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"Cocteau, Jean, 1889-1963."
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Art and Faith
The meaning of poetry and the sociological and political significance of art are dealt with in these letters.
eBook
Jean Cocteau : a life
Unevenly respected, easily hated, almost always suspected of being inferior to his reputation, Jean Cocteau has often been thought of as a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. In this landmark biography, Claude Arnaud thoroughly contests this characterization, as he celebrates Cocteau's \"fragile genius--a combination almost unlivable in art\" but in his case so fertile. Arnaud narrates the life of this legendary French novelist, poet, playwright, director, filmmaker, and designer who, as a young man, pretended to be a sort of god, but who died as a humble and exhausted craftsman. His moving and compassionate account examines the nature of Cocteau's chameleon-like genius, his romantic attachments, his controversial politics, and his intimate involvement with many of the century's leading artistic lights, including Picasso, Proust, Hemingway, Stravinsky, and Tennessee Williams. Already published to great critical acclaim in France, Arnaud's penetrating and deeply researched work reveals a uniquely gifted artist while offering a magnificent cultural history of the twentieth century -- Book jacket.
Book
Women and Images of Men in Cinema
Women and men in cinema are imaginary constructs created by filmmakers and their audiences. The film-psychoanalytic approach reveals how movies subliminally influence unconscious reception. On the other hand, the movie is embedded in a cultural tradition: Jean Cocteau's film La Belle
et
la Bête (1946) takes up the classic motif of the animal groom from the story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius' The Golden Ass (originally a tale about the stunning momentum of genuine female desire), liberates it from its baroque educational moral (a girl's virtue and prudence will help her to overcome her sexual fears), and turns it into a boyhood story: inside the ugly rascal there is a good, but relatively boring prince - at least in comparison to the monsters of film history.
In the seventy years since it was made, La Belle
et
la Bête has inspired numerous interpretations and has been employed by theorists of all genres and interests. In this book, Andreas Hamburger and other contributors consider its background, content, and reception, and explore the impact Cocteau has on our perceptions of beauties and beasts.
Introducing the monster as a suffering person, Cocteau's film reacts to the disturbing experience of World War II and the Holocaust. It questions hegemonial masculinity, designing a poetic, hallucinatory attempt at healing for a traumatized generation. Moreover, it addresses female and male adolescent development. Its deliberately incredible finale ironically portrays traditional constructs of femininity and masculinity, thus going beyond the scope of a compensatory fairy tale.
eBook
Fate or Free Will? The Reception of Greek Religion in Jean Cocteau’s La Machine Infernale (1934)
In the present article we propose to analyse the link between Greek religion and philosophical concepts of the human condition as a problem of reconciling determinism and at the same time free will, with its existential and moral implications. This issue has remained a matter of revision and discussion throughout the ages and latitudes within philosophy, but also in the literature, where through myths, these questions reappear, although in very different historical and religious contexts. We propose to approach these themes through the myth of Oedipus, immortalised by Sophocles in his tragedy Oedipus Rex, which Jean Cocteau, in the tragic interwar period, rereads and resemanticises, but without losing the essential question of whether there is an insurmountable destiny that imposes itself on free will.
Journal Article
SONIC ‘DETHEATRICALIZATION’
Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of his controversial play Les Parents terribles for the screen stands out in his oeuvre as an attempt to reconcile theatre and cinema. It also presented a challenge in preparing a soundscape for a work that did not have any music in its original form. Parents occupies a unique, Janus-like position in the history of French film music, as forward-looking in its anticipation of New Wave treatment of music as material as it is representative of the turn to adapting stage plays for the screen that started in the 1930s. Drawing on production sketchbooks and testimonies, this article considers the development of Cocteau’s working method and his collaboration with Georges Auric, fuelled by the director’s desire to take control of sonic matters. The resulting employment of a monothematic score was not only a new solution to the famous problem of filmed theatre, ‘detheatricalizing’ Parents sonically and visually, it contributed considerably to the development of Cocteau’s status as film auteurç—one whose role now extended to adapting musical material. Furthermore, the effect of this compositional technique in Parents suggests that it can be fruitfully situated in relation to recent work in film music studies on issues of anempathetic scoring practices.
Journal Article
Daddy’s Girl: Incest in Life and Literature
Eric Gill wallowed in his depravity and didn’t care about the terrible effects on the young girls in his family. Djuna Barnes was permanently wounded by her double trauma. Diana Arbus supposedly felt no guilt, but killed herself. Sappho Durrell, psychologically damaged, also committed suicide. In the literary works, the brother-sister incest ranges from doubly tragic in John Ford to mythically and musically elevated in Thomas Mann. It is idealized, even glorified, despite the tragic consequences, in Jean Cocteau and his follower Lawrence Durrell. Incest is elusive and merely hinted at in Barnes, disastrous and tragic in Scott Fitzgerald. All these works contrast the evil curse of incest with its perverse delights, and never resolve the eternal conflict between passionate nature and repressive morality.
Journal Article
Gloss
Friedrich Nietzsche2 The fruit of faith [is] understanding, so that we may arrive at eternal life, where the Gospel would not be read to us, but he who has given us the Gospel now would appear with all the pages of the reading and the voice of the reader and commentator removed. \"12 To find eternal gold in the auri sacra fames [sacred hunger for gold] of the text's unending weird glow (like [lik- \"body, form; like, same\"] the other gloss from ghel- \"to shine\"). \"17 ( )loss: abandonment of the specular place of images, of the third zone between subject and object, of the independent living reality of the sensible. [...]there is a truth, without the possibility of transmitting it; there are modes of transmission, without anything being either transmitted or taught. … perhaps no other epoch has been so obsessed by its own past and so unable to create a vital relationship with it.
Journal Article
Beauty and the Beast
The article is a reflection on the category of the beautiful in the work of Professor Hilary Fraser in the context of Victorian Studies at Birkbeck College.
Journal Article
Welcome to Poetry 2019
A dog seems keenly aware of the state of things, including the moods of the humans in the room, and able to sense the swings in personality, the funks of depression and despair, the buoyancy of joy and celebration. [...]that is what I most appreciated in Luchs' poem, \"Suzie,\" a poem that describes with keen precision and little embellishment the speaker's childhood dog. Addressed to the titular subject, it first reads as a character study of a less-than-cuddly dog, which is funny because it flies in the face of the usual \"sweet pooch\" found in poems about pets. The dog impresses by her viciousness and disloyalty, but still merits a grudging respect in the end, if for no other reason than consistency in a household fraught with warfare and abuse.
Journal Article