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Dying to Be Immortal: Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy

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Dying to Be Immortal: Jean Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 42.1 March 2016: 193-208 DOI: 10.6240/concentric.lit.2016.42.1.09 Dying to Be Immortal: Jean Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy Pei-lin Wu Center for English Language Teaching Wenzao Ursuline University of Languages, Taiwan Abstract Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), a French poet and filmmaker, adapted the Greek myth of Orpheus and produced three movies centered on it, which are known as the Orphic trilogy: Le Sang d’un poète (1930), Orphée (1950), and Le Testament d’Orphée (1960). His films incorporate features of Neo-classicism and Surrealism to present the main themes of art, love, and death in the Orphic myth. Death, above all, turns out to provide him with the vigor of living as a poet because it is the way to maintain the real self, his unconscious. Hence, to Cocteau, death is transcendental. He created his personal myth by communicating between the public and the private spheres, through filmmaking and his unique artistic style in the hope to also break down the barrier between the living and the dead like Orpheus. What Cocteau yearned for was not the immortality of a conscious hero as that in the traditional myths, but of an unconscious poet, not confined by any rules. Keywords Jean Cocteau, Orpheus, myth, death, Surrealism, Freud, Jung 194 Concentric 42.1 March 2016 In the acclaimed films of the Orphic Trilogy—Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930), Orphée (Orpheus, 1950), and Le Testament d’Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus, 1960)—Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) freely adapted the Greek myth of Orpheus. His cinematic art seems to be nourished in a pre-set environment of the fantastic where he could present the dream-like quality of the human unconscious by creating two different worlds: a real and a mysterious one. In these films, his intention of presenting a poet’s creation in cinematography (Cocteau’s favorite word in lieu of “cinema”), and a deep contemplation of human existence are notable through an exuberant childlike playfulness. The emphasis on childhood in Cocteau’s works reveals his nostalgia for the past; his employment of myth made possible to show the director’s inner struggles. We constantly perceive in his works, as the title of a collection of his biographical essays suggests, The Difficulty of Being the real self, and a fear of becoming what the public expected at that time. The reworking of the archaic material in an avant-garde fashion creates a new interpretation of the myth as well as his own existence. Cocteau, as a director, was influenced by Neo-classicism and Surrealism. Features of both movements can be observed in his preference for adapting works from classic antiquity and his methods of presenting these materials. In this article, I use the term “Orphic trilogy” not only for convenience in referring to Cocteau’s three representative films inspired by the mythic poet Orpheus, but also because Cocteau himself mentions in The Art of Cinema that before he made Le Testament d’Orphée, he “thought that it would be interesting to come full circle and end [his] career in films with a piece similar to Le Sang d’un poète” (162). As to what renders this first film “Orphic,” I will discuss later in detail. In addition to the Orphic trilogy, some of Cocteau’s other works also originate in Greek mythology, for instance, his play Antigone (1922), which was later made into an opera in collaboration with Arthur Honegger (1927), and his plays Orphée (1926) and La Machine infernale (1934), and his opera Oedipus Rex (1927), in collaboration with Igor Stravinsky. André Breton called Cocteau a false poet and did not recognize him as a Surrealist; Cocteau himself refused to associate his film with dreams (in the preface to the screenplay of Le Testament d’Orphée), a central concept of the Surrealist movement in the 1920s (Breton 36, 266, 282; Cocteau, Two Screenplays 73). According to Cocteau’s biographer, James Williams, Breton’s “hatred” towards Cocteau was caused by his “lethal combination of personal jealousy, ideological contempt and ugly homophobia” (76). Breton had good reason to resent Cocteau, who was considered by the public a crucial figure of the avant-garde; it was actually Breton whom the late Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the leading modern poets in the Pei-lin Wu 195 early twentieth century, asked to preface his Collected Works (Williams 76, 78). 1 In Neil Coombs’s Studying Surrealist and Fantasy Cinema, Surrealist art is divided into two types: “1. Automatism or ‘stream of consciousness’ poetry and drawing; . 