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While some other mid-20th-century directors were pursuing the chimera of “total cinema,” Jean Cocteau was chasing down the dream of a “total art.” But if “total cinema” meant capturing on screen the actual world as it really was, Cocteau’s “total art” meant giving form, instead, to the otherwise impalpable worlds of desire and dream. Both quests were fundamentally unrealistic, but Cocteau embraced this truth in ways both joyously inventive and technically rigorous.Read More »
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Jean Cocteau died on October 11, 1963, the same exact day that his longtime friend, the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, succumbed to liver cancer not all that far away. Some have even speculated that the news of Piaf’s death was what spurred the heart attack that claimed Cocteau, a beautiful, if melancholic coincidence, if we are to put our full faith into what’s ostensibly rumor, seeing as the famed poet, theater director, and filmmaker often remarked that he was more scared of the deaths of his loved ones than he was of his own inevitable demise.Read More »
PLOT: Cocteau takes the viewer on a tour of a friend’s villa on the French coast (a major location used in Testament of Orpheus). The house itself is heavily decorated, mostly by Cocteau (and a bit by Picasso), and we are given an extensive tour of the artwork. Cocteau also shows us several dozen paintings as well. Most cover mythological themes, of course. He also proudly shows paintings by Edouard Dermithe and Jean Marais and plays around his own home in Villefranche.Read More »
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This is not the end of the Cocteau story, of course, for as we have constantly witnessed, he is always oriented towards the future due to his undimmed faith in the creative act, and none more so than in the medium of film. Indeed, he was even more advanced in his preparations for death and the after-life of his work than originally thought.Read More »
Synopsis
A young artist draws a face at a canvas on his easel. Suddenly the mouth on the drawing comes into life and starts talking. The artist tries to wipe it away with his hand, but when he looks into the hand he finds the living mouth on his palm. He tries to wipe it off on the mouth of an unfinished statue of a young woman. The statue comes into life and tells him that the only way out of the studio is through the looking glass. The artist jumps into the mirror and comes to the Hotel of Dramatic Lunacies. He peeps through the keyholes of a series of hotel rooms. In the last room he sees desperate meetings of hermaphrodites. One of them has a signboard saying “Mortal danger”. Read More »
In his last film, legendary writer/artist/filmmaker Jean Cocteau portrays an 18th-century poet who travels through time on a quest for divine wisdom. In a mysterious wasteland, he meets several symbolic phantoms that bring about his death and resurrection. With an eclectic cast that includes Pablo Picasso, Jean-Pierre Leáud, Jean Marais and Yul Brynner, Testament of Orpheus (Le Testament de Orphée) brings full circle the journey Cocteau began in The Blood of a Poet, an exploration of the torturous relationship between the artist and his creations.Read More »
Synopsis
“Criterion” wrote:
In his last film, legendary writer/artist/filmmaker Jean Cocteau portrays an 18th-century poet who travels through time on a quest for divine wisdom. In a mysterious wasteland, he meets several symbolic phantoms that bring about his death and resurrection. With an eclectic cast that includes Pablo Picasso, Jean-Pierre Leáud, Jean Marais and Yul Brynner, Testament of Orpheus (Le Testament de Orphée) brings full circle the journey Cocteau began in The Blood of a Poet, an exploration of the torturous relationship between the artist and his creations.Read More »
In a grand apartment, where the disorder of an elderly couple and the order of old aunt Léonie are mixed together, Michel is the pampered child of this strange “roulotte” who seems to be rolling away from the world. Yvonne idolizes her son so much she forgets her husband. She would even forget herself if she did not have to take care of his insulin treatment. When Michel sleeps out for the first time, he vows to his mother (who he nicknames “Sophie”) that he loves Madeleine, a young woman who he wishes to present to her. At first reticent, then jealous and exclusive, Yvonne ends up capitulating before her son’s sorrow and his sister Léonie’s insistence. In the meantime, we discover that Madeleine already has an “old” lover who she wants to break up with, who is none other than Georges, Michel’s father. Aunt Léo attempts to bring order to this tragic comedy of life. (Wiki)Read More »
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A masterpiece of experimental film and a projection of the surrealist vision into cinema by its outstanding artists. Described by Richter as “part Freud, part Lewis Carroll,” it is a fairy tale for the subconscious based on the game of chess. This chess-sonata is played by a host of artists including Paul Bowles, Jean Cocteau, Julian Levy, Jacqueline Matisse, Jose Sert, Yves Tanguy, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst and Alexander Calder. “What interested me is the poetry of images, the melody and rhythm of forms and colors” (Hans Richter).Read More »