (The Eternal Return), 1943, 111 mins, b/w Director: Jean Delannoy Production: André Paulvé Screenplay and dialogues: Jean Cocteau Photography: Roger Hubert Editor: Suzette Fauvel with Jean Cocteau. Set: Georges Wakhévitch Music: Georges Auric Principal actors: Jean Marais (Patrice), Madeleine Sologne (Nathalie I), Junie Astor (Nathalie II), Jean Murat (Marc), Piéral (Achille), Alexandre Rignault (Morolt), Roland Toutain (Lionel), Yvonne de Bray (Gertrude), Jean d’Yd (Amédée) La Malibran, 1943, 95 mins, b/w Director: Sacha Guitry Production: Tobis-Klangfilm Screenplay: Sacha Guitry Principal actors: Jean Cocteau (Alfred de Musset), Geori Boué, Sacha Guitry, Suzy Prim, Jacques Jansen, Denis d’Inès, Jean Weber, Mario Podesta, Mona Goya, Jacques Varennes, Geneviève Guitry Les Dames du bois de Boulogne (The Ladies of the Bois de Boulogne aka Ladlies of the Park), 1945, 82 mins, b/w Director: Robert Bresson Production: Raoul Ploquin Screenplay: Robert Bresson, from an episode of Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste Dialogues: Jean Cocteau Photography: Philippe Agostini Editor: Jean Feyte Set: Max Douy Music: Jean-Jacques Grünenwald Principal actors: Paul Bernard (Jean), Maria Casarès (Hélène), Elina Labourdette (Agnès), Lucienne Bogaert (Agnès’s mother), Jean Marchat (Jean) L’Amitié noire, 1946 (short), 20 mins, b/w Directors: François Villiers, Germaine Krull Production: Office français d’information Commentary: Jean Cocteau (on France’s colonial mission in Africa)

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Ruy Blas, 1947, 93 mins, b/w Director: Pierre Billon Production: André Paulvé and Georges Legrand Screenplay and dialogues: Jean Cocteau, from the play by Victor Hugo Photography: Michel Kelber, Louis Stein and Roland Paillas Editor: Maurice Serein Set: Georges Wakhévitch Music: Georges Auric Sound: René Longuet Principal actors: Jean Marais (Ruy Blas Zafari), Danielle Darrieux (Queen Maria de Neubourg), Gabrielle Dorziat (Duchess of Albuquerque), Marcel Herrand (Don Salluste), Alexandre Fignault (Goulatromba), Amiot (Santa-Cruz), Gilles Quéant (Duke of Alba) Les Noces de sable (Desert Wedding), 1948, 85 mins, b/w Director: André Zwobada Production: Studio Maghreb Commentary (written and spoken): Jean Cocteau, from a Moroccan legend (text published in Osmose 4 (1950)) Photography: André Bac Editor: Charles Bretoneiche Music: Georges Auric Principal actors: Denise Cardi (the young girl), Itto Bart Lahrsen (the mad woman), Himmoud Brahimi (the clown) La Légende de Sainte Ursule, 1948 (short) Director: Luciano Emmer Production: Colonna Film Commentary: Jean Cocteau, on the paintings of Carpaccio in Venice celebrating Saint Ursula. Published in Poésie Critique, vol. I, Paris, Gallimard, 1959 Ulysse ou les mauvaises rencontres, 1948 (short, now lost) Director: Alexandre Astruc Principal actors: Jean Cocteau, Christian Bérard, Jean Genet, Juliette Greco, France Roche, Yvonne de Bray, Jean-Charles Tacchella, François Chalais Tennis, 1949 (short), 13 mins, b/w Director: Marcel Martin Commentary: Jean Cocteau

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Les Enfants terribles, 1950, 102 mins, b/w Director: Jean-Pierre Melville Production: Jean-Pierre Melville Screenplay and dialogues: Jean Cocteau, from his 1929 novel Photography: Henri Decae Editor: Monique Bonnot Set: Jean-Pierre Melville Music: J.-S. Bach, Vivaldi Sound: Jacques Gallois and Jacques Carrière Principal actors: Edouard Dermit (Paul), Nicole Stéphane (Elisabeth), Renée Cosima (Agathe, Dargelos), Jacques Bernard (Gerard), Roger Gaillard (his uncle), Adelein Auroc (Mariette), Maurice Revel (doctor), Mel Martin (Michaël) Ce Siècle a cinquante ans, 1950, 100 mins, b/w Feature-length documentary. Director: Denise Tual (in collaboration with Serge Roullet, Jean-George Auriol, Yannick Bellon) Production: SEPIC-UGC Theme and commentary: Jean Masson (spoken by Pierre Fresnay and François Périer) ‘Dramatic scenes’ conceived by Marcel Achard (1900), André Roussin (1938), Françoise Giroud (1925), Jean Cocteau (1914) Music: Georges Auric and Henri Sauguet Principal actors: Marie Daëms, Renaud Mary, Florence Verdier, Alain Quercy, Geneviève Page Venise et ses amants, 1950 (short), 10 mins, b/w Directors: Luciano Emmer and Enrico Gras Production: Universalia Commentary (spoken): Jean Cocteau Music: Roman Vlad Colette, 1950 (short), 10 mins, b/w Director: Yannick Bellon Commentary (spoken and written): Colette Principal actors: Colette, Jean Cocteau, Maurice Goudeket, Georges Vague Le Rossignol de I’empereur de Chine (The Emperor’s Nightingale), 1951, 67 mins, col. (film of puppets) Director: Jiři Trnka Production: Czech State Cinema

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Screenplay: Jiri Trnka, from Hans Christian Anderson Commentary (written and spoken): Jean Cocteau

