Cocteau made
only six films over a thirty-year period. He was forty
years old when he came to the cinema. La belle et la bete
was his second film and was shot sixteen years after the
making of Le sang d'un poète, a short surrealistic
film made in 1930 and the thematic forerunner of his subsequent
film output. He considered himself a poet first and filmmaker
second. Poetry was the basis for all art, "a religion without
hope." Cocteau was an innovator in ballet, theatre, and literature.
He also worked in the plastic arts, creating drawings, posters,
lithographs, sculpture, ceramics and tapestries. He devoted
a good amount of his time to promoting himself as 'artist'
and cultural celebrity, meticulously constructing a public
persona that rubbed against the conservative morality of his
time and the innate homophobia of the avant-garde boy's club,
the surrealist movement.
Assertive in
his homosexuality, Cocteau showcased his lover of ten years,
Jean Marais, in L'Eternal retour in 1942. La belle
et la bête made Marais a star.
His dual roles
in the film, the handsome Avenant and the troubled Beast,
paint a moral lesson; one's nature matters more than appearance.
Marais is Cocteau's cinematic alter ego, the face Cocteau
uses as his screen personification and muse. Marais is Orpheus/Narcissus
and the Orphic myth is the means of expression and core allegory
that Cocteau used for his life story, a life story that is
ethnographic and archetypal as regards the modern day myths
that surround the contemporary art and film world.
Filled with iconic
moments, La belle et la bête is nostalgic, as
every real fairytale must be, constructing an environment,
a tableau that allows the viewer to enter and become absorbed.
Mostly shot in medium close-ups, the actors, props, lighting,
and the framing of shots constantly refer to other things.
It is postmodern in its 'modernity' and stuffed with referential
pictorial elements that allude to Vermeer, Freudian pychology,
Jungian symbolism and Grand Opera. It takes a very pro-feminist
view of the main female character. Unlike the generic female
narrative in films of the late forties, she is not punished
but rewarded for her individuality with very little consequence
other than her positive emotional growth and eventual happiness.
Cocteau's stage
experience allowed him to direct the action and elicit performances
that are operatic in nature. Josette Day's experience as a
dancer gave her performance a certain lyrical motion. She
moves her body in response to the lines that Marais, as the
Beast, delivers. There is a point/counterpoint to the interplay
between these two characters. Punctuated with silence and
then soundtrack, the quality of both Marais' and Day's voices
and the communicative dance of subtle body movements between
them become musical. This is one of the core visual texts
in cinematic and art history.
Cocteau is essentially
a Catholic artist. He wrote the play Orphée
in 1925 when he was regularly using opium and was being converted
to Catholicism by Jacques Maritain. Seduced artistically and
spiritually by the surrealists, who later abjectly rejected
him, the script refers to his abandonment of surrealism and
the restrictions of any artistic movement, for his true inspiration,
the church. The play Orphée was originally conceived
as an interpretation of Christ's life. His conversion to the
church was a failure but the influence of religious iconography
is evident in the sumptuous medieval costuming and spotlit
portraiture that illuminates so many of the scenes in the
Beast's castle. The scene in which Belle has belatedly returned
to find the dying Beast, lying motionless by his drinking
pond as she takes him in her arms, is reminiscent of a Baroque
pietà.
Cocteau states
in Le sang d'un poète that he wanted to "photograph
poetry in a documentary way." He invents a psychological landscape
in which the palm of his poet/hero's hand has a wound that
turns into a mouth begging for air. The duality of the erotic
and the creative, the masturbatory and the communicative,
juxtaposed against the dualities of guilt and punishment persist
throughout the various vignettes which speak about the Orphic
experience and how the artist creates by finding inspiration.
Later from a
film title we read, " the ritual journey of its suicidal and
self-abusive hero poet who enters the Hotel des Folies as
if in a dream and proceeds to view certain mysteries through
keyholes, involving love, death, punishment and art." With
a simple change of the last word in this quote, the dominant
concerns of Catholicism are mirrored; love, death, punishment
and spectacle. The hero/poet voyeuristically looks into each
keyhole/gloryhole, secretly witnessing fetishistic passion
plays that are a mirror into his own subconscious. Cocteau
uses the motif of the mirror consistently in his films. Mirror
as peephole and portal. "Mirrors are the doors through which
death comes and goes..." Orphée (1950). Beyond
the mirror is the Zone.
Cocteau's work
is always self-referential. He weaves his autobiographical
imagery into the fabric of far older and recognizable narratives.
