His artistic avocations were many -- poet, novelist, painter, playwright, set designer, actor -- but Jean Cocteau's work as a filmmaker distilled his creative vision with a special lucidity. In film he could bring his Surrealist language and imagery together, making...
[more]His artistic avocations were many -- poet, novelist, painter, playwright, set designer, actor -- but Jean Cocteau's work as a filmmaker distilled his creative vision with a special lucidity. In film he could bring his Surrealist language and imagery together, making the dreamlike palpable and present. Cocteau's literary works announced the themes that would obsess him across mediums and genres -- unrequited love, narcissism, self-destruction, and poetic creativity. He was particularly concerned with critiquing bourgeois family life through a psychoanalytic lens, as in his great novel "Les Enfants Terribles" (published in 1929, adapted to film in 1950) and in his many reworkings of Greek myth: from the play "Antigone" (1922) and the opera-oratorio "Oedipus Rex" (1927 written with Stravinsky), to his life-long fascination with Orpheus -- a figure he explored in a play and two films.
These themes are realized most strongly in his films, where Cocteau used images of mirrors and self-portraits to explore the trap of narcissism, employed duplicated rooms and reverse projection to symbolize the separate "cameras" of the mind, and cast devastatingly beautiful actors to embody the yearning for the flesh that underlies much of his animus towards social convention. A cinematic piece like "La Belle et La Bete" (1946), with the clarity of Josette Day's Beauty and the vividness of Jean Marais's Beast, literally and metaphorically represents the dream world of fairy tale and the dangerous impulses of the subconscious. Sumptuous costumes, elaborate makeup, and a vast array of optically illusory effects make this film the culmination of Cocteau's Surrealist work.
Cocteau had considered himself "the prize booby of his class" growing up. His father's suicide disturbed his unremarkable life, and he became a mediocre student who sought refuge in his imagination and in passionate crushes on other youths. Then he emerged as a major artist in the avant-garde circles of 1920s Paris, publishing his first poetry at age 19, crafting plays with Pablo Picasso as set designer, and collaborating with composers such as Satie and Stravinsky. Included in his variegated biography are a stint as an ambulance driver in World War I, a face-lift, a fondness for wearing leather trousers and matador capes, and, more memorably, a passion for translating the sensuousness of reality into a Surrealist film.
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