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Juliette ou la clef des songes, 1951, 90 mins, col. Director: Marcel Carné Production: Sacha Gordine Screenplay: Marcel Carné and Jacques Viot, from an idea by Georges Neveux. Incorporates (without crediting) Cocteau’s original 1941 reworking of dialogues by Neveux. Principal actors: Gérard Philippe, Suzanne Cloutier, Jean-Roger Caussimon, René Génin, Edouard Delmont, Max Dejean Désordre aka Vision de St-Germain-des-Prés, 1951 (short), 20 mins, b/w Director: Jacques Baratier Production: Jacques Baratier Music: Claude Luter and Alain Vian (song by Raymond Queneau) Principal actors: Jean Cocteau, Boris Vian, Annabel, Juliette Gréco, Jacques Audiberti, Raymond Queneau, Simone de Beauvoir, Orson Welles La Corona negra (La Couronne noire) (The Black Crown), 1952, 94 mins, b/w Director: Luis Saslavsky Production: Sueva Films-Cesareo Gonzalez Original screenplay.’ Jean Cocteau, who later disowned the film Adaptation and dialogues: Michel Mihura Principal actors: Maria Félix, Vittorio Gassmann, Rossano Brazzi, José Maria Lado, Avelino Santana, Antonia Plana, Piéral 8 x 8, 1952 (never released in France), 98 mins, col. Director: Hans Richter Production: Hans Richter Film in 8 ‘moves’, the sixth ‘Queening the Pawn’ directed by Jean Cocteau Principal actors: Jacqueline Matisse, Yves Tanguy, Richard Hulsenbeck, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Hans Arp, Julian Lévy, Paul Bowles Gate of Hell (La Porte de I’enfer), 1952, 88 mins, col. Director: Teinosuke Kinugasa Prefatory text for French version: Jean Cocteau Le Rouge est mis, 1953 (short) Directors: Igor Barrère and Hubert Knapp Commentary: Jean Cocteau

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Production: Franco-London-Film Music: Georges Van Parys Une Melodie, quatre peintres, 1954 (short), 14 mins, col. Documentary on four painters: Jean Cocteau (France), E. W. Nay (Germany), Severini (Italy), Hans Erni (Switzerland) Director: Herbert Seggelke Production: Kœnig Films Photography: Georges Meunier for the part devoted to Cocteau Commentary: Jean Cocteau, who draws on a pane of glass A l’aube d’un monde, 1956 (short), 23 mins, col. Director: René Lucot Production: Cinétest Commentary: Jean Cocteau (on nuclear power) Pantomimes, 1956 (short), 20 mins, col. Director: Paul Paviot Prefatory text: Jean Cocteau Principal performer: Marcel Marceau Django Reinhardt, 1958 (short), 20 mins, b/w Director: Paul Paviot Production: Pavox Films Commentary: written by Chris Marker, spoken by Yves Montand Prefatory text: Jean Cocteau Principal actor: Yves Montand Le Musée Grévin, 1958 (short), 21 min., col. Directors: Jacques Demy and Jean Masson Principal actor: Jean Cocteau (improvised sequence where Cocteau dialogues with his wax double) La Princesse de Clèves (Princess of Cleves), 1961, 115 mins, Eastmancolor Director: Jean Delannoy Production: Robert Dorfmann, Cinétel, Silver Films, Paris Produzioni cinematografiche ‘Méditerranée’, Enalpa Films, Rome Screenplay and dialogues: Jean Cocteau, from the novel by Mme de La Fayette Photography: Henri Alekan, Henri Tiquet Editor: Henri Taverna Set: René Renoux Music: Georges Auric

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Sound: Jacques Lebreton Principal actors: Marina Vlady (Princesse de Clèves), Jean Marais (Prince de Clèves), Jean-François Poron (Due de Nemours), Anne Ducaux (Diane de Poitiers), Lea Padovanni (Queen Catherine de Médicis), Raymond Gérome (King) Adaptations and remakes of Cocteau’s work Une Voce Umana (La Voix humaine) (The Human Voice), first part (32 mins) of L’Amore (Woman aka Ways of Love), 1948 Director: Roberto Rossellini Adaptation of Cocteau’s 1930 play La Voix humaine Set: Christian Bérard Principal actor: Anna Magnani Intimate Relations, 1953, 86 mins Director: Charles Frank Adaptation of Cocteau’s 1938 play Les Parents terribles, closely modelled on his film version Production: Adelphi Principal actors: Marian Spencer, Harold Warrender, Ruth Dunning, Russell Enoch, Elsy Albiin Le Bel indifférent, 1957 (short), 29 mins, col. Director: Jacques Demy Production: S. N. Pathé-Cinéma Adaptation of Cocteau’s 1940 play Le Bel indifférent Set: Bernard Evein Music: Maurice Jarre Principal actors: Jeanne Allard, Angelo Bellini Thomas I’imposteur, 1965, 93 mins, b/w Director: Georges Franju Production: Eugène Lépicier (Filmel) Adaptation by Jean Cocteau, Michel Worms and Georges Franju of Cocteau’s 1923 novel Photography: Marcel Fradetal Editor: Gilbert Natot Set: Claude Pignot Music: Georges Auric

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Principal actors: Fabrice Rouleau (Thomas), Emmanuelle Riva (Princesse de Bormes), Jean Servàis (Pesquel Duport), Michel Vitold (De Vernes), Sophie Darès (Henriette), Edouard Dermit (Capitaine Roy), Gabrielle Dorziat (fortune-teller)

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Il Mistero d’Oberwald (The Oberwald Mystery) 1980, 123 mins, col. Director: Michelangelo Antonioni; originally shot on video before being transferred to 35 mm Production: Rai-Radiotelevisione Italiana, Politel International, Rete 2 Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra, from Cocteau’s L’Aigle à deux têtes Photography: Luciano Tovoli Music: Guido Tirchi Principal actors: Monica Vitti (Queen), Franco Branciaroli (Sebastian), Paolo Bonacelli (Comte de Foëhn), Luigi Diberti (Due de Wallenstein), Elisa betta Pozzi (Mile de Berg), Amad Saha Alan (Tony) Les Parents terribles, 2003, 90 mins, col. Director: Josée Dayan Production: Jean-Luc Azoulaz. Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, from Cocteau’s Les Parents terribles Principal actors: Jeanne Moreau, Nicole Garcia, François Berléand, Cyrille Thouvenin, Ariadna Gil Miscellaneous works directly inspired by Cocteau Saint-Blaise-des-Simples, 1959 (short), 16 mins, col. Director: Philippe Joulia Production: Films du Septentrion Screenplay and commentary: written by Jean-Jacques Kihm, spoken by François Périer Photography: Pierre Fattori Editor: Liliane Fattori Music: Domenico Cimarosa Anna la bonne, 1959 (short), 3 mins, b/w Director: Claude Jutra Production: François Truffaut Production: Les Films du Carrosse Screenplay inspired by Cocteau’s theatrical poem of the same name Principal actor: Marianne Oswald

