Climbing Mount Criterion XIX
Oh dear -- a trinity of poetic abstraction that isn't quite abstract. Well, let's try:
Films:
Le sang d'un poete (1930)
Orphee (1949)
Testament of Orpheus (1959)
Director:
Jean Cocteau
“It really is time that mankind admitted that it is living on an incomprehensible planet," Cocteau said in a lecture he gave at a screening of the final film in this trilogy, four hours or so of camera tricks, intellectual discussions that work like Moebius strips, and even a bit of humor -- Cocteau fervently believes that poetry ought to be the stuff of fistfights in the cafes, but he's willing to concede that the very idea looks a tad comic onscreen. My understanding of the Orpheus myth is limited and grade-school, but I also sense that the films wouldn't really sustain the weight of them anyway; Cocteau wanted to celebrate the qualities of artists that weren't earthbound, and the Orpheus-Euridyce tale is simply the oldest romantic-artistic archetype we have. "The poet, in composing poems, makes use of a language, neither living nor dead, which few people speak and few understand," Cocteau himself says in Testament. The idea was to articulate the ineffable -- feeling, not coherence, was the point.
And yet it's coherent, in part because Cocteau realized how infinitely capable film is to create dreamlands. (Indeed, he's arguably the first to do so.) So the things that stick with me aren't plot points but details -- the tight latex gloves sliding on and off when the film gets reversed in Orphee, the magnificent moment when the mirror turns into a pool in Le sang, the mouth in the hand in the same film, Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso's cameos in Testament, Orpheus (Jean Marais) and Eurydice (Marie Dea) avoiding each other in Orphee like they suddenly fell into a Preston Sturges film. And all this -- creating the appeal of small moments, not narrative -- is probably the way Cocteau wanted it. “This film is the opposite of an intellectual, or 'art' film," he said in the same lecture quoted above. Which would be what? An entertainment? No: a film that was made while almost reflexively avoiding anything that smacked of convention.
Films:
Le sang d'un poete (1930)
Orphee (1949)
Testament of Orpheus (1959)
Director:
Jean Cocteau
“It really is time that mankind admitted that it is living on an incomprehensible planet," Cocteau said in a lecture he gave at a screening of the final film in this trilogy, four hours or so of camera tricks, intellectual discussions that work like Moebius strips, and even a bit of humor -- Cocteau fervently believes that poetry ought to be the stuff of fistfights in the cafes, but he's willing to concede that the very idea looks a tad comic onscreen. My understanding of the Orpheus myth is limited and grade-school, but I also sense that the films wouldn't really sustain the weight of them anyway; Cocteau wanted to celebrate the qualities of artists that weren't earthbound, and the Orpheus-Euridyce tale is simply the oldest romantic-artistic archetype we have. "The poet, in composing poems, makes use of a language, neither living nor dead, which few people speak and few understand," Cocteau himself says in Testament. The idea was to articulate the ineffable -- feeling, not coherence, was the point.
And yet it's coherent, in part because Cocteau realized how infinitely capable film is to create dreamlands. (Indeed, he's arguably the first to do so.) So the things that stick with me aren't plot points but details -- the tight latex gloves sliding on and off when the film gets reversed in Orphee, the magnificent moment when the mirror turns into a pool in Le sang, the mouth in the hand in the same film, Yul Brynner and Pablo Picasso's cameos in Testament, Orpheus (Jean Marais) and Eurydice (Marie Dea) avoiding each other in Orphee like they suddenly fell into a Preston Sturges film. And all this -- creating the appeal of small moments, not narrative -- is probably the way Cocteau wanted it. “This film is the opposite of an intellectual, or 'art' film," he said in the same lecture quoted above. Which would be what? An entertainment? No: a film that was made while almost reflexively avoiding anything that smacked of convention.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home