Jean Cocteau Films

With the release of Cocteau's masterpiece Orphee on DVD remastered, Pasquale Iannone discusses the filmography of this visionary French director.

Poet, playwright, painter and novelist, Jean Cocteau frequently cast doubts over his own ability as a director, insisting he had made use of the medium of film to show what poetry, novels, the... show more >

With the release of Cocteau's masterpiece Orphee on DVD remastered, Pasquale Iannone discusses the filmography of this visionary French director.

Poet, playwright, painter and novelist, Jean Cocteau frequently cast doubts over his own ability as a director, insisting he had made use of the medium of film to show what poetry, novels, theatre and essays could merely describe. During his long, astonishingly prolific artistic career, apart from directing his own films – his first was Le Sang d'un Poète (1930) and his last Le Testament d'Orphèe (1960) – Cocteau enjoyed fruitful collaborations with some of France’s most prominent filmmakers, in particular Jean Pierre Melville and Robert Bresson.

On the surface at least, Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945) sits somewhat incongruously among the stark visual austerity of the director's later work. Co-written by Cocteau and adapted from an episode in Denis Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste , the film makes expert use of professional actors, crisp chiaroscuro and an increasingly mobile camera. It tells of an elegant socialite Hélène (Maria Casarès) who plans revenge on her faithless lover Jean (Paul Bernard) by ensnaring him into marriage with a former prostitute Agnès (Elina Labourdette).

Based on Cocteau's 1929 novel, Melville’s Les Enfants Terribles (1950) tells of an adolescent brother and sister's withdrawal into their own private world of sexually charged game-playing. Featuring a striking performance from Nicole Stéphane as Elisabeth, the film was completed swiftly and shot primarily in the director’s own Paris apartment, achieving the rough, ‘16mm quality’ Cocteau wanted. Aesthetically, Les Enfants Terribles was a key film in the subsequent development of the nouvelle vague. Melville’s tight production techniques cemented his reputation as an independent filmmaker of consummate skill, a hero for the Cahiers du cinéma group.

In an article on Orphée (1949), his fifth feature as director, Cocteau affirmed that “there is nothing more vulgar than works that set out to prove something. Orphée naturally, avoids even the appearance of trying to prove anything”. The film is a hypnotically beautiful, allegorical retelling of the Greek myth set in post-war Paris, tantalisingly - and purposefully - open to a myriad of interpretation. Cocteau makes brilliant use of a variety of cinematic effects, the most memorable of which is the entrance to the hereafter represented by a mirror ('We watch ourselves grow old in mirrors. They bring us closer to death'). Jean Marais (Cocteau's real-life companion) delivers an impressive performance as the eponymous poet, with Maria Casarès mesmerising as The Princess.

Orphée may well represent Jean Cocteau's most accomplished work as a director, remarkably consistent with the rest of his work and faithful to his own personal obsessions. Through almost sixty years of polymathic artistic activity, the language of cinema, the landscape of modern film, is incalculably enriched by his poetic vision. < show less