Jean Coctaeu

Jean Coctaeu

1)Had made films since 1920's
2)Also known as poet, novelist, artist and screenwriter.
3)In 1930's his avant-garde work Blood of a Poet 
    is considered to be his first film. 
4)He did a rare lost film about the life of a writer in 1925. 

5)After Blood of a Poet did two others to make a trilogy
   Orpheus (1950) and The Testament of Orpheus (1960).

6)His 1946 version of Beauty and the Beast 
    remains one of his most well known films. 
    a)mixes surreal visual style
    b)romantic tradition of the classic story
    c) Josette Day (Belle) & Jean Marais (Beast)

7) Max Cavitch in Criterion review:

"Much of the film’s deep magic comes from Cocteau’s sense of himself as a vulnerable beast-in-love: In his mid-50s when he made the film, Cocteau was openly gay in an often viciously homophobic post-Vichy France, an opium addict, plagued by skin-disfiguring eczema, and yet still enamored of his much younger star, the Adonis-like Jean Marais, his sometime-lover and great friend and collaborator. In Marais’s triple role (he plays the monstrous yet tender-hearted Beast; Avenant, the hunky but caddish suitor of Josette Day’s La Belle; and the ensorcelled Prince Ardent, whom the Beast is ultimately revealed, with some ambivalence, to be), the actor lends virtuosic as well as symbolic appeal to Cocteau’s cinematic inquiry into the complex interplay of identification and desire. Between the time of their meeting in 1937 and Cocteau’s death in 1963, the two were often acknowledged publicly as a couple, though they both had other lovers as well. And they spent many of those years living together as a family, on and off, first in a Paris apartment and later in a grand house in the Fontainebleau Forest."

Beauty and the Beast (Jean Cocteau, 1946): B&W Clip of Film

Here is a trailer Click Here

Description of film clip:

Beauty takes the magic horse Magnifique to go back to the Beast. 
He is glittery. The gates open and there he knows the way. Beautiful 
white. Entering the house, the chandeliers all have arms she runs in and up the staircase like she's floating. Her gowns are flowing - slow motion... The curtains are white and billowing. 
She is gliding without walking. Belle, i am the door to your room. The statues move. There's like a fog in her bedroom. I am your mirror - reflect in your heart for me and i'll reflect for you. Bedspread animated. She leaves the house and Beast comes out and she faints. He picks her up and takes her upstairs. He's dressed very nice. He goes up several stairways beautifully lit. The doors open automatically in the house. Her bed is like a sleigh. Close up on her face and his and it ends.