| Music Encyclopedia: (Clément Eugène) Jean (Maurice) Cocteau |
(b Maisons-Laffitte, 5 July 1889; d Milly-la-Forêt, 11 Oct 1963). French poet. Associated with the Ballets Russes from their arrival in Paris in 1909, he collaborated with Satie and Picasso on Parade (1917) and with Stravinsky on Oedipus rex (1927). His polemic Le coq et l′arlequin (1918) provided an aesthetic for Les Six, whose guiding spirit he was: Milhaud, Poulenc, Auric and Durey all set his verse and Auric wrote music for his films of the 1930s and 1940s.
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| Biography: Jean Cocteau |
The French writer Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) explored nostalgia for childhood and adolescence, frustration in love, and fear of solitude and death.
Jean Cocteau was born in a suburb of Paris and brought up in a well-to-do home frequented by the artistic notables of the day. As a schoolboy at the Lycée Condorcet, he was anything but a model pupil, but he charmed his teachers by his verve and brilliance. His official debut was at the age of 18, when the renowned actor édouard de Max gave a lecture on Cocteau's poetry. Cocteau soon visited Edmond de Rostand, Anna de Noailles, and Marcel Proust; everybody and everything fashionable attracted him.
When the Russian ballet performed in Paris, Jean Cocteau was there. Soon he proposed to its director, Sergei Diaghilev, a ballet of his own. The resulting Blue God, which was not presented until 1912, was not a success. Not daunted, Cocteau started the ballet David, for which he hoped Igor Stravinsky would do the music. Although the ballet did not materialize, Potomak, a curious prose work of fantasy dedicated to Stravinsky, did get written, and texts composed for both works were finally incorporated in a ballet called Parade. Erik Satie and Pablo Picasso collaborated with Cocteau on this production, for which Guillaume Apollinaire, in a program note, coined the word surrealistic.
After World War I, when Dada and surrealism replaced cubism and the "new spirit," Cocteau played about with the new ideas and techniques without adhering strictly to any group. The mime dramas of The Newlyweds of the Eiffel Tower and The Ox on the Roof as well as the poems of The Cape of Good Hope all demonstrate the manner of the day without, however, following any prescribed formula. Subsequently, in verse Cocteau reverted to more conventional prosody, and in fiction, to an uncomplicated narrative style. The Big Split and Thomas the Impostor present in forthright prose the themes of the author's life and times.
Antigone opened Cocteau's series of neoclassic plays, which enjoyed great success from the late 1920s on with their sophisticated props such as oracular horses, symbolic masks and mirrors, angels, and mannequins. The same trappings would be maintained for his plays of romantic or medieval inspiration and would constitute, as well, recognizable features of Cocteau's films.
In the universe that Cocteau's work evokes, the boundaries between what is real and what is unreal disappear, and none of the conventional oppositions such as life and death or good and bad remains fixed. Enveloping the work is a hallucinatory atmosphere that is characteristic. Cocteau was elected to the French Academy in 1955.
Further Reading
Francis Steegmuller's sympathetic Cocteau (1970) is the most comprehensive biography. Margaret Crosland deliberately avoids gossip in her Jean Cocteau (1955). Neal Oxenhandler in Scandal and Parade: The Theater of Jean Cocteau (1957) expressed indignation at what he considers unfair treatment of Cocteau. Wallace Fowlie is frankly admiring in Jean Cocteau: The History of a Poet's Age (1966). Elizabeth Spigge, collaborating with a French biographer (Jean Jacques Kihm) on Jean Cocteau: The Man and the Mirror (1968), handles her subject with bland discretion. Not so, however, Frederick Brown, whose hostile treatment of Cocteau has given An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of Jean Cocteau (1968) particular notoriety. Brutal though it is, this is a witty and well-written book.
Additional Sources
Album Masques, Jean Coctea, Paris: Masques, 1983.
Cocteau, Jean, The difficulty of being, New York: Da Capo Press, 1995.
Cocteau, Jean, Souvenir portraits: Paris in the Belle Epoque, New York: Paragon House, 1990.
Peters, Arthur King, Jean Cocteau and the French scen, New York: Abbeville Press, 1984.
Steegmuller, Francis, Cocteau, a biography, Boston: D.R. Godine, 1986, 1970.
Touzot, Jean, Jean Cocteau, Lyon: Manufacture, 1989.
