James S. Williams,
Jean Cocteau.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006.
ISBN: 0 7190 5883 X
223pp
£40.00 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by Manchester University Press)

Jean Cocteau’s contribution to the cinema and art of the twentieth century was, by any standard, quite extraordinary. A painter, sculptor, poet, playwright, novelist, critic and filmmaker – to name but a few of his accomplishments – he created a rich and varied body of work that was characterised by remarkably consistent yet intricately elaborate themes and motifs. Even within his film work he took on a variety of roles. If he is best known as the director of the enduring classics Le sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930), La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946), Orphée (Orpheus, 1950) and Le testament d’Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus, 1960) it was, as James S. Williams notes, as much his “multiple interests in the cinema as a writer of screenplays, dialogues, commentaries and voice-overs, actor, editor, festival organiser and judge, [that] established Cocteau as one of the supreme film directors in France” (1).

Williams’ new study forms part of its publisher’s French Film Directors series and, as such, sets its focus upon the films directed by Cocteau himself although his other achievements, particularly as a writer, are drawn into the discussion in the author’s project of presenting his subject as a consummate filmmaker and auteur complet. While the greater portion of Williams’ discussion is centred on the four well-known features cited above, much of the book’s value resides in his detailed evaluation of the less celebrated projects, L’Aigle à deux têtes (The Eagles with Two Deads, 1947) and Les Parents terribles (The Storm Within aka Intimate Relations, 1948). Two obscure and unreleased shorts are also discussed – La Villa Santo-Sospir (1951) and Jean Cocteau’s adresse à l’an 2000 (1963) although little is said about the more elusive titles, Coriolan (1950) and the now lost Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma (1925).

The author’s approach to writing about Cocteau’s film work is subtle and well considered. There is little surprise in that it hinges equally on close textual analysis and a form of auteurism and yet the handling of each of these methodologies is often of outstanding quality. In evaluating Cocteau’s authorial status, Williams explores how key motifs inform his work as a director even as they draw on, and enrich, his wider oeuvre. In particular he shows how “Cocteau’s life and work functioned in parallel to form an overall ethical project, specifically a metaphysical engagement with questions of the self and the other” (3). At the same time he proficiently executes a more nuanced analysis that identifies and draws out some less well-documented authorial traits.

Williams’ splendid textual scrutiny rests on a diligent shot breakdown of films that at times allows him to analyse their overall strategy in an enumerative way (such as his quantification of shot scale and camera movement in Les Parents terribles [84-5]). Elsewhere – as when he discusses Cocteau and designer Christian Bérard’s “extraordinary eye for visual detail and texture” in the costumes of La Belle et la bête (67) – he shows that his own eye is no less sharp and his mode of expression almost equally evocative. Through such methods he is able to identify and illuminate a range of textual strategies that partake meaningfully in Cocteau’s artistic preoccupations and which have, nonetheless, been the subject of little prior scrutiny. One significant chapter draws “on the fruits of current gay and queer film theory to formulate a homoerotics of filmic style” (27). Here Williams centres his analysis on framing and mise-en-scène to show, for instance, how often “the very act of looking and turning back in Cocteau is defined as a locus of male activity and enticement” (170).

Even while Williams recognises that the consistency of Cocteau’s filmmaking is such that one might easily write of it as a cinema of personal expression (as, indeed, it has normally been deemed), he tempers this approach with more wide-ranging forms of critical practice. This project goes far beyond situating Cocteau’s films within the artistic and political contexts from which they arose (although these things he does – in his measurement of Le Sang d’un poète against contemporary Surrealist endeavours like L’Age d’or [Luis Bunuel, 1930], for example, or in his reading of Orphée as being, in part, a product of the French Occupation). His approach also significantly encompasses issues of collaboration and interpretation. The first of these provides the basis for a chapter examining the extensive association between Cocteau and the actor Jean Marais. Although Marais was Cocteau’s long-term lover, Williams refuses to reduce their work together to the product of a Svengali-like relationship and powerfully demonstrates the extent to which Marais actively participated in encouraging Cocteau’s art to take certain forms and directions.

In considering the ways in which Cocteau’s films might be interpreted, Williams draws upon the wealth of commentary that the director has offered in his own extensive writings. Cocteau was famous for his maxims and “Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered” (13) is just one of the many cited here. Williams himself resists propounding any absolute decipherment of Cocteau’s texts, preferring to leave open the possibility of a plurality of readings. Typical of his stance is that, while speculating on an interesting variety of possible interpretations of Orphée he suggests that reading it “through a fixed prism is as problematic as treating the tale of impossible love in La Belle et la bête as, say, an allegory of the doomed love that dare not speak its name” (130). Indeed, such is the resistance of Cocteau’s cinema to facile explanation that one of the book’s most piquant and telling anecdotes is of a New York cinema which, in 1933, advertised a competition rewarding $25 to the viewer who could offer a “true explanation” of Le Sang d’un poète (51)!
Enlightening in its own textual readings while generous to other interpretative possibilities, Williams’ superb, densely written analysis is bolstered by a wealth of extra-textual and inter-textual knowledge. Thoroughly researched, incisive and eloquent, film criticism doesn’t get much better than this.

Deborah Allison
United Kingdom.

Created on: Thursday, 9 November 2006