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Jean Cocteau

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A renowned poet and famous French avant-garde filmmaker. (Maisons-Laffitte, July 5, 1889 – Milly-la-Forêt, October 11, 1963). In addition to being a novelist and painter, draftsman and actor, playwright and choreographer, he was one of the creators who exerted the greatest cultural influence in the first half of the 20th century. Like his contemporary René Clair, he belonged to the French Academy.

His passion for cinema began with the impressionist movement of the twenties. Along with his generation –Louis Delluc, Marcel L’Herbier , Jean Epstein , Abel Gance , Germaine Dulac , Jacques de Baroncelli and Jacques Feyder– , he alternated the pen with the camera and tried new forms in the Seventh Art. And although they were not always effective, they were valid in their desire for renewal and discovery of other expressive paths or aesthetic emotions.

Jean Cocteau considered cinematographic art as one of the means to show “the unknown character that lives in me… The poet’s mission is to express his thoughts in works. Imagine how much cinema can serve us ”, he had declared. For this reason, the films that he directed were authentic personal confidences.

It is obvious, then, that his most famous avant-garde films, The Blood of a Poet (1932), Beauty and the Beast (1946) , Orpheus (1950) and The Testament of Orpheus (1960), turn out to be intimate diaries, full of obsessions and creative pursuits. Cocteau never lost his artistic identity and investigative nature, despite his collaboration as an actor, screenwriter, dialogue adapter, and commentator for other authors, such as the aforementioned L’Herbier, Jean Delannoy , Jean-Pierre Melville , and Robert Bresson , among others.

“The more effort I make in studying the craft of film, the more I realize that its effectiveness is of an intimate, confessional and realistic order. A film is not a dream that is told, but a dream that we all dream together”, she stated.

However, his conceptual and minority cinema, with a metaphorical and emphatic style –halfway between surrealism and the so-called “magical realism”–, is somewhat difficult for non-intellectual audiences and also marginal with respect to the industry. Jean Cocteau tests and investigates in his works the filmic language and theatrical conception ( L’aigle à deux têtes and Los padres terribles , both from 1948) and about the updating of classical myths. “A film is a petrified source of thought”, he had also said.

This author was a beautician and brilliant creator, with baroque and even decadent elements, who has gone down in history with a dreamlike-cinematic work as spaced as it is original and inimitable.

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