My Favorite Jean Cocteau Film

Jean Cocteau was undeniably a great filmmaker, but he was not primarily a filmmaker, directing only eight features in total. He was far more prolific as a writer, producing plays, essays, and volumes of poetry over a career that spanned six decades. He didn't direct his first film, "The Blood of a Poet," until he was in his forties, and already an established, influential figure in the French art world. Cocteau was also a painter, designer, scenarist for ballets, and wrote scripts for other filmmakers including Robert Bresson and Jean-Pierre Melville. I suspect we remember Cocteau best as a filmmaker because film was the medium that best reflected his own multidisciplinary, wide-ranging talents.

"Beauty and the Beast" is easily Cocteau's most popular film, but his most ambitious works were the three films that made up his Orphic Trilogy, which draw from the myth of Orpheus to explore the relationships between creators and their art, dreams and reality, and life and death. The second film, "Orpheus," is a full retelling of the Orpheus myth set in modern day Paris. The title character, played by Cocteau's regular leading man Jean Marais, is a poet rather than a musician. Cocteau described it as "a film in which I express a truth peculiar to myself," full of symbols and images that held very personal meanings.

However, I didn't find "Orpheus" to be impenetrable. There are certainly mysteries and ambiguities, but the story is very accessible, and the themes are clear. Orpheus's obsession with his art and immortality are linked to his infatuation with a woman, the Princess (Maria Casarès), who represents Death and acts as a guide to the Underworld. Cocteau was adamant that she was not literally meant to be Death, but it's hard to argue that anything in this film is literal. This infatuation complicates Orpheus relationship with his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa), who represents a more mundane, ordinary existence.

"Orpheus" has been described as a "poetic film," full of dream logic and abstract, avant-garde elements. The entryway to the Underworld is a mirror that requires magic gloves to traverse. A car radio relays only poetry that may contain coded messages. Cocteau incorporates experimental techniques like running the film backwards to show supernatural actions, and using negative images to create a surreal landscape. The nocturnal Underworld is a fantastic place, where time runs differently and unseen forces are everywhere. The cinematic tricks are simple enough, but it's the careful, artful execution of them that make them so arresting. The way people move in gravity-defying slow-motion in the Underworld, and the way that Orpheus slips through the mirror are still breathtaking to witness.

Jean Marais was a popular screen idol whose reputation was cemented by his double role in "Beauty and the Beast." However, it's Maria Casarès as the Princess (who might be Death) who I found the most memorable. Regally dressed, attended by male servants, and implacable in her demeanor, she projects an air of great knowledge and authority. She appears to Orpheus as an elusive, enigmatic figure, beautiful and remote. When he embraces her, she feels like ice. However, her existence is fragile, and her power is subject to strict rules. Orpheus and the Princess's love for each other is obsessive, but clearly doomed. And it's the Princess who pays the price.

Cocteau had very specific ideas of what "Orpheus" is all about. The immortality of artists and the sacrifices required to achieve this status are prominent themes. The mirrors are symbols of death, as they are a reminder of our mortality. Autobiographical elements, like Orpheus's frustration with being misunderstood by younger poets, are prominent. Several of the film's characters, including the Princess, would return in "The Testament of Orpheus," made a decade later with Jean Cocteau playing his own lead - another poet, naturally. In that film, Cocteau uses them to interrogate his own artistic worth more directly.

I have a special fondness for magical realist films and films that try to capture the feeling of being in a dream. Cocteau's films remain among the most popular and influential of this type for good reason. The fairy tale narratives and the fantastic imagery lend an air of timelessness, while Cocteau's personal struggles as an artist, seen through this lens, remain fascinating.

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What I've Seen - Jean Cocteau

The Blood of a Poet (1930)
Beauty and the Beast (1946)
The Eagle With Two Heads (1948)
Les Parents Terribles (1948)
Orpheus (1950)
8 × 8: A Chess Sonata in 8 Movements (1957)
Testament of Orpheus (1960)