Word: cocteau
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...rather reticent way, Proust liked Cocteau and understood him. He once told him he wished "for something to happen that would isolate you, so that after a sufficiently long period of fasting you might again really hunger after those beautiful books, beautiful pictures, beautiful countries that you now skim over with the lack of appetite of someone who has spent all New Year's Day making a round of visits, each complete with marrons glac...
...figure in a succession of top billings: Ziegfeld's Follies, George White's Scandals, Billy Rose's Casino de Paree. Damon Runyon admired her and Walter Winchell spotlighted her in his column. After seeing her gracefully dispense with her clothing, Jean Cocteau exclaimed "How vital!" She "retired" in 1937 to become an author (The G-String Murders, Gypsy) and sometime actress (You Can't Have Everything), but continued to make scores of "final" appearances. Asked about her style, Gypsy quoted her teacher Tessie the Tassel Twirler. "In burlesque," Tessie once told...
Sartre's play (perhaps his greatest) draws on the lore of Greek mythology to dramatize philosophical dilemmas of "choice" central to his own thought. Unlike Girandoux and Cocteau, so often careless and fanciful in their dramatic use of Greek "gods" and fate, Sartre adopts the symbolic fable of the House of Atreus as a serious medium for analysis of social guilt. He throws the uprooted Orestes into a miasma of remorse and penitent masochism. But in portraying Orestes' collaboration with Electra to avenge the murder of their father, Sartre avoids abstraction and presents his characters concretely...
DUNSTER'S production of the Durrenmatt-Gore Vidal play Romulus excellently reflects the dual nature of the work. It reminds one of many French plays (especially those of Cocteau, Anouilh and Giraudoux) both witty and superficial on one hand, and intensely intellectual and philosophical on the other. The problem of mounting such a production on the amateur level is obvious: the recruitment of actors to perform characters who can simultaneously embrace these conflicting elements...
...expresses himself cinematically, as a poet does with a pen," said Jean Cocteau of Robert Bresson. "There is a huge barrier between his greatness, his silence, his commitment and his dreams, and the world in which they are mistaken for stumbling and obsession." Une Femme Douce, Bresson's newest film, may go some small way toward razing the barrier. Adapted from a Dostoevski novella about the suicide of a young bride, Une Femme Douce finds Bresson dealing once again with the corruption of innocence, a theme that has dominated his work from Diary of a Country Priest to last...