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Jean Cocteau |
For more information on Jean Cocteau, visit Britannica.com.
| Dictionary of Dance: Jean Cocteau |
Cocteau, Jean (b Maison-Lafitte, nr. Paris, 5 July 1889, d Milly-le-Forêt, 11 Oct. 1963). French writer, artist, designer, and film director. Part of Diaghilev's circle from the first Paris season in 1909, he wrote the scenarios for several of the ballets as well as designing company posters. He wrote the librettos for Fokine's Le Dieu bleu (1912), Massine's Parade (1917), and Nijinska's Le Train bleu (1924). He also worked with Börlin and the Ballets Suédois in the 1920s, for whom he wrote Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel (1921), and with Roland Petit, for whom he wrote Le Jeune Homme et la mort (1946). He wrote L'Amour et son amour for Babilée in 1948 and Phèdre for Lifar in 1950, for which he also did the designs. He wrote numerous articles and essays on dance, and made many sketches and caricatures of the Diaghilev circle.
| Fairy Tale Companion: Jean-Maurice-Eugène-Clément Cocteau |
Cocteau, Jean‐Maurice‐Eugène‐Clément (1889–1963), French artist, writer, and cinematographer. Given Cocteau's loose ties to futurism, dada, and surrealism, his penchant for the fantastic, from the very beginning of his career, is not at all surprising. Hence, he explores various types and levels of ‘reality’ in much of his work, including his early cartoon, Le Potomak (1919); his plays Oedipus Rex (1927), La Machine infernale (The Infernal Machine, 1934), and Les Chevaliers de la table ronde (The Knights of the Round Table, 1963); and his films L'Éternel retour (The Eternal Return, 1943) and La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946).
Cocteau deals most directly with the fairy tale in his cinematic version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’. Although now considered a classic, at the time of its release in the aftermath of World War II when people were struggling to meet their most basic needs, the film was considered by many to be shockingly frivolous. Cocteau countered that he was offering a means of survival by renewing people's ‘spirit’. He also deemed his reworking of this fairy tale to be an expression of his own being. Encompassing both the personal and the social, this film, like most of Cocteau's œuvre, explores different facets of reality such as dreams, daily life, and the supernatural. To evoke these, Cocteau makes a particularly effective use of lighting, including blurred shots, shadows, and contrasts between light and dark, but also many special effects, such as candelabras with human arms, bodiless hands that serve meals, doors that open mysteriously, that have lost nothing of their charm even today. The acting in this film is often praised for striking a delicate balance between archetypal and individual expression that reveals Cocteau's belief in the intersection of these aspects of reality.
Although Cocteau bases his film on Mme
Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast is one of the most important 20th‐century reworkings of the tale, and its influence has been considerable. In the time since its release, it has gone from being an avant‐garde to a classic film that now inspires new versions.
Bibliography
— Lewis C. Seifert
| French Literature Companion: Jean Cocteau |
Cocteau, Jean (1889-1963). A leading figure in the avant-garde in Paris in the first decades of the century. Born in Maisons-Laffitte, he entered at an early age the world of the ‘tout-Paris’, including the salon of Anna de Noailles. He constantly sought to respond to Diaghilev's celebrated command, ‘Etonne-moi’. Although he was involved in all forms of artistic and cultural activity, he preferred to regard himself as a poet, so much so that he referred to his novels as ‘Poésie de Roman’ and his plays, ballets, and libretti as ‘Poésie de Théâtre’.
Paradoxically, it is not for his poetry proper that he is now best known. He published his earliest volume of verse, La Lampe d'Aladin, in 1909, but his more important collections include: the Futurist (or Cubist, or Dadaist) long poem Le Cap de Bonne Espérance (1919), dedicated to the aviator Roland Garros; the more traditional poem (or poems) of desire, doubtless inspired by Radiguet, Plain-Chant (1923); the staccato, modernist, word-play-ridden pieces addressed to L'Ange Heurtebise (1925): the opium-inspired Opéra (1927) that Cocteau himself considered to be his quintessential expression; the shapely, richly textured poems of La Crucifixion (1946); and his poetic testament, perhaps his poetic masterpiece, Le Requiem (1962), in which he pays tribute to a wide range of precursors, from Homer to Góngora, from Dante to Mallarmé.
His ‘Poésie de Roman’ began with the almost unclassifiable verbal-cum-artistic fantasia Le Potomak (1919), dedicated to Stravinsky, continued with the 1923 novellas Le Grand Écart and Thomas l'Imposteur, and reached its climax with Les Enfants terribles (1929), a tale of rebellious youth centred on a brother and sister, Paul and Élisabeth. These works of the 1920s are characteristically controlled concoctions of personal experience and vivid imagination, dream and reality, truth and falsehood, all larded with provocative aphorisms.