In the film Orphée, Jean Marais plays the part
of a well-heeled man of letters who has become too famous,
'the national poet'. As he enters the Café des Poètes,
the new poet-of-the-moment Cegeste (played by Edouard Dermit)
confronts him, muttering contemptuously. This metaphor represents
Cocteau's rejection in 1949 by a young public, the new generation
of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Cocteau establishes
a tension between the artist and the celebrity, between the
new and the old, the divergent and the convergent. He was
an artist that inhabited the cusp. "When you smash a statue,
you risk becoming one yourself."
How does a summer's
viewing of Cocteau's La belle et la bête substantiate
the influence of this maestro? In the early 1950s the critics
of the Cahiers du Cinema, responsible for initiating
the idea of the 'auteur', said that Cocteau was a director
whose personal stamp was evident in every film that he had
made. He was praised for being a "film-maker's film maker."
Jean-Luc Godard said that La belle et la bête was
influential in the making of Alphaville (1965), especially
in the use of lighting and camera angles. Alan Resnais used
Orphée as a model when constructing shots with
his Japanese cameraman on the set of Hiroshima mon amour
(1959). Cocteau's work was motivational for such directors
as Vincent Minelli, Agnes Varda, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Ingmar
Bergman. Francois Truffaut was such an admirer of Cocteau's
work that he helped produce his last film, Le testament
d'Orphée (1959). Cocteau's influence on la Nouvelle
Vague is duly acknowledged.
The domino effect
of the French New Wave on films produced during the seventies
and early eighties is without question. Le sang d'un poète's
direct influence on Underground Film is equally apparent.
New Gay Cinema acknowledges its debt to Cocteau. Jean Genet,
Kenneth Anger, Willard Maas and Ben Moore (Narcissus, 1956)
were all affected by Cocteau's use of space - the ordinary-sized
room or studio set where marvellous things can happen. Even
in contemporary popular culture, Star Trek - the Next Generation
has used the Beauty-and-the-beast motif as a basis for the
relationship between the Betazoid Counselor Deanna Troi and
the Klingon Lieutenant Worf.
Filmmakers not
only influence other filmmakers, they influence and act as
subtexts in all creative mediums. Visual culture is an interconnected
web of signs and symbols that resonates in the work of nearly
every contemporary artist. Whether one speaks about Film Noir,
Sci-Fi, the fantasy genre, video, photography, the comic book,
pop art or contemporary literature, forms and structure are
shuffled and reshuffled. The cinematic eye has pervaded every
art form.
In a world where
visual imagery motivates and mitigates, we are all members
of the viewing audience, watching a film or studying an image
in a book or magazine, breathing in mediated information from
the television or the web. Each image, whether a reproduction
of an existing image or a hybrid from the cultural database
of communicative forms, is internalized. To see Cocteau's
influence, look at the work of Pierre et Gilles, Matthew Barney
or Joel Peter Witkin. The tableau and the similacrum are dominant
structures in the work of artists who wish to refer and infer
using the object as symbol, creating not only a conceptual
space, but constructing allegorical spaces that refer to a
library of stylistic and cultural references. The artist's
stamp is a personal 'mise en scène' apparent throughout
a consistent artistic career.
In February 2003,
La belle et la bête was released as a DVD package
presented in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.33:1.
It contains a new high-definition digital transfer from the
restored French negative initiated in 1995 by the Centre National
de L'Audiovisuel in Luxemburg in association with the CLT-UFA
International. The soundtrack print was restored at 24-bit
using digital audio tools to reduce sound distortion. The
package includes two soundtracks, the restored French-language
monaural soundtrack and a Dolby Digital 5.5 Surround Soundtrack
featuring the opera composed by Philip Glass. There is a new
and improved translation for the English subtitles and commentaries
by film historians Arthur Knight and Christopher Frayling.
Extras include three documentaries featuring interviews with
cast and crew and two versions of the trailer directed and
narrated by Cocteau.
It is important
to remember that Cocteau considered the making of La belle
et la bête as a stance against the production practices
of Hollywood and a return to the artisanal teamwork of traditional
French film production. There is a message here for any young
filmmaker or artist with a digital film camera in hand. One
can still circumnavigate current trends and low budgets to
tell one's personal fairytale. The Orphic experience is always
pertinent. In Cocteau's words," Poetry is an ethic. By ethic
I mean a secret code of behavior, a discipline constructed
and conducted according to the capabilities of a person who
rejects the falsifications of the categorical imperative."
James Armstrong
is an artist who lectures on photography and new media at
Dublin City University.