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Portrait-souvenir, 1964, 134 mins, b/w Director: Paul Seban Interview for television with Jean Cocteau by Roger Stéphane. Filmed at Milly-la-forêt in April 1963, broadcast in January 1964 La Voix humaine, 1970 Director: Dominique Delouche Screenplay: Dominique Delouche, from the one-act opera by Francis Poulenc Principal actor: Denise Duval

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Select bibliography Works by Jean Cocteau Published screenplays and film diaries (1947), Ruy Blas, Paris, Paul Morihien. (1948), Le Sang d’un poète, Paris, Robert Marin (screenplay in form of a ciné-roman republished by Editions du Rocher first in 1957 with twelve drawings by Cocteau, then in 2003 with a preface by M. Schneider). (1948), L’Aigle à deux têtes, Paris-Théâtre 22. (1948), L’Eternel retour, Paris, Nouvelles Editions Françaises. (1948), Les Parents terribles, Le Monde illustré, II December. (1950), Orphée, Paris, André Bonne. (1957), Les Dames du bois de Boulogne, Cahiers du cinéma 75–7. ([1946] 1958), La Belle et la bête, Journal d’un film, Monaco, Editions du Rocher. (1970), Beauty and the Beast: The Shooting Script (ed. R. M. Hammond), New York, New York University Press. (1972), Three Screenplays: L’Eternel retour, Orphée and La Belle et la bête (trans. C. Martin-Sperry), New York, Grossman Publishers. ([1950] 1972), Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film (trans. R. Duncan), New York, Dover. Introduction by George Amberg. ([1961] 1983), Le Testament d’Orphée, Monaco, Editions du Rocher, with photographs by Lucien Clergue (republished in anniversary edition in 2003). ([1968] 1985), Two Screenplays: The Blood of a Poet/The Testament of Orpheus (trans. C. Martin-Sperry), New York, Marion Boyars. (1992), Jean Cocteau, Orphée: The Play and the Film (ed. E. Freeman), London, Bristol Classical Press. Introduction by E. Freeman. (2003), La Belle et la bête, Monaco, Editions du Rocher (special anniversary edition). Preface by S. Toubiana.

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Works on the Cinema ([1951] 1972), Cocteau on the Film: Conversations with Jean Cocteau Recorded by André Fraigneau (trans. V. Traill), New York, Dover. Introduction by George Amberg. (1952), Cinéma, un œil ouvert sur le monde (Bovay, G.-M. ed. in collaboration with J. Cocteau et al.), Lausanne, Editions Clairefontaine. ([1958] 1978), Orson Welles: A Critical View (trans. J. Rosenbaum), London, Elm Tree Books. Written by A. Bazin with an introduction by J. Cocteau and a foreword by F. Truffaut. ([1973] 1988), Du Cinématographe (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Pierre Belfond. ([1973] 2003), Entretiens sur le cinématographe (L’Edition anniversaire), (eds A. Bernard and C. Gauteur), Paris, Editions du Rocher. This excellent anniversary edition incorporates Entretiens avec Andre Fraigneau (1951) and key interviews with Cocteau, notably by G.-M. Bovay (1952) and J. Domarchi and J.-L. Laugier (1960). ([1988] 2001), The Art of Cinema (trans. R. Buss), New York and London, Marion Boyars. Introduction by R. Buss. Pillaudin, R. (1960), Jean Cocteau tourne son dernier film (Journal du Testament d’Orphée), Paris, La Table Ronde. Written by R. Pillaudin with an introduction and illustrations by J. Cocteau. Other (1931) Opium, journal d’une désintoxication, Paris, Librairie Stock. Opium: The Diary of a Cure (trans. M. Crosland and S. Road), London, Peter Owen, 1947. (1951) Jean Marais, Paris, Calmann Lévy ‘Masques et Visages’. ([1953] 1985) Journal d’un Inconnu, Paris, Grasset. Diary of an Unknown, London, St. Edmundsbury Press. (1987) Lettres à Jean Marais, Paris, Albin Michel. Includes preface and notes. ([1987] 1988) Past Tense: The Cocteau Dairies (trans. and ed. R. Howard) (2 vols), New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. (1995), Jean Cocteau: Romans, Poésies, Œuvres diverses (ed. B. Benech), Paris, Le Livre de Poche ‘Classiques Modernes’ (includes screenplays of Le Sang d’un poète and Le Testament d’Orphée). (2003) Jean Cocteau. 28 autoportraits (ed. P. Caizergues), Paris, Ecrirure (includes ‘Mon testament pour l’an 2000’ and a CD of Cocteau’s interview with Pierre Brive in 1962).

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Secondary criticism Amy de La Bretèque, F. and Caizergues, P. (eds) (1989), Une encre de lumière, Montpellier, Üniversité Paul Valéry. An eclectic collection of previously unavailable Cocteau material, from assorted film journalism (including the crucial ‘Notes autour du cinématographe’) to accounts of his own films, as well as scripts and synopses of films never made. Azoury, P. and Lalanne, J.-M. (2003), Cocteau et le cinéma. Désordres, Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma. A challenging, critically engaged and highly suggestive study of Cocteau’s cinema organised in three parts: compact readings of individual films, a theoretical discussion of key themes such as invisibility and anachronism, and an entertaining account of Cocteau’s influence on other filmmakers. Although at times a little too allusive and esoteric, the volume is also well illustrated with stills, production photographs, drawings and extracts from working scripts. Beylie, C. (1966), ‘Jean Cocteau’, Anthologie du cinéma, 12 February: 59–112. An intelligent and incisive overview of Cocteau’s film-work. Clergue, L. (2001), Jean Cocteau and the Testament of Orpheus, New York, Viking Studio. Photographs by Clergue, essay by D. LeHardy Sweet. A ravishingly beautiful collection of photographs taken during the shooting of Le Testament d’Orphée and commissioned by Cocteau himself. Gercke, D. (1993), ‘Ruin, Style and Fetish: The Corpus of Jean Cocteau’, Nottingham French Studies 32(1): 10–18. Evans, A. B. (1977), Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity, Philadelphia, The Art Alliance Press. An eminently readable and accessible, though also rather limited, introduction to the ‘Orphic trilogy’. Gilson, R. ([1964] 1969), Jean Cocteau: An Investigation into his Films and Philosophy, New York, Crown. For a long time the only extensive study of Cocteau’s work in English and now feeling somewhat dated. Adopting a highly personal and partisan approach it includes discussion of the major films, a useful selection of Cocteau’s thoughts on the cinema, and an appreciation of Cocteau’s project and legacy by a range of critics, writers and filmmakers. Greene, N. (1998), ‘Deadly Statues: Eros in the Films of Jean Cocteau’, The French Review 61(6): 890–8. Langlois, H. (1972), ‘Jean Cocteau et le cinéma’, Cahiers Jean Cocteau 3: 25– 34. Lebrat C. (ed.), Sur Le Sang d’un poète. Jean Cocteau, Paris, Paris Expérimental, 2003. Preface by D. Noguez, postface by A. Virmaux. A short but useful volume on Le Sang d’un poète that charts the history of Cocteau’s own views on the film. Oxenhandler, N. (1965), ‘Poetry in Three Films of Jean Cocteau’, Yale French Studies 17: 14–20. A pioneering introduction to Cocteau’s film aesthetics.

