Film Forum

(1932) “Cocteau’s first venture into cinema and the only film on which he claims to have been completely free. Despite its stylistic artificiality and visual fireworks, it is a sincere and personal film, replete with his personal iconography and the themes, obsessions, and dream associations he had already used in his poems, novels, drawings and plays. Examples of these in the film include: the poet with a star on his left shoulder; the mouth in a drawing that comes alive; the mirror that leads to another world; the poet moving down the corridor, apparently against a strong wind; the elderly governess in buttoned boots and the mutinous child; the opium addict, the hermaphrodite with the “Danger de Mort” sign in its crotch; the children’s snowball fight in which one is killed; the game of cards; the triumphant petrification of Death when she wins the game; the horns of a bull forming a lyre while Cocteau’s voice proclaims ‘L’Ennui mortel de l’immortalité.’” – Georges Sadoul. 35mm. Approx. 55 min.

Part of Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy.

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