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"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 Buñuel 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
Orpheus
A Parisian poet becomes seduced by the prospect of eternal fame in Jean Cocteau's jazzy 1949 update of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus. The café set won't give successful Orpheus (Jean Marais) the time of day, so he obliges when the Princess of Death (Maria Casarés) orders him into her Rolls Royce with her injured young protégé. It isn't long before the poet realizes the commanding Princess is no ordinary benefactor of the arts; for one thing, she can travel through mirrors. The next day, Orpheus returns to his frantic wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) with the kindly chauffeur Heurtibise (François Périer), but remains distracted by the Princess and the cryptic messages from her car radio. The equally smitten Princess eventually takes Eurydice before her time, which results in an underworld trial about her actions. To get his wife back, Orpheus must promise to never to look at his wife, but his heart's not in it. This black-and-white film slyly explores the dark side of the creative urge with panache. Dreamy and mesmerizing, it depicts an underworld not too different from everyday life. With subtitles. --Diane Garrett
The Testament of Orpheus
It is the unique power of the cinema to allow a great many people to dream the same dream together and to present illusion to us as if it were strict reality. It is, in short, an admirable vehicle for poetry." Jean Cocteau, at age 70, thus ruminates on the life and purpose of the creative artist in a poetic essay. Cocteau himself stars as a time-traveling poet bopping helplessly through the ages until an experimental scientist grounds him in a kind of never-never land where he defends himself to the judges of Orpheus, dies, and is resurrected to complete his sentence: "condemned to live." Though the film opens with scenes from Orpheus, the series of symbolic encounters and surreal images more resembles The Blood of a Poet. What's different is his cinematic assurance and sly sense of humor: shot through with jokey gags and playful imagery, the film is less philosophical treatise than career summation by way of farewell party. He's invited fictional characters (most of the cast of Orpheus) and real-life friends (cameos range from Brigitte Bardot to Yul Brynner to Pablo Picasso) from his past and present to send him off to an uncertain future. The new Home Vision video and Criterion DVD releases feature the restored color sequence. Cocteau died in 1963, three years after completing the film. --Sean Axmaker
| CATEGORY: | Video |
| THEATRICAL RELEASE DATE: | 1999 |
| MANUFACTURER: | Atlantic |
| MPAA RATING: | NR (Not Rated) |
| MEDIA: | VHS Tape |
| # OF MEDIA: | 3 |
| UPC: | 037249144035 |
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Customer Reviews of Plays George Gershwin's Porgy And Bess
An Ephemeral Vision of Life and Death Orpheus is the second film in the Orphic Trilogy by Jean Cocteau and after watching "The Blood of a Poet" it makes much more sense. You are thrown into a similar world, and if you embrace the magical realism that is somewhat haunting, it becomes quite a delicious story with a purpose. <
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>Based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, the main couple, Orpheus the poet and his wife the somewhat fragile Eurydice (killed by a motorbike instead of a snake), experience life in a world where they are presented with otherworldly temptations and serious life-changing contemplations. <
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>They visit a strangely modern underworld where Orpheus seems to be looking for death/the Princess or perhaps Persephone (queen of the underworld - but she seems to be more like the temptress/siren in this movie) more than his recently departed wife. She seems to have a good sense of humor and reminds the participants of her plots not to look back lest they be turned into pillars of salt, as she remembers from the past. <
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>There are all sorts of lovely visual metaphors like "kiss of death" and other ideas you pick up on as you are watching the story unfold. Just as in "The Blood of a Poet," we find humans moving through mirrors as easily as their underworld conspirators. Death falls in love with a poet, although we assume he fell in love with the idea of her first. In a way, he writes her into his life. <
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>Everyone seems to live in reality all while moving from death to life and from life to death. Keeping up with who is dead and who is alive only makes it all the more fun. It is not quite as frightening as a horror movie, but somewhat like a twilight zone with an unexpected ending. I found this to be rather intriguing and it kept my attention better than most modern movies of today. There is something very elegant, contemplative and intriguing about the movies in Jean Cocteau's trilogy. I love the way the mirrors turn watery and how the characters move so easily from one world to the next. <
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A superb centerpiece.