It is Cocteau's ‘Poésie de Théâtre’ that is the most obvious interface with the other arts. For the ballet Parade (first performed 1917) he collaborated with Satie, Picasso, and Massine; for Les Biches (1924) he worked with Milhaud and Poulenc; for Phèdre (1950) Georges Auric composed the music and Serge Lifar was the choreographer. In the preface which he wrote in 1922 to Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel he contemplated a new ‘genre théâtral’ to be produced by ‘un groupe amical’ rather than an individual dramatist; that play involved collaboration with five of Les Six. His adaptation, or contraction, of Sophocles' Antigone, first staged in 1922, became the libretto for Honegger's ‘tragédie lyrique’ six years later. The Latin translation of the text of his adaptation of Oedipus Rex similarly served as the basis of Stravinsky's opera-oratorio. More importantly, it was the stimulus to the reworking of the Oedipus story in La Machine infernale (1934), where Cocteau was able to incorporate allusions to Freud. The Greek myth with which he felt the most personal affinity, however, was that of Orpheus, for which he found a dramatic structure first in the play Orphée (1927) and subsequently in the film version (1950). The cinema was possibly his ideal medium; he made his debut with Le Sang d'un poète (1930), and his best films include L'Éternel Retour (1943) and La Belle et la bête (1945), as well as Orphée, but not the embarrassingly egocentric Le Testament d'Orphée (1960).
[Keith Aspley]
Bibliography
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Jean Cocteau |
Bibliography
See his autobiography; comp. from his writings by R. Phelps (tr. 1970); biographies by F. Brown (1968), E. Sprigge and J.-J. Kihm (1968), and F. Steegmuller (1970); M. Crosland, ed., Cocteau's World (tr. 1972).
| Quotes By: Jean Cocteau |
Quotes:
"The actual tragedies of life bear no relation to one's preconceived ideas. In the event, one is always bewildered by their simplicity, their grandeur of design, and by that element of the bizarre which seems inherent in them."
"One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends."
"Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death."
"Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort."
"An original artist is unable to copy. So he has only to copy in order to be original."
"I am a lie who always speaks the truth."
See more famous quotes by
Jean Cocteau
| Writer: Jean Cocteau |
| Filmography: Jean Cocteau |
| Wikipedia: Jean Cocteau |
| Jean Cocteau | |
|---|---|
 Jean Cocteau in his 20s |
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| Born | Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau 5 July 1889 Maisons-Laffitte, France |
| Died | 11 October 1963 (aged 74) Milly-la-Foret, France |
| Partner | Jean Marais (1937-1963) |
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Along with other Surrealists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and René Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the "algebra" of verbal codes old and new, mise en scène language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Édith Piaf, whom he cast in one of his one act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940, and Raymond Radiguet.
His work was played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theatres, the Boulevards and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both lived through and helped define and create. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim.
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Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, a small village near Paris to Georges Cocteau and his wife Eugénie Lecomte, a prominent Parisian family. His father was a lawyer and amateur painter, who committed suicide when Cocteau was nine. At the age of fifteen, Cocteau left home. Despite his achievements in virtually all literary and artistic fields, Cocteau insisted that he was primarily a poet and that all his work was poetry. He published his first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp, at nineteen. Soon Cocteau became known in the Bohemian artistic circles as 'The Frivolous Prince'—the title of a volume he published at twenty-two. Edith Wharton described him as a man "to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundation of the Heavenly City..."
In his early twenties, Cocteau became associated with the writers Marcel Proust, André Gide, and Maurice Barrès. During the Great War Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, artist Amedeo Modigliani and numerous other writers and artists with whom he later collaborated. The Russian ballet-master Sergei Diaghilev challenged Cocteau to write a scenario for the ballet - "Astonish me," he urged. This resulted in Parade which was produced by Diaghilev, designed by Pablo Picasso, and composed by Erik Satie in 1917. An important exponent of Surrealism, he had great influence on the work of others, including the group of composer friends in Montparnasse known as Les Six. The word Surrealism was coined, in fact, by Guillaume Apollinaire in the prologue to Les mamelles de Tirésias , a work begun in 1903 and completed in 1917 less than a year before he died.[1] "If it had not been for Apollinaire in uniform," wrote Cocteau, "with his skull shaved, the scar on his temple and the bandage around his head, women would have gouged our eyes out with hairpins." Cocteau denied being a Surrealist or being in any way attached to the movement.[citation needed]
In 1918 he met the French poet Raymond Radiguet. They collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau also got Radiguet exempted from military service. In admiration of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and also arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps (a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man), exerting his influence to garner the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize for the novel. Some contemporaries and later commentators thought there might have been a romantic component to their friendship.[2] Cocteau himself was aware of this perception, and worked earnestly to dispel the notion that their relationship was sexual in nature.[3]
There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned, despondent and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral (he generally did not attend funerals) and immediately left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les Noces (The Wedding) by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself much later characterised his reaction as one of "stupor and disgust." His opium addiction at the time,[4] Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style. His most notable book, Les Enfants Terribles, was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning. In Opium, Diary of an Addict, he recounts the experience of his recovery from opium addiction in 1929. His account, which includes vivid pen-and-ink illustrations, alternates between his moment to moment experiences of drug withdrawal and his current thoughts about people and events in his world.
