Jean Cocteau

Although Jean Cocteau is probably best known for the half dozen or so films he directed, his creative talents extend far beyond the narrow confines of cinema.  An accomplished artist and writer, as well as a film director, he was among the great creative influences of the Twentieth Century.   His stature is reflected by his circle of friends and patrons, which included such artistic giants as the composer Erik Satie, the writers Marcel Proust and Colette, the painter Pablo Picasso and the ballet director Serge Diaghilev. 

In all of his work, Cocteau was profoundly original and avant-garde, often drawing together the classical (such as Greek mythology) with the modern (including Cubism and jazz).  The only thing that unified Cocteau remarkably diverse output was the artist’s assertion that everything had a basis in poetry.  This is most evident in his written work (his novels, poems and screenplays), where the voice of the poet is clearly discernible.

Cocteau was born on 5th July 1889 at Maisons-Lafitte, near to Paris.  His comfortable bourgeois upbringing was shattered when his father committed suicide when he was just nine.  This event undoubtedly had a profound effect on Cocteau, and from an early age he developed a reputation as a rebel and a trouble causer (he was expelled from school and he later ran away to Marseilles).  Through his many and diverse artistic hobbies, which included painting and writing, Cocteau found a more constructive way to express his reactionary urges.

Cocteau’s artistic career flourished between the two world wars.  His first major successes were his stage play Orphée and his novel, Les Enfants terribles.  In 1930, with the patronage of the eccentric Vicomte de Noailles, Cocteau made his first film, Le Sang d’un poète , a surrealist expression of his own artistic beliefs (although the film was denounced by the Surrealist Movement as superficial).

It would be almost 15 years before Cocteau would make his next film, the legendary 1946 film La Belle et la bête.  In the interim, Cocteau wrote some of his best stage plays, including La Machine infernal amd Les Chevaliers de la table ronde, and some film scripts, including Robert Bresson’s first major film, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.

In 1949, Cocteau made what many consider to be his greatest film, Opheé, which starred his close friend Jean Marais.  A surreal re-telling of the Greek legend of Orpheus in the Underworld, the film is believed to have a semi-autobiographical sub-text.  Cocteau returned to similar themes in his final film, Le Testament d’Orphée (1960), in which he himself played the central character.

In later years, Jean Cocteau became a formidable public figure (elected to the prestigious Academie française in 1955), but he was also an unashamed eccentric (to the extent of having a face lift and wearing matador capes).  He died on 11th October 1963, from a heart attack immediately after hearing the news of the death of his friend Edith Piaf.

Although it represents a very small part of his creative output, it is possibly Cocteau’s films that reveal most about the great artist.  What most distinguishes his films is the immediate impression of a strong creative talent, one that is capable of following its own artistic flow, unrestrained by the limits of imagination or convention.  This shows not just in the writing – which is among the most beautiful in cinema history – but also on the visual side, in the inventive camera work and often in the set design.  Cocteau’s cinema is probably the most poetic the world has ever seen, eloquent, mysterious, and timeless.

“In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.”

“An artist cannot speak about his art any more than a plant can discuss horticulture.”

“An original artist is unable to copy.  So he has only to copy in order to be original.”

“Art is a marriage of the conscious and the unconscious.”

“Art is not a pastime but a priesthood.”

“Asking an artist to talk about his work is like asking a plant to discuss horticulture.”

“Emotion resulting from a work of art is only of value when it is not obtained by sentimental blackmail.”

“Film will only became an art when its materials are as inexpensive as pencil and paper.”

“One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.”

“The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up.”

“Art produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time.  Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time.”

“I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?”

“We must believe in luck.  For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?”

“After the writer’s death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter.”

“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death.  To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving.  It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”

“Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.”

“I have a piece of great and sad news to tell you: I am dead.”

“Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk.  It is walking toward me, without hurrying.”

“The day of my birth, my death began its walk.  It is walking toward me, without hurrying.”

“You’ve never seen death?  Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive.”

“Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal.  Drugs, alcohol, or lies.  Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself.  Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.”

“A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”

“I have lost my seven best friends, which is to say God has had mercy on me seven times without realizing it.  He lent a friendship, took it from me, sent me another.”

“One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it.  With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.”

“The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends.”

“Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods.  We have ours, they have theirs.  That is what’s known as infinity.”

“Commissions suit me.  They set limits.  Jean Marais dared me to write play in which he would not speak in the first act, would weep for joy in the second and in the last would fall backward down a flight of stairs.”

“The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order.”

“If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort.  He must relinquish it.”

“Life is a horizontal fall.”

“The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one’s preconceived ideas.  In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizzare which seems inherent in them. ”

“I love cats because I enjoy my home; and little by little, they become its visible soul.”

“There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul.”

“All good music resembles something.  Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it.”

“The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee.”

“A true poet does not bother to be poetical.  Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses.”

“Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie.”

“I know that poetry is indispensable, but to what I could not say.”

“Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for.”

“Take a commonplace, clean it and polish it, light it so that it produces the same effect of youth and freshness and originality and spontaneity as it did originally, and you have done a poet’s job.  The rest is literature.”

“The poet doesn’t invent.  He listens.”

“The poet is a liar who always speaks the truth.”

“The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.”

“The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood.”

“The extreme limit of wisdom - that is what the public calls madness.”

“Art is science made clear.”

“Silence moves faster when it’s going backward.”

“The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free.  First, society begins by trying to beat you up.  If this fails, they try to poison you.  If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head. ”

“I am a lie who always speaks the truth.”

“When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work.”

“If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas.”

“It is not I who become addicted, it is my body.”

“Poets don’t draw.  They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently.”

“Style is a simple way of saying complicated things.”

“Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far.”

“There are truths which one can only say after having won the right to say them.”

“There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off.  This period does not last.  He returns headlong to his beard.”

“True realism consists in revealing the surprising things which habit keeps covered and prevents us from seeing.”

“What the public criticizes in you, cultivate.  It is you.”

“Whatever the public blames you for, cultivate it; it is yourself.”