Jean Cocteau's "Orphee," along with his earlier "La Belle et la Bete," must be ranked among the greatest of French films. This highly personal version of the myth of Orpheus remains a testament both to the the power of poetic imagery on film and to Cocteau's genius as a creator of such imagery. Cocteau's Orphee (Jean Marais) is a brusque, egocentric, dissatisfied soul who, to paraphrase Keats, is more than half in love with Death. As portrayed by Maria Casares, Death is far from the easeful presence Keats envisioned, but imperious, severe, and tres, tres chaud. Setting his fantasy in then-contemporary France (1949, to be exact), Cocteau dresses his angels of Death in leather and puts them on motorcycles, the roar of their engines as inexorable as a buzzsaw, and sends Orphee cryptic messages from the underworld via a car radio. "Orphee" is an unforgettable story of obsession and renunciation, the characters constantly going forward and backward through mirrors in a miasma of love, pain, and time lost and regained. Just as Orphee and Death act out their torrid passion, Eurydice (Marie Dea) carries on a sadder, more delicate version of the same story with Death's servant Heurtebise (Francois Perier). Meanwhile, the drunken poet Cegeste (Edouard Dermithe) finds himself a nearly mute witness to the drama, severed for eternity from the passions swirling around him. This three-disc set is worth owning for "Orphee" alone; the other two films are interesting, but not extraordinary. "The Blood of a Poet" (1930) feels like warmed-over Bunuel these days, while "The Testament of Orpheus" (1959), Cocteau's valedictory address to the cinema, is an intermittently interesting but overly talky apologia for Cocteau's life and career. They are interesting mainly for the light they shed on "Orphee"; "The Blood of a Poet" contains many of the motifs found later in "Orphee," especially Cocteau's fascination with mirrors, while "The Testament of Orpheus" brings back the lead actors from "Orphee" to serve as Cocteau's guides and artistic judges. (Cocteau, always a bit of a name-dropper, also brings in his pals Pablo Picasso and Yul Brynner for cameos.) The judgment is unavoidable: "The Blood of a Poet" proved that Cocteau needed a story on which to hang his images, while "The Testament of Orpheus" proved that he told a story better with images than with words. Among the many excellent technical credits is that of Georges Auric, surely one of the greatest of all film composers, who wrote the superb music for all three films. The first disc also contains a fascinating and informative documentary about Cocteau, in which he reminisces about Picasso, Nijinsky, Debussy, Satie, Diaghilev, and all the other great artists he knew. It was Diaghilev who exhorted Cocteau, "Astonish me!" Cocteau proceeded to astonish him and everyone else for the next fifty years. (In watching "Orphee," it's also fun to play Cocteau's version of "La Ronde"; he cast both his former lover, Jean Marais, and his current one, Edouard Dermithe, while simultaneously Marais was having an affair with Marie Dea. Only Michael Powell--having his former mistress Deborah Kerr and his current mistress Kathleen Byron fight to the death at the edge of a cliff in "Black Narcissus"--was equally daring.)
Astonish Us
Criterion's done a nice Criterion-quality job in assembling Jean Cocteau's 3 most famous films, but seeing them all together left me a little disappointed. In returning to the Orpheus myth three times over a thirty year span, Cocteau displayed an ongoing fascination with the artist as a chosen creature, attuned to a special realm of beauty that eludes the common run of humankind. To my mind though, these films are more concerned with revering the Poet than with being poetic. The special effects they rely on to convey the world on the other side of the mirror, the artist's domain of wonder and dreams, are awkward even for their time and struck me more as stagecraft than a real engagement with the subconscious as a creative force. Outside of the imagery, the films have little to offer in the way of narrative or acting or cinematographic wizardry. For surrealist filmmaking, Buster Keaton has Cocteau beat hands down.
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>Watching these films it occurred to me--and I'm sure I'll get a lot of negative votes for this!--that Cocteau was at heart a poseur. He recognized the genius in his famous friends and collaborators (Picasso, Stravinsky, Satie, Apollinaire) but when it came to expressing his own, relied on a canny restatement of the Romantic idea of the suffering artist, one that would play well to the public but had little to do with the radical new art burgeoning around him. That may be too harsh, but I wonder if I'm alone in finding these movies a little too self-consciously poetic to be really moving.
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