Word: orpheus
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...story in Cocteau's "tragedy" is essentially no different from the ancient Greek myth: the poet, Orpheus, retrieves his bride from the Underworld on the condition that he won't look into her face, or she'll die a second time. Of course he does--as the couple's guardian angel, Heurtebise, remarks quite matter-of-factly, "It was inevitable...
...river Styx. The two are similar, but the symbolism of Cocteau's approach is more explicit and eccentric. He imbues a pretty mundane object the mirror with suggestive properties at the moment when you no longer possess an image when you can't be reflected, you're dead Similarly. Orpheus's bloody head-- lopped off by the Bacchantes--turns into a marble bust when it's propped on a pedestal. There are plenty of strange transformations in this play, and they mingle the whimsy of Alice in Wonderland with the more exotic invocation of classical mythology...
...Cocteau led such a fiamboyant life that it tended to overshadow his work. In love with a young motorcyclist at one time he used to follow him around in his chauffeur-driver limousine and vomit each time the led made a dangerous turn, to the delights of meansprited Parisians Orpheus is probably the most theatrically successful of this unsavory man's unusual ouevre. At the Ex, tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday (as well as next weekend...
...classics. The series begins Wednesday with Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player and Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. The Truffaut is wonderful but confusing entertainment and the second film is Bergman at his lovliest and most comprehensible. On Thursday you can check out Marcel Camus's Black Orpheus, a visually stunning but cineamagraphically blurred document on life in the slums of Rio de Janero...
Williams has always been a tinkerer, right from his first commercial effort, Battle of Angels, which wound up 17 years later as Orpheus Descending. The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore was offered to the public in four versions, none of them successful. And, more recently, Two Character Play resurfaced...