Word: cocteau
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...version of "Beauty and the Beast" in 1991, the moviegoing public was enchanted. The film was a box office success and critics unanimously praised Disney for its originality and innovation. Yet while the Disney version had undeniable charm, behind it stood the specter of an immensely superior film, Jean Cocteau's 1946 "La Belle et la Bete...
...Belle et la Bete" remains the definitive film adaptation of the familiar story, an extraordinary and profoundly influential movie. Disney, in fact, "borrowed" the look and many other aspects of its cartoon from Cocteau's film. To see Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast" is to see why movies were invented. Cocteau's oneiric masterpiece is a perfect demonstration of what movies can give us that other media can't; it is a dream that seizes us and pulls us into a world that operates under its own logic. We find ourselves in a landscape where beauty seems...
...first part of the film, which takes place on the farm where Beauty's family lives, is a tribute to the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer. Cocteau achieves a heightened sense of realism through careful composition and austere lighting. He presents a vision of simplicity and common sense, the antithesis of the world inside the palace of the Beast, where fantasy reigns supreme. There, candelabra are held by human hands protruding from the walls, a magical mirror contains the visage of a beloved and an enchanted white steed roams the halls. The palace in the midst of the dark woods...
Their hesitant courtship becomes an exquisite pas de deux between Josette Day and Jean Marais. Cocteau was blessed to have two such accomplished actors playing the lead roles. Day, with her delicate cheekbones and tremulous lovliness, is radiant; the other-wordly image of Beauty in a dark cloak stays in one's memory for days. Marais is triumphant as the Beast. In Berard's makeup and ornate costumes, he displays a flair not present in any of his other performances. He looks at once noble and ridiculous, menacing and silly, and his resonant, incantatory voice is unforgettable...
Singleton has found encouragement in the experiences of other onetime ; wunderkinds who have weathered the vicissitudes of a Hollywood career. He recalls that when he first met Coppola, the older director was screening Jean Cocteau's Orpheus in an attempt to learn how filmmakers achieved special effects in the days before high-tech computer graphics. "What real filmmakers do is they study films, they study their craft," Singleton observes. "No matter how much success they encounter, they are always in the process of studying." Singleton himself watches at least one film a day, a practice he equates with taking vitamins...