Word: cocteau
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Eternal Return (Paulve; Discina). The medieval bards sang of Tristan and Iseult as huge, cloudy symbols of high romance; later storytellers (Swinburne, Wagner, Tennyson, E. A. Robinson et al.) further enriched (or corrupted) the tale with new ideas and idioms. Now the French poet-moviemaker, Jean Cocteau, has handsomely reset the legend in modern dress. His title, The Eternal Return, is the term Nietzsche gave to the mournfully romantic doctrine of endless historical repetition. The Nietzschean note tolls through the film like a sunken bell...
...Lopert), the innocent old fairy tale written in 1757 by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont, seems to many surrealists to state the problem of good & evil in its "real" terms, i.e., as a sexual, male-female equation, with symbols of profane and sacred love. Poet-Playwright-Producer Jean Cocteau, a part-time surrealist, has now transformed the tale into a film that is a wondrous spectacle for children of any language, and quite a treat for their parents...
Clever, opium-puffing Producer Cocteau (his fans call him "the cleverest man alive") has allowed his pipe dreams only a soupcon of surrealist-Freudian flavor. The surreal touch is applied to several scenes with absolute poetic Tightness: by retarding to slow motion Beauty's terror-struck sprint through the Beast's castle, Cocteau conveys every decibel of the shriek she cannot release. There is also plenty of surreal wit: the Beast's eyes, ears, nose and fingernails fume when the fires of lust blaze up in him; and Beauty's tears turn to diamonds...
Unfortunately, Cocteau makes about a half-hour too much of a good thing-and few things pall like a dream that cannot be shaken off. Cocteau's moody retort to this criticism is that there's just no dream to shake off: "It's a realistic film in an unreal world...
...Paris, a couple of dozen writers and painters-including Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse -dutifully responded to a cable from Charles Chaplin asking them to protest the deportation* to Germany of Hollywood Composer Hanns Eisler. To the Paris Embassy the celebrities sent their message: please let Eisler use his visa to France, where "we expect [him] to write the music for the film Alice in Wonderland." Said Cocteau: "If Eisler's music is good, who cares about his politics? . . . Politics are dirty. Art is pure...