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Philippe, C.-J. (1989), Jean Cocteau, Paris, Seghers ‘Les Noms du Cinéma’. A business-like account of Cocteau’s film career, full of interesting anecdotes about Cocteau the personality but rather perfunctory and clicheé-ridden when it addresses the films themselves. Pinoteau, C. (2003), Derrière la caméra avec Jean Cocteau. Entretiens avec Monique Bourdin, Paris, Horizon illimité. Preface by J.-L. Dabadie. Rolot, C. and Caizergues, P. (eds) (1994), Le Cinéma de Jean Cocteau, suivi de: Hommage à Jean Marais, Montpellier, Université Paul Valéry. A conference proceedings volume that includes some valuable work on the use of sound and voice in Cocteau’s films, as well as the transcription of a round-table discussion with Jean Marais. Rolot, C. and Ramirez, F. (2000), Jean Cocteau, I’œil architecte, Paris, ACR. A lavish and brilliantly illustrated compendium of Cocteau’s contribution to the visual arts, half of which is devoted to the cinema. It provides a lucid and well-organised summary of Cocteau’s film career as well as a chronological list of all the films he ever saw and wrote about. Soleil, C. (2003), Raconte moi Jean Cocteau, suivi d’entretiens inédits avec Edouard Dermit, Lyons, Ancre et Enere. Strauss, F. (1989),’Un cocktail, des Cocteau’, Cahiers du cinéma 425:75–82. Tolton, C. D. E. (ed.) (1999), The Cinema of Jean Cocteau: Essays on his Films and their Coctelian Sources, New York, Ottawa and Toronto, Legas. A very neven and rather sloppily edited, motley collection of chapters covering Cocteau’s principal films from a variety of perspectives, including feminism, philosophy, formalism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Williams J.S. (2005), ‘Dos à dos: Godard croise Cocteau dans la zone’, CRIN44: 31–44. Exhibition Catalogues Jean Cocteau. Magicien du Spectacle, Marseille, Musée Borely-Musée provençal du Cinéma. Catalogue of exhibition held November 1983– February 1984. Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle (ed. D. Moyen, trans. T. Selous), London, Paul Holberton, 2003. English version of the catalogue of the exhibition Jean Cocteau, sur le fil du siècle held in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and in Montreal at the Museum of Fine Arts in 2003/4, curated by D. Païni, F. Nemer and I. Monod-Fontaine. Includes articles on Cocteau’s cinema by C. Rolot and F. Ramirez, M. A. Guerin, Y. Beauvais, and J.-C. Tacchella.

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Special issues of journals devoted to Cocteau Empreintes (Brussels) (May 1950). L’Avant-Scène Cinéma 3 (April 1961) (includes shot-by-shot breakdown of La Princesse de Clèves and the texts of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples and Le Rossignol de l’empereur de Chine) Cahiers du cinéma 152 (‘Jean Cocteau: Le chiffre sept’) (February 1964) La Revue du Cinéma 262 (June-July 1972) (comprises interviews with Cocteau covering the length of his film career) L’Avant-Scène Cinéma 138-9 (July-September 1973) (includes shot-by-shot breakdown of La Belle et la bête and Le Baron fantôme) L’Avant-Scène Cinéma, May 1983 (includes shot-by-shot breakdown of Le Sang d’un poète and Le Testament d’Orphée). Libération (hors série) (‘Jean Cocteau’) (October 1983). Cinéma 298 (October 1983). Revue des Sciences Humaines 233 (January–March 1994). Bucknell Review (Lewisburg, PA) 41(1) (ed. Cornelia A. Tsakiridou) (1997) Œuvres et Critiques 22(1) (‘Jean Cocteau et les arts’) (1997) Europe 894 (October 2003). Cahiers Jean Cocteau (ed. Milorad). Published 1969–1989 by Gallimard. A new series published by Editions Passages du Marais began in 2002 with a number devoted to Cocteau and Jean Genet. Magazine littéraire 423 (September 2003) (includes articles on Cocteau’s cinema by Claude Michel Cluny and Denis Brusseaux). Télérama (hors-série) (‘Cocteau: le poète aux cent visages’) (2003). Connaissance des Arts (hors-série) (‘Jean Cocteau: Sur le fil du siècle’) (2003).

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. 8 x 8 2, 204 8 ½ 107 400 coups, Les 8, 93 1000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse, The 104 A l’aube d’un monde 205 ‘accidental synchronism’ 20, 47, 79 Adair, Gilbert 100 Age d’or, L’ 35, 36, 37, 49–50 Ahmed, Abdullah 75 Aigle à deux têtes, L’ (film) 1, 6, 11, 26, 31, 74–80, 81, 137, 157, 159–60, 163, 171, 186, 189, 188 Aigle à deux têtes, L’ (play) 74–5, 77, 81 Albersmeier, Franz-Josef 50, 51 Alekan, Henri 10–11, 63, 65, 67 Allemagne année 90 neuf zéro 190 Almodóvar, Pedro 189 Alphaville 190 Ambassadors, The 178 Amberg, George 106 Amitié noire, L’201 Amy de La Bretèque, François 8n.1, 24, 66, 82, 90, 190n.3