Cocteau's experiments with the human voice peaked with his play La Voix Humaine. The story involves one woman on stage speaking on the telephone with her (invisible and inaudible) departing lover, who is leaving her to marry another woman. The telephone proved to be the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, feelings, and "algebra" concerning human needs and realities in communication.
Cocteau acknowledged in the introduction to the script that the play was motivated, in part, by complaints from his actresses that his works were too writer/director-dominated and gave the players little opportunity to show off their full range of talents. La Voix Humaine was written, in effect, as an extravagant aria for Madame Berthe Bovy. Before came Orphée, later turned into one of his more successful films; after came La Machine Infernale, arguably his most fully realized work of art. La Voix Humaine is deceptively simple—a woman alone on stage for almost one hour of non-stop theatre speaking on the telephone with her departing lover. It is, in fact, full of theatrical codes harking back to the Dadaists' Vox Humana experiments after World War One, Alphonse de Lamartine's "La Voix Humaine", part of his larger work Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses and the effect of the creation of the Vox Humana (Voix Humaine), an organ stop of the Regal Class by Church organ masters (late 1500s) that attempted to imitate the human voice but never succeeded in doing better than the sound of a male chorus at a distance.
Reviews varied at the time and since but whatever the critique, the play, in a nutshell, represents Cocteau's state of mind and feelings towards his actors at the time: on the one hand, he desired to spoil and please them; on the other, he was fed up by their diva antics and was ready for revenge. It is also true that none of Cocteau's works has inspired as much imitation: Francis Poulenc's opera of the same name, Gian Carlo Menotti's "opera bouffa" The Telephone and Roberto Rosselini's film version in Italian with Anna Magnani L'Amore (1948). There has also been a long line of interpreters including Simone Signoret, Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann (in the play) and Julia Migenes (in the opera).
According to one theory about how Cocteau was inspired to write La Voix Humaine, he was experimenting with an idea by fellow French playwright Henri Bernstein.[5] "When, in 1930, the Comedie-Française produced his La Voix Humaine...Cocteau disavowed both literary right and literary left, as if to say, "I'm standing as far right as Bernstein, in his very place, but it is an optical illusion: the avant-garde is spheroid and I've gone farther left than anyone else."
In the 1930s, Cocteau had an affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the beautiful daughter of a Romanov grand duke and herself a sometimes actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong. She became pregnant. To Cocteau's distress and Paley's life-long regret, the fetus was aborted. Cocteau's longest-lasting relationships were with the French actors Jean Marais and Edouard Dermithe, whom Cocteau formally adopted. Cocteau cast Marais in The Eternal Return (1943), Beauty and the Beast (1946), Ruy Blas (1947), and Orpheus (1949).
In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful. He also worked with Pablo Picasso on several projects and was friends with most of the European art community. Some have believed that Cocteau was homosexual, however, as with his friendship with Radiguet mentioned above, Cocteau himself specifically denied any such element in their relationship. Nevertheless, it is known that his collaborator Jean Marais was also his lover.
Cocteau's films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing Surrealism into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.
Cocteau is best known for his novel Les enfants terribles (1929), and the films Les parents terribles (1948), Beauty and the Beast (1946), and Orpheus (1949).
Cocteau died of a heart attack at his chateau in Milly-la-Foret, France, on 11 October 1963 at the age of 74, only hours after hearing of the death of his friend, the French singer Édith Piaf. He is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint Blaise Des Simples in Milly La Foret, Essonne, France. The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the chapel reads: "I stay among you" ("Je reste avec vous").
In 1955 Cocteau was made a member of the Académie française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.
During his life Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.A) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes film festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.
Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in literature" article, except for poetry and poetry criticism, which link to corresponding "[year] in poetry" articles.
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