Jean Cocteau
Also Known As: 장 콕토, Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau
Biography: Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ kɔkto]; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Along with other avant-garde artists 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.[citation needed] His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María Félix, 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. Description above from the Wikipedia article Jean Cocteau, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Department: Directing
Place of Birth: Maison Laffitte, Yvelines, France
Adult: No
Birthday: July 05, 1889
Age: 135 years old
Gender: Male
Deathday: October 11, 1963
Popularity:
Known For:
Beauty and the Beast
Overview: The story of a gentle-hearted beast in love with a simple and beautiful girl. She is drawn to the repellent but strangely fascinating Beast, who tests her fidelity by giving her a key, telling her that if she doesn't return it to him by a specific time, he will die of grief. She is unable to return the key on time, but it is revealed that the Beast is the genuinely handsome one. A simple tale of tragic love that turns into a surreal vision of death, desire, and beauty.
Genres: Drama Fantasy Romance
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1946-10-29
Popularity:
It Happened on the 36 Candles
Overview: Rejecting the union of her daughter Brigitte with a modest worker, Madame Magnin invents an adultery for the lover, then introduces Brigitte to a good-looking man working on the famous RTF entertainment show 36 Chandelles. The show ultimately seals the reunion of the two estranged young lovers. The story features a parade of music-hall stars from the era: Charles Trenet, Charles Aznavour, Georges Guétary, Juliette Gréco, Roger Pierre and Jean-Marc Thibault, Fernand Raynaud, Georges Ulmer and many more.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1957-10-16
Popularity:
Testament of Orpheus
Overview: An 18th century poet travels through time in search of divine wisdom. In a mysterious wasteland, he has a series of enigmatic encounters with symbolic phantoms with whom he muses about the nature of art and his own career. Ultimately, the poet strives to achieve his rebirth as a celestial being.
Genres: Fantasy
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1960-02-18
Popularity:
The Strange Ones
Overview: Elisabeth and her brother Paul live isolated from much of the world after Paul is injured in a snowball fight. As a coping mechanism, the two conjure up a hermetic dream of their own making. Their relationship, however, isn't exactly wholesome. Jealousy and a malevolent undercurrent intrude on their fantasy when Elisabeth invites the strange Agathe to stay with them -- and Paul is immediately attracted to her.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1950-03-29
Popularity:
Venom and Eternity
Overview: In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.
Genres: Comedy
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1952-01-25
Popularity:
La Malibran
Overview: On the death of the famous singer Maria Malibran, Countess Merlin retraces the main lines of the unusual destiny of this young woman entirely devoted to her art.
Genres: Comedy Drama
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1944-05-03
Popularity:
The Image Book
Overview: In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.
Genres: Drama Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 2018-10-11
Popularity:
From Joan of Arc to Philippe Pétain
Overview: Sitting at his desk, Guitry gives us a lecture on French history from Joan of Arc to the Occupation, with some focus on a number of its great writers and musicians.
Genres: Documentary History
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1944-05-04
Popularity:
Orpheus
Overview: A famous poet in postwar Paris, scorned by the Left Bank youth, is in love with both his wife Eurydice and a mysterious princess. Seeking inspiration, the poet becomes obsessed and follows the princess from the world of the living to the land of the dead.
Genres: Romance Fantasy
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1950-09-29
Popularity:
Daughter of the Sands
Overview: This Moroccan romance is a kind of Arab Tristan and Isolde: the heroine kills herself when she is convinced no one cares for her, the young nobleman she thought would love her is killed by a madwoman.
Genres: Drama Romance
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1949-01-11
Popularity:
Jean Cocteau Makes Cinema
Overview: A short film about a famous writer who loses control of his hand and begins to write letters and articles denouncing himself.
Genres: Drama Comedy
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1925-01-01
Popularity:
8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements
Overview: 8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements is an American experimental film directed by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau. Described by Richter as "part Freud, part Lewis Carroll" and filmed partially on the lawn of Duchamp's summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.