André, Marcel 63, 81 André Masson ou les quatre éléments 90 Andrea, Yann 150–1 ‘Ange Heurtebise, L” 12, 112, 148– 9n.5, 175, 192 Angelus Novus 128n.11 Anger, Kenneth 9–10, 187–8 Anglaise et le due, L’ 189 Anna la bonne 152n.8, 189, 207 Antigone 5 anti-Semitism 73–4, 165n.4 Antonioni, Michelangelo 189 Apollinaire, Guillaume 3, 115, 119 Apuleius, Lucius 64 Aragon, Louis 4, 37 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 165 Arnaud, Claude 5, 37n. 1 Assassinat du due de Guise, L’ 77 Assayas, Olivier 189 Astor, Junie 59 Astruc, A. 9, 190 Auclair, Michel 63 Auden, W. H. 8 Aumont, Jacques 128, 129 Aumont, Jean-Pierre 137 Auric, Georges 4, 10, 35, 41, 47,

INDEX

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57, 63, 69, 75, 79, 81, 93, 96, 110, 117–18 Aznavour, Charles 94, 152 Azoury, Philippe 16, 51, 80, 91, 104, 118–19, 128, 188 Balibée, Jean 113 Baratier, Jacques 9 Barbette 36, 41, 46 Bargy, Charles Le 77 Baron fantôme, Le 2, 13, 200 Bataille du rail, La 63 Baudelaire, Charles 7, 119 Bazin, André 9, 21, 86, 87, 188, 190 Beaumes, Georges 140 Bédier, Joseph 57 Bel indifférent, Le 189, 190, 206 Belle et la béte, La (Glass) 188 Belle et la béte, La 1, 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 18, 26, 27, 30, 31, 52, 63–74. 76, 79n.8. 85. 91, 100, 101, 127, 130, 137, 139, 140, 141, 144–7, 159, 162, 164, 165n·4, 171, 180, 186, 197–8 Belle et la béte. Journal d’un film, La 72–3 Belion, Yannick 2 Benga, Féral 35, 36 Ben-Hur 22 Benjamin, Walter 128–9 Bérard, Christian 10, 63, 66, 67, 75, 76, 81, no, 115 Berendt, Rachel 41 Berger, Pierre 111 Berléand, François 189 Bersani, Leo 154n.10 Berrín, Pierre 110–11 Bertolucci, Bernardo 189 Bertrand, Pierre 93 Betsky, Aaron 177 Beylie, Claude 13 Billon, Pierre 2, 74, 137

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Blin, Roger 111, 114 blood 39, 40, 45, 53, 66, 101–2, 166, 183 Blue 188 Bodin, René-Pierre 48 Bœuf sur le Toit, Le 4 Bonnes, Les 152n.8 Boord, Dan 188 Bosé, Lucia 94 Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Le 69 Brasillach, Robert 57 Brassaï, 119 Breker, Arno 4, 62 Bresson, Robert 2, 7, 10, 22, 74, 137, 190 Breton, André 4, 37–8, 112, 114, 151 Britannicus 137 Broch, Hermann 192 Brown, F. 52–3, 157 Browning, Tod 164 Brynner, Yul 93, 101n.23, 106, 181 Buňuel, Luis 35, 36, 37, 50 Burch, N. 48, 141 Buss, Robin 5, 22 Cagliostro, Count Alessandro 161 Caizergues, Pierre 8n.1, 24, 66, 82, 90, 148–9n.5, 190n.3 Calmettes, André 77 Camus, Albert 4 Camus, Marcel 186 Cannes Film Festival 9, 57 Cap de Bonne-Espérance, Le 3 Carax, Leos 189, 191 Carné, Marcel 56, 61 Carpenter, John 189 Carton, Pauline 35 Casarès, Maria 94, 105, 110 Castagno, Andrea del 43 Ce Siècle a cinquante ans 2, 203 Chabrol, Claude 89 Chant d’Amour, Un 9, 152, 158, 187–8

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Chaperon, Danielle 144 Chaplin, Charlie I, 3, 22, 24, 48, 49 Char, René 37 Charlotte et son Jules 190 Chazal, Robert 86 Cheat, The 22 Chevaliers de la Table Ronde, Les 63, 37, 139 Chien andalou, Un 37, 49–50 Christophe, Françoise 105 Chute de la Maison Usher, La 48 Cinéma d’hier, cinéma d’aujourd’hui 21 Citizen Kane 188 Clair, René 21, 22 Claudel, Paul 4 Clément, René 63 Clergue, Lucien 93 Clouzot, Henri-Georges 90 Club des Amis du Septième Art, le 9 Cocteau, Jean 2, 5, 6–10, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18–19, 20, 22, 23, 24, 40n.2, 45, 46, 49n.5, 50–1, 60, 61, 65–6, 67, 69, 72, 77, 78, 82, 87, 98, 99n.22, 102, 103, 115–17, 12n.5, 123, 124– 5n.9, 126, 138, 157, 160, 162, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168, 170, 174, 175, 176, 183, 184, 186, 187 Cocteau Cento 188 Colette 2, 203 Colette, Sidonie-Gabrielle 2, 36 Comédie du bonheur, La 2, 200 Comœdia 4, 49n.4 Comte, Michèle 95 Corbeau, Roger 119 Coriolan 1, 8n.1, 199 Corona negra, La (La Couronne noire) 204 Cosima, Renée 89 Couronne noire, La 8

Crémieux, Henri 95, 110 Cuny, Alain 138 d’Eaubonne, Jean 35, 110 d’Yd, Jean 60 Dada movement 111–12 Dali, Salvador 37, 50 Dame à la licorne, La 63 Dames du bois de Boulogne, Les 2, 74, 201 Dante, Jo 189 Dante Alighieri 97 Daumier, Honoré 119 Day, Josette 63, 65, 67, 81 Dayan, Josée 189 de Beaumont, Madame Leprince 63, 147n.4 de Beauvoir, Simone 4 de Bray, Yvonne 15, 60, 81, 85, 87, 163 de Gourmont, Remy 77 de Max, Edouard 139 De Mayerling à Sarajevo 80 de Poligny, Serge 2, 10, 13 de Vilmorin, Louise 93 Dea, Marie 110 death 6, 17, 36, 38, 39–40, 48, 52, 57, 59, 61, 64, 71–2, 73, 76–7, 78, 85, 93, 94–5, 102, 105, 158 Death of Virgil, The 192 Debord, Guy 9 Debucourt, Jean 75 Decae, Henri 89 Del Castagno, Andrea 164 Del Degan, Dario P. 64 Delannoy, Jean 2, 7, 11, 56, 57, 58, 60, 137, 141 Deleuze, Gilles 143 Delluc, Louis 22 Deluge, The 164 DeMille, Cecil B. 22, 106 Demy, Jacques 94n.19, 189

