Cocteau and Surrealism
Jean Cocteau's La Belle a La Bête
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, visual artist, and filmmaker. His adaptation of La Belle a La Bête (1946) is uniquely personal, as Cocteau himself suffered from painful eczema that made him ashamed to go outside. In fact, he is described as showing up to the set of the film with a self-fashioned mask - a veil of black paper that was clipped to his hat with close-pins. Cocteau was also reeling from professional failure at the time, as his misguided, offensive comments led the French artistic community to blacklist him.
Read more about Cocteau's background in this essay "A Yearning for the Beast"
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La Belle a La Bête (1946) is a surrealist take on Beaumont's story of the same name. The film is in black and white and features Josette Day as Beauty and a heavily prosthetic'd Jean Marais as the Beast. Slow and dreamlike in pace, the film takes its time, especially in the castle scenes. Cocteau was the first to decide that the castle objects may be enchanted as well, but his version of Lumiere is a human arm holding a candelabra protruding from the wall. The unsettling human elements of the enchanted castle give the film a distinctly dark, eerie, and adult tone.
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“Children believe what we tell them. They have complete faith in us. They believe that a rose plucked from a garden can plunge a family into conflict. They believe that the hands of a human beast will smoke when he slays a victim, and that this will cause him shame when a young maiden takes up residence in his home. They believe a thousand other simple things.
I ask of you a little of this childlike sympathy and, to bring us luck, let me speak four truly magic words, childhood's "Open Sesame":
Once upon a time…”
-Cocteau’s opening statement at the beginning of the film
Surrealism in Film
Surrealism was an avant-garde art movement in Paris from 1924 to 1941, consisting of a small group of writers, artists, and filmmakers. The movement used shocking, irrational, or absurd imagery and Freudian dream symbolism to challenge the traditional function of art to represent reality. Related to Dada cinema, Surrealist cinema is characterized by juxtapositions, the rejection of dramatic psychology, and a frequent use of shocking imagery.
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Common Touch Points
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Bizarre/evocative imagery
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Deliberate avoidance of rationality
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Juxtaposition (a convulsive beauty)
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Eclectic
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Freudian