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Gilbert
Adair's introductory essay on the inimitable Jean Cocteau.
Cocteau
was one of the twentieth century's most significant
artists. Poet, painter, boxing trainer, drummer, traveller—he
was a maestro of every conceivable form, and this eclecticism
is reflected in his films. This retrospective includes
films Cocteau directed, plus a handful he scripted and/or
appeared in.
On
Jean Cocteau's tombstone, inside a tiny chapel in Milly-la-Forêt
(the not especially picturesque hamlet near the Fontainebleau
forest in which he spent his final years) just four
words, scrawled in his own familiar handwriting, have
been inscribed: ‘Je reste avec vous'. Or, ‘I'm still
among you'.
Is
he, though? Has he survived his life? Or does he impinge
on our current consciousness as a dandified dilettante
admired by his own period but of utter irrelevance to
ours? Was he a maestro of every conceivable form—he
wrote poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism, directed
several films, tossed off literally thousands of sketches
and paintings, went round the world in 80 days, trained
the Panamanian prizefighter Al Brown so well that Brown
eventually regained his bantamweight championship, even
played the drums in a couple of Parisian nightclubs—but
an authentic master of none? Was he, in short, the effeminate,
opium-smoking flibbertigibbet of popular legend?
What
I suggest, rather, even to those who may have scant
affinity with his exacerbated aestheticism (Cocteau
reiterated the term ‘poet' as obsessively as a navvy
will use another four-letter word), is that he was one
of the twentieth century's most significant artists—and
supremely, perhaps, in the cinema. For the spidery watermark
of his influence is easily detectable in the films of
the New Wave directors who idolised him, particularly
Truffaut, Godard, Demy, and Resnais, as it is in those
of Bresson, Bergman, Melville, Pasolini, Franju, Visconti,
Bertolucci, Ruiz, Fassbinder, Almodóvar, Anger, Carax,
Jarman, and Tim Burton.
Yet,
however much imitated, Cocteau remains ultimately inimitable,
and this retrospective has been designed to show why.
One reason for his distinctiveness, arguably, is that
(pace his reputation as a near-monomaniacal narcissist,
endlessly filming his navel as others are content to
contemplate theirs) Cocteau's filmography is in fact
remarkably eclectic, encompassing as it does not merely
the solipsistic self-apotheoses with which his name
tends automatically to be associated, but crowd-pleasing
fantasies and fairy tales, historical mel0dramas, and
modern psychodramas. Whatever the genre, however, each
of his films possesses the magical Coctalian patina
of what he affected to call ‘le plus vrai que le vrai'
(the truer than truth).
The
French word for a cinema screening is séance. Where
Cocteau's films are concerned—‘those dreams,' as he
himself once defined them, ‘that we all dream together'—it's
also the English one.
Gilbert
Adair
Gilbert
Adair is a prolific film critic, writer, and
translator. His seminal texts on film include Hollywood's
Vietnam: From Green Berets to Apocalypse Now,
and Flickers: An Illustrated Celebration of 100
Years of Cinema. He has also written several novels,
including Love and Death on Long Island, and
screenplays, including The Dreamers (2003),
but he is perhaps best known for his social critiques,
such as The Postmodernist Always Rings Twice: Reflect-ions
on Culture in the 90s and Surfing the Zeitgeist.
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The
Brisbane International Film Festival gratefully
acknowledges the assistance of the National Film
Theatre, London, in presenting Jean Cocteau: The
Naked Dandy.
Our
thanks to Gilbert Adair for his kind permission
to reprint programme notes from the NFT season.
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View
the full Cocteau programme
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