■ Jean Cocteau
Biography
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) has been called the most versatile artist of the twentieth century, and in this case hyperbole has at least some basis in reality.
Born to a middle-class family in Paris, he excelled from youth in an almost absurd range of fields: filmmaking, poetry, graphic art, fiction, drama, couture, even postage-stamp design. Most of all, Cocteau was a brilliant, witty, self-invented personality whose talents put him at the forefront of practically every "ism" of the century, from surrealism to modernism to dada. The persistence of fairy tale, mythological, and other classical motifs in his work adds a gravitas — a word Cocteau would no doubt bristle at, as being much too serious — that makes it arguably unique in modern art.
While it’s hard at this point to judge the breadth of his achievement — much of his work outside cinema is difficult to find — his films have been consistently available as staples of the arthouse circuit, cine clubs, and classrooms devoted to the aesthetics of cinema. Cocteau was not prolific in this area: he made only six films over a three-decade period. Of these, four — Beauty and the Beast and the "Orphic trilogy" — stand almost sui generis as representatives of the poetic consciousness in cinema. The Criterion Collection’s recent release of the Orphic trilogy in a DVD boxed set affords a welcome chance to reassess these works that were a crucial part of many cinephiles’ introduction to the art of film. All three benefit from crisp digital transfers, restored sound, and new English subtitle translations.
■Poems
Preamble (A Rough Draft For An Ars Poetica)
by Jean Cocteau
...Preamble
A rough draft
for an ars poetica
. . . . . . .
Let's get our dreams unstuck
The grain of rye
free from the prattle of grass
et loin de arbres orateurs
I
plant
it
It will sprout
But forget about
the rustic festivities
For the explosive word
falls harmlessly
eternal through
the compact generations
and except for you
nothing
denotates
its sweet-scented dynamite
Greetings
I discard eloquence
the empty sail
and the swollen sail
which cause the ship
to lose her course
My ink nicks
and there
and there
and there
and
there
sleeps
deep poetry
The mirror-paneled wardrobe
washing down ice-floes
the little eskimo girl
dreaming
in a heap
of moist negroes
her nose was
flattened
against the window-pane
of dreary Christmases
A white bear
adorned with chromatic moire
dries himself in the midnight sun
Liners
The huge luxury item
Slowly founders
all its lights aglow
and so
sinks the evening-dress ball
into the thousand mirrors
of the palace hotel
And now
it is I
the thin Columbus of phenomena
alone
in the front
of a mirror-paneled wardrobe
full of linen
and locking with a key
The obstinate miner
of the void
exploits
his fertile mine
the potential in the rough
glitters there
mingling with its white rock
Oh
princess of the mad sleep
listen to my horn
and my pack of hounds
I deliver you
from the forest
where we came upon the spell
Here we are
by the pen
one with the other
wedded
on the page
Isles sobs of Ariadne
Ariadnes
dragging along
Aridnes seals
for I betray you my fair stanzas
to
run and awaken
elsewhere
I plan no architecture
Simply
deaf
like you Beethoven
blind
like you
Homer
numberless old man
born everywhere
I elaborate
in the prairies of inner
silence
and the work of the mission
and the poem of the work
and the stanza of the poem
and the group of the stanza
and the words of the group
and the letters of the word
and the least
loop of the letters
it's your foot
of attentive satin
that I place in position
pink
tightrope walker
sucked up by the void
to the left to the right
the god gives a shake
and I walk
towards the other side
with infinite precaution
Jean Cocteau Quotes
"A car can massage organs which no masseur can reach. It is the one remedy for the disorders of the great sympathetic nervous system."
"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."
"A true poet does not bother to be poetical. Nor does a nursery gardener scent his roses."
"After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter."
"All good music resembles something. Good music stirs by its mysterious resemblance to the objects and feelings which motivated it."
"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 produces ugly things which frequently become more beautiful with time. Fashion, on the other hand, produces beautiful things which always become ugly with time."
"Being tactful in audacity is knowing how far one can go to far."
"Children and lunatics cut the Gordian knot which the poet spends his life patiently trying to untie."
"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 for a moment believe He was killing the young; He was costuming angels."
"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 oeself with something other than life or death."
"He has the manner of a giant with the look of a child, a lazy activeness, a mad wisdom, a solitude encompassing the world."
"Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live."
"I am a lie who always speaks the truth."
"I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?"
"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."
"If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it."
"If it has to choose who is to be crucified, the crowd will always save Barabbas."
"In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator."
"It is not I who become addicted, it is my body."
"Life is a horizontal fall."
"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."
"Mystery has its own mysteries, and there are gods above gods. We have ours, they have theirs. That is what's known as infinity."
"One must be a living man and a posthumous artist."
"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."
"Poetry is indispensable - if I only knew what for."
"Poets don't draw. They unravel their handwriting and then tie it up again, but differently."
"Silence moves faster when it's going backward."
"Since the day of my birth, my death began its walk. It is walking toward me, without hurrying."
"Such is the role of poetry. It unveils, in the strict sense of the word. It lays bare, under a light which shakes off torpor, the surprising things which surround us and which our senses record mechanically."
"Tact in audacity consists in knowing how far we may go too far."
"Tact in audacity is knowing how far you can go without going too far."
"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."
"That pile of paper on his left side went on living like the watch on a dead soldier's wrist."
"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 bizarre which seems inherent in them."
"The ear disapproves but tolerates certain musical pieces; transfer them into the domain of our nose, and we will be forced to flee."
"The extreme limit of wisdom, that's what the public calls madness."
"The greatest masterpiece in literature is only a dictionary out of order."
"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, the finish by loading honors on your head."
"The joy of youth is to disobey; but the trouble is that there are no longer any orders."
"The Louvre is a morgue; you go there to identify your friends."
"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 reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication: that is why so many bad artists are unable to give it up."
"The trouble about the Academie is that by the time they get around to electing us to a seat, we really need a bed."
"The worst tragedy for a poet is to be admired through being misunderstood."
"There are too many souls of wood not to love those wooden characters who do indeed have a soul."
"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."
"Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Vistor Hugo."
"We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don't like?"
"Wealth is an inborn attitude of mind, like poverty. The pauper who has made his pile may flaunt his spoils, but cannot wear them plausibly."
"What the public criticizes in you, cultivate. It is you."
"When a work appears to be ahead of its time, it is only the time that is behind the work."
"You've never seen death? Look in the mirror every day and you will see it like bees working in a glass hive."
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