Word: cocteau
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...introduction to the movie script of Orpheus, Jean Cocteau says, "in this film there is neither symbol nor thesis... It is a realistic film which, through the camera, puts into the work more truth than truth; that truth which Goethe contrasts to reality." As the title hints, the plot--if one can say there is one--draws from the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Cocteau, however, skillfully shrouds this legend with the story of a poet's struggle to become immortal...
...Jeune Homme et La Mort a Boston, premiere, is a Jean Cocteau creation based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth. Earthy and passionate, Jean Babilee and Nathalic Philippart conveyed well the brutality, horror, and the final beauty of this modern ballet. The acrobatic elements in the choreography, however, tended to detract from the symbolic force of the legend...
Jean Babilée is a dancer U.S. balletomanes have been hearing about, in brief flashes from Paris, since the end of the war. The first flash was that he could leap as no one since Nijinsky. Then came a tale of an astonishing physical feat: in Jean Cocteau's Le Jeune Homme et la Mort (TIME, Dec. 9, 1946), Babilée hung by his neck on a gallows for a full minute, with no more extra support than he could get from wrapping one arm around a pillar...
...title role, the impeccable playing of Sir Thomas Beecham and the Royal Philharmonic, and a charming first act in which Moira (The Red Shoes] Shearer dances as Olympia, the lifelike doll, the bulk of the picture is slow, obscure and pretentious. The script and direction, which borrow from Dali, Cocteau and Cecil B. DeMille, compound the vague symbolism of the Offenbach opera, leave the story line frayed and dangling. Whenever they are audible in the upper operatic range, the English lyrics sound banal. And the much-touted spectacle of Tales of Hoffmann's settings and costumes seems overripe...
...feature work of the concert was Igor Stravinsky's "Oedipus Rex," written to the Latin verse of Jean Cocteau. The Glee Club made it appropriately the most impressive event of the evening. "Oedipus" is dominated by strong dramatic tension created by the jarring chords of the piano, the roll of the kettledrums, and the vocal crescendos of the chorus...