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INDEX

Deren, Maya 188 Dermit, Edouard 11–12, 27, 75, 88, 89, 90, 94, 96, 97, 101, 103, 110, 117, 134, 136, 140, 147–50, 152, 158, 181, 192 Desbordes, Jean 11, 35, 113, 151, 153 Désordre 9, 204 Diable au corps, Le· 153 Diaghilev, Serge 3, 114 Dietrich, Mariene 22 Difficulté d’être, La 18, 153, 167n.5 Dillon, Steven 188 Django Reinhardt 205 Doisneau, Robert 136 Dolce vita, La 189 Dominguin, Luis-Miguel 94, 152 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques 80, 111 Doré, Gustave 67, 69, 164 Dorziat, Gabrielle 81 doubles 6, 42, 59, 76, 83, 94, 97 Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde 104 Dreamers, The 189 Dreyer, Carl T. 22, 68 Du Cinématographe 21, 22–3, 24, 149, 163 Duchamp, Marcel 37 Dulac, Germaine 22 Duras, Marguerite 6, 150–1 Durey, Louis 4 Durgnat, Raymond 130, 131 Dutoit, Ulysse 154n.10 Duvivier, Julien 22 Dyer, Richard 152n.8, 157, 158 Eck, Marcel 158 Edelman, Lee 180–1 editing 19–20, 46–7, 84–5, 123, 125–6 Einstein, Albert 104 Eisenstein, Sergei 3, 19, 22 El-Hoss, Tamara 87 Eluard, Paul 4, 37 Emperor’s Nightingale, The 2, 203–4

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Enfants terribles, Les 2, 5, 39, 54, 87–9, 93, 148, 203 Epstein, Jean 9, 22, 48 Eraserhead 189 eroticism 45–6, 79–80, 101–2, 120, 130, 136, 145, 157–84, 192–4 Escoffier, Marcel 110 Eternel retour, L’ 2, 7, 11, 18, 22, 26, 27, 30, 48, 56–62, 69, 81, 106, 137, 140, 141–4, 162–3, 201 Evans, Arthur B. 13 existentialism 114, 151 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques (Paris 1937) 132 fantasy 61–2, 66–9, 126 Fargier, Jean-Paul 104 Faure, Elie 9 Fédération française des CinéClubs, la 9 Federation Nationale du Spectacle, la 9 Fellini, Federico 107, 189 Festival du Film Maudit, le 9 Feuillade, Louis 48 Feuillère, Edwige 74, 75, 80 Fireworks 10, 187–8 Fischlin, Daniel 73, 145–6 Flament, Edouard 36 Fleurs du Mal, Les 119 Foucart, Claude 163–4 Franju, Georges 2, 22, 189 Frayling, Christopher 69–70 Freaks 164 Freeman, Edward 112n.1 Freud, Sigmund 37, 143, 176n.11, 177 Friedrich, Casper David 78 Gabin, Jean 61 Gance, Abel 22 Gate of Hell 9, 204

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Gélin, Daniel 105 Genet, Jean 6, 9, 151–2, 158, 187 Gercke, Daniel 142, 159 Germon, Nane 63 Gide, André 112 Gilson, Paul 49 Gilson, René 15, 80, 87, 101, 138 Giraudoux, Jean 112 Glass, Philip 188 Gluck, Christophe Willibald 117 Godard, Jean-Luc 1, 6, 23, 27, 56, 117, 128n.10, 190–5 Goethe, Wolfgang von 17 Golden Ass: Or Metamorphoses, The 64 Gorel, Michel 49 Grand écart. Le 3, 5 Gréco, El 163–4 Greco, Juliette 4–5, 110, 115 Greene, Naomi 48, 143 Grémillon, Jean 35, 90 Gremlins 189 Guffroy, Pierre 93 Guitry, Sacha 2, 6, 13, 139 Hart, William S. 22 Hayer, Nicolas 110 Hayward, Susan 145 Haziza, Fabien 13 Hélas pour moi 190 Héliogabale 152n.8 Herbert, James 132 Herbier, Marcel L’ 2 Histoires de ma vie 138 Histoire(s) du Cinéma 23, 128n.10, 191–2, 193 history 26–7, 43, 54, 61, 62, 76–7, 107, 125, 126, 128–9 Hitchcock, Alfred 180 Hollywood 22, 24 Homme atlantique, L’ 150–1 homoeroticism 45, 145, 158, 179n.8 homophobia 22, 37, 151

homosexuality 52, 53, 141, 175 Honegger, Arthur 4, 9 Hôtel du Nord 61 Hubert, Roger 57 Hugnet, Georges 49 Hugo, Valentine 37n.1 Hugo, Victor 74 Ibéria, Claude 63, 75 incest 6, 146–7 Inconcevable Jean Cocteau, L’138, 153 Isou, Isidore 9, 114 J’adore 153 James, Henry 182 Janet, Janine 93 Jarman, Derek 154n.10, 188 Jaubert, Maurice 9 Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma 1, 13, 24, 197 Jean Cocteau s’adresse à l’an 2000 2–3, 187, 200 Jean Cocteau tourne son dernier film 93 ‘Jean l’oiseleur’ 4 Jean Marais 11, 138 Jeancolas, Jean-Pierre 61 Jeune Homme et la mort, Le 47n.3, 113 Journal d’un Inconnu 104 Jouvet, Louis 152n.8 Juliette ou la clef des songes 56, 204 Jutra, Claude 189 Kammerspiel 48 Keaton, Buster 3, 22, 48 Keller, Marjorie 120 Khill, Marcel 16, 153 Kihm, Jean-Jacques 130 King Lear 190, 191, 193 Kinugasa, Teinosuke 9 Klee, Paul 128n.n, 192

