Credits:

Written & Directed by Jean Cocteau, 1930
Music by Georges Auric
With Lee Miller, Pauline Carton, Odette Thalazac, Enrico Rivero, Jean Desbordes, Fernand Dichamps, Lucien Jager, Feral Benga and Barbette.

Text projected on the screen

'Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered. 

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. 

Free to choose the faces, the shapes, the movements, the tones, the acts, the places that please him, he composes with them a realistic documentary of unreal events. The musician under-lines the noises and the silences. 

The author dedicates this collection of allegories to the mem-ory of Pisanello, Paolo Uccello, Piero della Francesca, Andrea del Castagno, who were all painters of coats of arms and enigmas.' 

 




 
 

Credits:

Written and Directed by Jean Cocteau, 1946
Music by Georges Auric
Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély, Nane Germon, Michel Auclair, Raoul Marco, Marcel André



 

 

Credits:

Written
and Directed by Jean Cocteau, 1948
Music by Georges Auric
Cast: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Marcel André, Yvonne de Bray, Jean Cocteau, Gabrielle Dorziat

*"With the film Les Parents Terribles Jean Cocteau discovered a whole new public. By 1948 Yvonne de Bray had become more temperate in her habits, and Cocteau could now cast her as the domineering mother. Jean Marais, Marcel André, and Gabrielle Dorziat, all from the original theatrical production, were joined by Josette Day as the sweetheart. Jean Marais succeeded in disguising the fact that by 1948 he was a bit mature for the part of the son. The team worked well together, and the screenplay remained so faithful to the original, with its suffocating two-room set and tangled web of family romance, that the film enjoyed a success even greater than that of the play."

Information quoted from the site "Jean Cocteau: Index"

 


 




 

 

Credits:

Written
and Directed by Jean Cocteau, 1947
Music by Georges Auric
Cast: Yvonne de Bray, Jean Debucourt, Edwige Feuillère, Jean Marais, Silvia Monfort,Maurice Nasil, Gilles Quéant, Edward Stirling, Jacques Varennes

"Political intrigue and psychological drama run parallel. The queen is in seclusion, veiling her face for the ten years since her husband's assassination, longing to join him in death. Stanislas, a poet whose pen name is Azrael, is a suicidal anarchist, his imagination haunted into hate by longing for this queen who's drawn apart. He enters her private quarters intent on killing her then himself, but they fall in love, in part because he looks like the king. Stanislas wants her to regain political power by appearing to the public, and she tries to convince him to find hope and escape. All the while, the queen's enemies plot to keep the lovers together but to thwart their plans."

Summary written by {jhailey@hotmail.com}




 

 

Credits:

Written
and Directed by Jean Cocteau
Music by Georges Aueic
Cast: Jean Marais, François Périe, Maria Casarès, Marie Déa, Henri Crémieux, Juliette Gréco, Roger Blin, Edouard Dermithe, Maurice Carnege, René Worms, Raymond Faure, Pierre Bertin, Jacques Varennes, Claude Mauriac


"In 1949 Cocteau, sixty years old but toujours vert, began to film the screen version of his 1926 play Orphée. Both Jean Marais and Edouard Dermit appeared in the movie. Marais as Orpheus (the older poet) and Dermit as Segistus (the younger poet). Maria Casares, one of Cocteau's favourite actresses, played the Pincess (Death). Cocteau wrote to his English translator, Mary Hoeck, explaining that the moral of Orphee was the engagement of the poet with himself, not with causes or parties. Such intransigence, continued Cocteau, creates chaos in the world, and so in the film Death, although in love with Orpheus, sacrifices her own feelings and allows the poet to remain on earth.

In one scene in the film, at the entrance to the Cafe des Poetes, Dermit/ Cégeste comes in as Marais/Orphée goes out. They pause, and Cégeste (Segistus ) mutters scornfully at Orphée. That instant on screen is a Coctelian reference to a state of tension that prevailed in the poet's household at the time. But it also portrays his awareness that by 1949 he was being rejected by the young public, the new generation of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. This anxiety is reconfirmed in the film when two of the Bacchantes attack Orpheus. For the Bacchantes' role, Cocteau chose Juliette Greco and Anne-Marie Cazalis from Le Tabou, one of Saint-Germain-des-Prés most famous caves . The film was shot largely in the ruined buildings of Saint-Cyr, the French West Point, which had been destroyed by the Germans during World War II in the course of aerial bombardment. Cocteau's innovations abound: Death rides in a magnificent Rolls-Royce (a visual echo of Francine Weisweiller's Bentley) escorted b a sinister motorcycle police; Orpheus is mesmerized by a car radio that repeats coded messages (brilliant poetic phrases); and one of the trick mirrors used in the film was actually a thousand-pound tub of mercury. In September of 1950 Orphée won the Prix International de la Critique at the Venice Film Festival, and in 1951 it took First Prize at the Cannes Film Festival."

Information quoted from the site "Jean Cocteau: Index"

 


 


 

 

Credits:

Written
and Directed by Jean Cocteau
Music
by Georges Auric
Cast
: Jean Cocteau, Edouard Dermit, Jean Marais, Maria Casarès, Charles Aznavour, Françoise, Christophe, Nicole Courcel, Henri Crémieux, Daniel Gélin, Jean-Pierre Léaud, Pablo Picasso, François Périer

THE TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS
or
"Do Not Ask Me Why"

'I SPEAK: It is the film-maker's privilege to be able to allow a large number of people to dream the same dreaming together, and to show us, moreover, the optical illusions of unreality with the rigor of realism. In short, it is an admirable vehicle for poetry. My film is nothing other than a striptease show, consisting of removing my body bit by bit and revealing my soul quite naked. For there is a considerable public interested in the world of shadows, starved for the more-real-than-reality, which one day will become the sign of our times. Here is the legacy of a poet to the successive groups of people who have always supported him.

A tangle of smoke dissolves slowly and curls out through a soap bubble, that appears to have come out of the point of a knife. . . .'

 

   

 
 

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