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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. The most ambitious and talented fabulist since E.T.A. Hoffmann, Cocteau not only produced a vast and diverse corpus of poems, drawings, plays, sculptures, novels, and libretti, he also wrote and directed a small but astonishing group of films. Beauty and the Beast is the best of his five feature films and the greatest fable of his entire oeuvre—a vulnerable-beast-in-love tale to end all others, from King Kong to Edward Scissorhands.

Much of the film’s deep magic comes from Cocteau’s sense of himself as a vulnerable beast-in-love: In his mid-50s when he made the film, Cocteau was openly gay in an often viciously homophobic post-Vichy France, an opium addict, plagued by skin-disfiguring eczema, and yet still enamored of his much younger star, the Adonis-like Jean Marais, his sometime-lover and great friend and collaborator. In Marais’s triple role (he plays the monstrous yet tender-hearted Beast; Avenant, the hunky but caddish suitor of Josette Day’s La Belle; and the ensorcelled Prince Ardent, whom the Beast is ultimately revealed, with some ambivalence, to be), the actor lends virtuosic as well as symbolic appeal to Cocteau’s cinematic inquiry into the complex interplay of identification and desire. Between the time of their meeting in 1937 and Cocteau’s death in 1963, the two were often acknowledged publicly as a couple, though they both had other lovers as well. And they spent many of those years living together as a family, on and off, first in a Paris apartment and later in a grand house in the Fontainebleau Forest.

Made in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi Occupation of France, Beauty and the Beast depicts a very different sort of family, a traditional bourgeois family—La Belle’s—that happens to be in serious trouble: divided, penniless, and without a strong patriarch. In other words, la belle France itself. But, if Cocteau’s film in some ways pointed up the nation’s devastated present and uncertain future, it was also one of the first major cinematic triumphs of the post-war era. It helped revitalize France’s film industry, and thus in no insignificant way contributed to the nation’s renascent economic as well as cultural health. However, the film provides no evident “happy ending” for La Belle’s family; Cocteau doesn’t tell us what’s in store for her siblings, for example. Indeed, whether or not the film’s ending is a fully happy one even for La Belle herself remains an open question, just as it did for the allegorized bourgeois national family of post-Occupation France.

And, of course, just as it did for Cocteau himself. Beauty and the Beast is both a national tale and the very personal story of its creator’s sense of himself as a regal but cursed, aging but perennially romantic, gay artist. For all its very genuine and supremely successful appeal to the childlike, it’s also a mature, sophisticated meditation on gay aestheticism, and thus a crucial work in Cocteau’s lifelong project—not just to acknowledge, but also actively to participate in the artifice of the real. From the perspective of this aestheticism, there’s nothing “natural” or given about what appears to us as real. In cinema as in life, Cocteau believed, appearances aren’t mere reflections of reality, but rather the morphing, disturbed, beautiful, hideous creatures of human exertion and contortion. Appearances are visceral as well as visual, and Cocteau’s cinematic art is the art of living hands—like the flesh-and-blood, pre-CGI hands of the young actors who hold the magic candelabras in the famous corridor scene at La Bête’s enchanted castle.

Beauty and the Beast is a gorgeously ethereal film, but also one with sinews and bones and blood…and semen: The spilled pearls that magically self-assemble in La Bête’s palm during one of his failed erotic encounters with La Belle are just one example of the film’s abundant traces of the spunk of Cocteau’s consciously queer artifice. Such traces may be less “obvious” here than in Cocteau’s more explicitly homoerotic works. And yet it’s precisely the questions and challenges of visibility—of what’s obvious and to whom and why—that the film so masterfully explores. To better appreciate this, one has but to ponder the wildly complex, erotic interpenetrations and displacements among Marais’s three characters and the actor whose body fleshes them out.

In one of the film’s climactic scenes, Cocteau—the better to realize the unreal—directed that an actual arrow be shot into Marais’s back, fortified with cork beneath his Avenant costume. If that doesn’t yet amount to “total art,” it certainly comes close to a total commitment to the quest.

Jean Cocteau - (1946) Beauty and the Beast.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 33mn
Size:	1.85 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	2 117 Kbps
Audio
#1:	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
#2:	French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps (Philip Glass’s opera "La Belle et la Bête")
#3:	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 128 Kbps (Commentary with film historian Arthur Knight)
#4:	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 128 Kbps (Commentary with writer and cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling)

https://nitro.download/view/874C82322ACAF8D/Jean_Cocteau_-_(1946)_Beauty_and_the_Beast.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jean Cocteau & René Clément – La belle et la bête AKA Beauty and the Beast (1946) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
Lily and Erich, telephone operators in Paris and Berlin, respectively, fall in love over the telephone wires and resolve to meet in Paris. Their simple plan is confounded by Erich’s unexpected travel delay and the subterfuge of their friends Annette and Max. Two cases of mistaken romantic identity result and play out against the streets, bistros and beds of Paris. True love triumphs in the end.

Allo Berlin, Ici Paris (1932).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1h 22mn
Size: 	1.26 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	698x576 ~> 744x576
Aspect ratio:  	1.292
Frame rate: 	25.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 000 Kbps
BPP: 	0.199
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/8EEA0D3B8BA3CFC/Allo_Berlin,_Ici_Paris_(1932).DVDrip.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/5E3A50A20D79081/Allo_Berlin,_Ici_Paris_(1932).Fra.srt

Language(s):French, German
Subtitles:French hardsubs for some German,French

The post Julien Duvivier – Allo Berlin? Ici Paris! (1932) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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)

Jean Cocteau’s filming of his 1938 play ten years later is both a lesson in mise en scene and an illustration of the paradox that accentuating the theatrical aspects of theater on-screen makes them quintessentially cinematic (Cf André Bazin – What is cinema) – To my knowledge, the only other film that does this to the same degree is Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge. The accomplishment becomes all the more impressive if one considers how mannered and affected Cocteau’s material is. The sheltered son of a middle-aged couple living with the wife’s unmarried sister falls in love with a young woman without realizing that she’s his father’s mistress, and the terror faced by the mother at the prospect of losing her son is matched by terror faced by the mistress in being exposed. The characters may seem outlandish individually, but collectively they bring credence to one another as the plot unfolds in two claustrophobic flats, and the cast is masterful: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Yvonne de Bray, Marcel Andre, Gabrielle Dorzoat. Cocteau cuts and moves his camera in ways that are both eccentric and definitive. (Jonathan Rosenbaum)

Jean Cocteau - (1948) The Storm Within.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 40 min
Size: 	1.92 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	792x576 
Aspect ratio:  	1.375
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 544 kb/s
BPP: 	0.232
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/6B3CD4FACE93D46/Jean_Cocteau_-_(1948)_The_Storm_Within.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jean Cocteau – Les parents terribles AKA The Storm Within (1948) first appeared on Cinema of the World.