INDEX

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Koestenbaum, Wayne 150 Labrely, Henri 35 Lack, Roland-François 119, 130 Lalanne, Jean-Marc 16, 51, 80, 91, 104, 118–19, 128, 188 Lang, André 11 Lang, Fritz 104 Lange, Monique 153 Langlois, Henri 21 Lansing Smith, Evans 130 Laplanche, Jean 168 Last Will of Dr Mabuse, The 104 Laubreaux, Alain 80, 81 LaValley, Al 157, 158 Law of Desire, The 189 Léaud, Jean-Pierre 8, 105 Leboursier, Raymond 81 Leenhardt, Roger 9 Légende de Sainte Ursule, La 202 Léger, Fernand 9 Lettres à Jean Marais 138 Lettrism 114 Leutrat, Jean-Louis 192 Lifar, Serge 94 Lit à colonnes, Le 56, 200–1 Living Room, The 189 Livre blanc, Le 12, 166, 188 Lully, Jean-Baptiste 69 Lynch, David 189 Machine á écrire, La 5 Machine Infernale, La 5, 85–6 Maeterlinck, Maurice 4 Magnan, Henri 86 Magnani, Anna 189 Magnificent Ambersons, The 188 Mains sales, Les 114 male form 39, 45–6, 47–8, 143–4, 163–4, 171, 175, 176, 178, 180, 182 see also masculinity Malibran, La 2, 13, 201

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Mallarmé, Stéphane 131 Malle, Louis 89 Malraux, André 93 Marais, Jean 2, 11–12, 26, 27, 56, 57, 62, 63, 65, 66, 71, 74, 75, 76, 80, 81, 85, 87, 94, no, 122, 123, 129, 135, 136–50, 153– 4, 158, 166, 172–3, 182, 189 Marceau, Marcel 2 Marco, Raoul 66 Marey, Etienne-Jules 15 Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, Les 4, 22 Marken, Jane 58 Marker, Chris 14–15, 189 Martin, Marcel 8n.1 Martyrdom of St Maurice and his Legions, The 163 masculinity 12, 14, 140, 141–3, 144, 147, 161, 170, 173, 177 see also male form masochism 143–4, 157, 168 see also sadomasochism Masson, Jean 94n.19 Matras, Christian 75, 80 Matrix, The 189 Mauriac, Claude 87 Mauvais Sang 190 Méliès, Georges 26, 36, 41, 56, 61, 68 Mélodie, qualre peintres, Une 205 Melville, Jean-Pierre 2, 10, 87, 88, 89, 111 Mérimée, Prosper 8 Meshes of the Afternoon 188 Métehen, Jacques 96 Michalczyk, John J. 6 Milhaud, Darius 4 Miller, Lee 35, 37, 41 Milorad 52, 54, 175, 176n.11 Miracle of the Host 41 mirrors 6, 17, 38, 67–8, 71–2, 75, 83, 94, 105, 118, 120, 122–3, 126, 127–8, 166, 177

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INDEX

Molière 69 Mon Premier voyage (Tour du Monde en 80 jours) 16 Monfort, Sylvia 78 montage see editing Morand, Paul 36 Moreau, Jeanne 189 Morissan, Brigitte 94 Mourier, Maurice 48, 50 Murnau, F. W. 48 Musée Grévin, Le 94n.19, 205 music 10, 20, 36, 40, 44, 47, 63, 69, 89, 96, 11, 117–18 Mystère Picasso, Le 90 Nazism 4, 62, 73 Nemer, Français 12n.2 Neveux, Georges 56 Nietzsche, Friedrich 58 Noailles, Charles, Vicomte de 35, 36, 37 Noailles, Marie Laure de 35, 36 Noces de sable, Les 21, 202 ‘Notes autour du cinématographe’ 24 Notes sur le cinématographe 190 Notre-Dame-des Fleurs 152 Nouvelle Vague 1, 9, 89, 101, 107 Nouvelle Vague 190 Numero Deux 193 Oberwald Mystery, The 189, 207 Occupation 2, 4, 57, 124–5, 130, 142 see also Second World War ŒdipeRoi 5, 139 Olympiad 17n.3 Opéra 3, 112 Ophüls, Max 80 opium 3, 4, 16, 20, 36 Opium, journal d’une désintoxication 3, 16–17, 118, 176n.11 Orfeo ed Euridice 117

Orfeo Negro 186 Orphée (film) 2, 4–5, 6, 8, 11, 18, 26–7, 33, 52,·54, 78, 88, 89, 94, 95, 96, 97. 101, 105, 107, 110–35, 138, 140, 148, 149, 151, 157–8, 162, 164, 166, 170–1, 172–4, 177, 178–9, 181, 182, 186, 189, 190, 191, 192, 199 Orphée (play) 5, 11, 112, 116, 125 Oxenhandler, Neal 16, 133 Pagnol, Marcel 6, 63 Paisà 128 Paley, Princesse Natalie 113n, 2 Pantomimes 2, 205 Parade 3, 41, 58, 152 Parély, Mila 63 Parents terribles, Les (Dayan) 189, 207 Parents terribles, Les (film) 1, 4, 6, 11, 15–16, 26, 32, 48, 80–7, 88, 110, 139, 141, 163, 177–8, 198 Parents terribles, Les (play) 1, 26, 80–1, 82, 137, 138, 139, 157 Parking 189 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 189, 190 Passion 193 Paulvé, André 63, 110 Pauly, Rebecca M. 146–7 Paviot, Paul 2 Peau d’ane 189 Pépé le Moko 22 Périer, Franíois 94, 105, no, 192 Périnal, Georges 35, 36 Perrault, Charles 63 Perrin, Laurent 189 Petit, Roland 47n.3, 113 Petit soldat, Le 190 phallic women 6, 79, 157, 178 Phèdre 96 Philippe, Claude-Jean 74, 87 Philippe, Gérard 138

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INDEX Picasso, Pablo 3, 36, 90, 94, 152 Piéral, Pierre 58 Piero della Francesca 443, 164 Pillaudin, Roger 17, 98, 93, 106, 169 Pinoteau, Claude 93, 110 Pisanello, Antonio 43, 164 Plain-Chant 3 poetry 4, 18, 22–3, 43, 59, 60, 94, 95n.20, 107, 114, 119, 138, 153, 163–4 Pontcarral, Colonel d’Empire 57, 62, 141 Pontoiseau, Roland 93 Porte de I’enfer, La 9 Portrait-souvenir 208 Poulenc, Francis 4 Prince of Darkness 189 Princesse de Clèves, La 2, 205–6 Profanation of the Host 53 Proust, Marcel 150n.6 Pruitt, John 43

