La
Difficulte Detre by
Jean Cocteau
This book is written in French. Malade, Cocteau
confie aux mots sa douleur, la mort apprivoise, les variations de
son me mais aussi le rire, la jeunesse survolte, les amis... Le
tmoignage mouvant d'un crateur sans pareil. Ill, Cocteau writes
about pain, coming to terms with death, the variability of his
spirit but also about laughter, overwrought youth, friends... The
moving testimony of a creator without equal.
Crateur, Cocteau occupe une place particulire
dans la littrature. Il s'est essay tous les genres: romans, thtre,
posie mais aussi dessins, peintures et films. travers des images
et des personnages peu communs, Cocteau construit un univers o la
mythologie se mle au surrel, o les frontires du mensonge et de la
vrit s'estompent. As a creator, Cocteau occupies a particular
place in literature. He tried his hand at many genres: novels,
plays, poetry, drawing, painting and film. By means of images and
unusual characters, Cocteau constructs a universe in which
mythology blends with the surreal, where the dividing line between
lies and truth becomes blurred.
A
Day With Picasso : Twenty-Four Photographs by Jean Cocteau by
Billy Kluver,
Jean Cocteau (Photographer)
During the 1980s,
Swedish-born Billy Klüver became a sort of amateur archivist,
collecting early-20th-century photographs of the bohemian district
of Paris known as Montparnasse. One day he stumbled upon a group
of astonishing photographs depicting such seminal modernist
figures as Modigliani; Picasso; his friend, the poet Max
Jacob; and the poet and critic André Salmon as well as Picasso's
mistress. Like an archaeologist reconstructing an artifact,
Klüver set about trying to determine how, where, and why the
pictures were taken. The result of his efforts is the whimsical
and engaging A Day with Picasso, centering around 24
pictures taken on the afternoon of August 12, 1916, over the
course of four hours. The photographer? None other than
Jean Cocteau, in an early experiment that perhaps
prefigured his later films. Brought together by an exhibit at the
Salon d'Antin, the famous subjects are shown laughing and clowning
their way through a café lunch and later adjourning to a nearby
restaurant.
A Day with Picasso also contains a
detailed précis of Cocteau's work, some contextual background
about the subjects and their relationships to one another, and
some sample drawings from the artists whose relaxed camaraderie is
so vividly captured in these intriguing photographs.
Blood
of a Poet (1930) - English subtitles
Considered one of the most influential
avant-garde films of all-time, Blood of a Poet explores the
plight of the artist and the forces of creative thought.
Constructed as a collage of dreamlike situations, autobiographical
revelations and enigmatic images, the film is an odyssey into the
poet's imagination. Freud described the film as being "like
looking through a keyhole at a man undressing."
"A realistic documentary of unreal
situations" reads the introductory card of Jean Cocteau's
debut film, which recalls the work of the silent surrealists
(notably Luis Buńuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou
and L'Âge d'Or). Cocteau uses dream imagery to explore
poetry, artistic creation, memory, death, and rebirth in four
separate fantasy sequences. In the first scene, an artist
confronts his creations when they take on a life of their own. In
the second, he dives through a mirror (a primitive but startling
effect Cocteau refines for Orpheus) and into a skewed hall
where every door reveals a fantastic dream scene. The third
sequence finds a gang of boys turning a snowball fight into a
cruel war, and in the last an audience gathers to witness a dead
boy's resurrection amidst a strange card game. These descriptions
do little to communicate the poetry of each segment, which rely on
creative imagery to create meaning not in stories but in symbols
and metaphors. Cocteau's realization is often stiff and stilted,
the work of a visual artist transforming still images into an
medium that moves through time, but it's never less than beautiful
and evocative. Cocteau returned to many of the same themes in Orpheus
and The Testament of Orpheus. --Sean Axmaker
Jean Cocteau Filmography