2. Hyper-real representations of dream images” (20). Cocteau’s central concept of poetry and his cinematic works do not seem to deviate from these two types, though the contents still follow a chronological order and thus are not at all incomprehensible and, as for the second type, he rather saw his own films as “realistically” presented with the mechanics of dreams. Walter Strauss’ keen insight appropriately explains the complicated relationship between Cocteau and the Surrealists: Aside from the fact that Cocteau shunned the surrealist movement and that his temperament was neoclassical and “linear,” there is nevertheless a strong attraction in all of his works to the fantastic and the mysterious as well as to the unconscious. This fact brings him into close proximity of the surrealists and their exploration of the “marvelous” and of “psychic automatism.” (34) This must be why some film critics categorized his works as Surrealism or talked about him and the Surrealists as if they were in the same group. Since Surrealists took dreams as their main source of artistic inspiration and utilized automatism of hands to produce their art, they could be seen as artists or spokesmen of dreams. Freud’s statement that the dream is “the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind” therefore makes them presenters of the unconscious (Frey-Rohn 226). Cocteau acknowledges this aspect in his film: “In Le Testament d’Orphée, events follow one another as they do in sleep, when our habits no longer control the forces within us or the logic of the unconscious, foreign to reason” (The Art 165). This being said, Cocteau’s films in question actually reflect a large part of his inner self; at least they appear to do so. 1 Cocteau’s works were actually not acknowledged by the Surrealists led by Breton. They considered him “an opportunist in the arts rather than a true creator” and saw Le Sang d’un poète as a blatant imitation of Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, which they had officially adopted as the first authentic Surrealist film (Steegmuller 25-30). To their surprise, Freud chose Le Sang d’un poète to analyze (Cocteau, Professional Secrets 147). The tension between Cocteau and the Surrealists might be the reason why Cocteau denied being a Surrealist and showed no connection to the movement. He claimed his works to be avant-garde instead. In spite of the controversy between the two camps, the films speak for themselves. It is undeniable that they share the distinctive surrealistic features that should be classified as such. 196 Concentric 42.1 March 2016 His films are highly autobiographical; among them, the Orphic trilogy in particular lies at the center of his self-representation, and best demonstrates his life and art. Le Sang d’un poète is an epitome of a poet’s life: the poet first finds that the mouth which he sketched on the paper becomes animated. The mouth moves to his palm when he tries to erase it with his hand. He then rubs it onto a statue. The mouth tells him to enter the mirror and he does so. As the poet moves along a corridor with difficulty, he peeps into the keyhole of each room; he then shoots himself and is crowned a poet laureate. The next episode takes us to his childhood, where he kills a boy with a snowball. Finally, the poet plays cards with a woman—obviously the statue come to life. He loses the game and shoots himself. Regarding this film, Cocteau refused to give any interpretation. However, he did reveal that it “[was] a realistic documentary about unreal events” and “based on the poet’s need to go through a series of deaths and to be reborn in a shape closer to his real being” (Cocteau, The Art 134, 157). The final scene shows that the death of the poet is followed by the immortality of art, represented by the woman (who changes back into a statue), a lyre, and a globe. This relates directly to Orpheus, the immortality of whose art could not have been achieved without his own death. The issue of real being can be explained in both physical and psychological senses. As Harry Slochower explains in his Mythopoesis: “the individual, particularly the creative artist, writer, and scientist, feels himself to be in a kind of prison, the prison of impersonal authorities. The problem of creativity is immense in our time because of the difficulty of identifying with creative models” (12). Mythology indeed provides an outlet for one’s artistic impulses. It draws on the oldest memories of mankind as the Mother of the Muses, Mnemosyne, bestows inspiration on the artist. In light of Cocteau’s preference for the mythic figure, Orpheus, to serve as his own embodiment in his autobiographical trilogy, the implications are expanded not only to the genius of this master of music and poetry—whose severed head “goes on singing even in death and from afar” (Jung and Kerényi 4), a characteristic underlining the immortality of the mythic poet who trespasses the boundary between the two worlds of the living and the dead—but also to his role as the son of Calliope, the muse of heroic poetry, best known as Homer’s muse.
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