221

Quai des brumes 61 ‘Queening the Pawn’ 2 Querelle de Brest 152

reversal 6, 20, 42, 161, 178 reverse-motion photography 2, 13, 20, 39, 42, 70, 71, 72, 91–2, 102, 104, 105, 117, 121, 122, 126, 159–63, 164, 165, 167, 168–9, 171, 173–4, 181–2 Richter, Hans 2 Riefenstahl, Leni 17n·3 Rignault, Alexandre 58 Rimbaud, Arthur 7 Ritual in Transfigured Time 188–9 Rivero, Enrique 11, 35, 36, 42, 44, 151, 175 Rivette, Jacques 101 Robinne, Gabrielle 77n·7 Robinson, Christopher 158 Rohmer, Eric 189 Rolot, Christian 92n.17, 190n.3 Roman de Tristan et Iseult, Le· 57 Rose, Francis 35 Rossellini, Roberto 128 189 Rossif, Frédéric 89–90 Rostand, Edmond 4 Rouge est mis, Le 204 Ruiz, Raúl 189 Ruy Blas 2, 11, 74, 137, 140, 202

Radiguet, Raymond 4, 52, 112, 115, 153 Ramirez, Francis 92n.17 Ray, Man 37 realism 60–3, 66–7, 68–70, 71, 74, 123–5 Rear Window 180–1 Rebatet, Lucien see Vinneuil, François (aka Lucien Rebatet) Règle du jeu, La 67 Rembrandt (van Rijn) 67 Renaud et Armide 5, 63 Renoir, Jean 35, 67, 104 resurrection 6, 39, 42, 48, 64, 71–2, 93, 94–5, 96, 102, 105, 161, 164

sadomasochism 158 see also masochism Sadoul, Jacqueline 81, 110 Saint Genet, comedien et martyr 151 Saint-Saëns, Camille n.7 ‘Salut à Arno Breker’ 4 Sang d’un poète, Le 1, 7, 11, 12, 13, 15, 16, 19, 22, 26, 29, 35–55, 57, 65, 69, 85, 89, 91, 94, 95, 96, 99, 100, 102, 105, 119, 122, 125, 126, 143, 144, 151, 152, 158, 164, 165, 166, 174–6, 177, 178, 181, 183, 186, 188, 189, 185, 197 Sarrazin, René 93 Sartre, Jean-Paul 4, 64n.5, 112,

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222

INDEX

114, 151 Saslavsky, Luis 204 Sauve qui peut (la vie) 193 Schefer, Jean Louis 164 Scott, Andrea 79 Second World War 2, 4, 57, 114, 124–5, 128, 129–30, 142 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 182 Sellier, Geneviève 141 Shaviro, Steven 167 Sims, Gregory 60, 62 Sirène du Mississippi, La 189 slow motion 15, 16–17, 20, 41, 42, 47, 70, 107 Snow, Michael 189 Soigne ta droite, ou une place sur la terre 192 Soleil, Christian 148–9n.5 Sologne, Madeleine 57 sound 20, 26, 41, 42, 44, 47 ‘space-time’ 104–7 Springer, Alfred 52 St-Germain-des-Prés 9 Stéphane, Nicole 89, 90 Stevenson, Robert Louis 104 Stop Thief’15 Strauss, Frédéric 19, 25 Stravinsky, Igor 3 Studio 28 9 surrealism 3, 4, 6, 35, 37, 38, 49–50, 112, 114, 151 Syndicat des Scénaristes, le 9 Tailleferre, Germaine 4 Tardieu, Jean-Luc 149 Tarr, Carrie 141–2 Tati, Jacques 7 television 104 Ten Commandments, The 106 Tennis 8n.1, 202 Testament d’Orphée, Le 1, 2, 8, 10, 11, 13, 17, 20, 21, 22, 23, 26, 27, 34, 52, 92–107, 128n.10,

134, 143, 144, 147, 148, 149,·150, 152, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166, 168, 169, 170, 172, 173, 178 –80, 181, 186–7, 188, 191, 192, 199–200 Testament du docteur Cordelier, Le 104 theatre 4, 5, 23, 26, 74, 75–6, 78, 82–3, 84, 87, 112, 159–60 Theorem 189 Thévenet, Virginie 189 Thierry, Gaston 49 Thomas l’imposteur 2, 3, 5, 189, 190, 206–7 Thullier, Jean 93 time 16–17, 26–7, 70, 91, 92–3, 100, 104–7, 125–6, 127–9, 159–60 Tiquet, Henri 63 Tirez sur le pianiste 107 Torrés, Henri, Maitre 95 Tournoi, Le 35 Toutain, Roland 60 Traité de bave et d’éternité 9 Trnka, Jiří 2 Truffaut, François I, 8, 89, 93, 107, 189 Tual, Denise 2 Tual, Roland 56 Uccello, Paolo 41, 43, 53, 164–5 Ulysse ou les mauvaises rencontres 202 Una voce umana 189, 206 Valdovino, Luis 188 Vampyr 68 Varennes, Jacques 11 Venice Film Festival 11, 188 Venise et ses amants 203 Vénus d’Ille, La 8 Vermeer, Jan 18, 67, 69

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INDEX

223

Verne, Jules 16 Vie d’un poète, La see Le Sang d’un poète Vigo, Jean 7, 47 Villa Santo-Sospir, La, 1, 11, 12, 14, 22, 26, 89–92, 150, 176–8 191, 199 Villon, François 7 Villoteau, Grégoire 49 Vincendeau, Ginette 89n.14 Vinneuil, François (aka Lucien Rebatet) 22, 57 Visiteurs du soir, Les 61, 62 Vaix humaine, La 5, 189, 208

Weisweiller, Francine 5, 90, 93, 94, 179 Welles, Orson 22, 188 Wenders, Wim 189 Whitman, Walt 176n.11 Wilde, Oscar 6 Williams, James S. 150 Williamson, James 15 Winter, Jay 58n.2 Wyler, William 22

Wachovski brothers 189 Wakhévitch, Georges, 75 war see Second World War Warhol, Andy 107, 189 Weiss, Peter 52

Zéro de conduite 47 Zone, the 118, 122, 123, 124–8, 134, 178 Zwobada, André 21

Yeux sans visage, Les 22 Yoyotte, Marie-Josèphe 93