Genres: Fantasy
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1957-03-15
Popularity:
Jean Cocteau: Autobiography of an Unknown
Overview: Jean Cocteau reminisces about the people he has known throughout his long life.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1984-11-15
Popularity:
Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000
Overview: In August 1963, just a couple of months before his death, Jean Cocteau made one last short film. The film comprises one still and highly sober shot of Cocteau facing the camera head-on to address the youth of the future. Once recorded, this spoken message for the 21st century was sealed and stored with the understanding that it would be opened only in the year 2000. As it turned out, it was discovered and exhumed a few years shy of that date. Where in The Testament of Orpheus Cocteau portrays himself as a living anachronism, a lonesome classical modernist loitering in space-time while lost in the spectral light of his memories, here he acknowledges explicitly the irony of his phantom-like state. By the time the viewer sees this image, he, J. C., our saviour Poet, will long be dead.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1962-06-12
Popularity:
In This Atrocious Garden
Overview: This short documentary film is conceived as a stroll through the valley of Thebes and the temple of Karnak.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1964-12-14
Popularity:
Portrait Souvenir: Jean Cocteau
Overview: Cocteau, at his home, remembers his childhood, talks at length about theater, cinema, literature, and draws portraits of friends.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1964-02-11
Popularity:
Disorder Is 20 Years Old
Overview:
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1967-06-06
Popularity:
Steel Cathedrals
Overview: 20 minute music documentary shot in two days of November 1984 in, and around the outskirts of, Tokyo, Japan. A large part of the music was completed during that same month and recorded over a period of three days.
Genres: Documentary Music
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1985-05-17
Popularity:
Toute la vérité, rien que la vérité : Jean Cocteau
Overview: In 1959, Jean Cocteau looked back on his artistic journey for the Télé Monte-Carlo television show Tout la vérité, rien que la vérité. The program ends with a tasty anecdote about television that Cocteau describes as a “box of tricks”. A few weeks later, in the same Victorine studios, Cocteau directed most of the sequences for his last opus: The Testament of Orpheus (1959).
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1959-02-07
Popularity:
Iran Darroudi: The Painter of Ethereal Moments
Overview: A look at the life and art of Ms. Iran Darroudi, one of the most important contemporary Iranian painters, who has divided her time between Tehran and Paris for the past fifty years. The film describes the various influences in her life and how she came to cultivate a style that merges the western surrealism with eastern mysticism
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fa
Release Date: 2009-01-01
Popularity:
Jean Marais, le mal rouge et or
Overview:
Genres: Documentary TV Movie
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 2006-01-01
Popularity:
Callas Assoluta
Overview: This revealing documentary from director Philippe Kohly examines the storied life of renowned soprano Maria Callas, from her troubled childhood in New York City to her scandal-laden but triumphant international career in opera. Featuring archival interviews with Callas herself and footage of contemporaries such as her lover Aristotle Onassis, this celebration of "La Divina" pays tribute to her enduring legacy some three decades after her death.
Genres: Documentary History
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2007-12-20
Popularity:
America as Seen by a Frenchman
Overview: At the end of the 1950s, French documentarian François Reichenbach spent eighteen months traveling the United States, documenting its diverse regions, their inhabitants, and their pastimes. The result is a journey through a multitude of different Americas, filtered through a French sensibility.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1960-06-08
Popularity:
Cocteau et compagnie
Overview:
Genres: No genres available
Original Language: fr
Release Date:
Popularity:
Beyond the Riviera
Overview: Travelogue exploring the coastline, towns and surrounding mountains of the French Riviera.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1960-10-24
Popularity:
Daedalus
Overview: "Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Shot in just seven consecutive days during the summer of 2023, it concludes the first volume of Bliss, a playlist of sounds and shapes. Daedalus delves into the perilous dance between striving for something and the suffocating pull of stagnancy. This chaotic structure bridges the warnings and epiphanic thoughts of 20th-century thinkers with the lives of today's dreamers.
Genres: Music Mystery Documentary TV Movie
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2024-07-17
Popularity:
Jean Cocteau
Overview: We film buffs grew up worshiping Jean Cocteau—particularly his BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ORPHEUS and BLOOD OF A POET—but in recent years he has perhaps ebbed from our consciousness.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2024-08-29
Popularity:
The Century Is Fifty
Overview: As the title of this French documentary indicates, Ce Siecle a 50 Ans examines the 20th Century at its halfway point. Utilizing the archives of several European film reserves, director Denise Tua offers a fascinating mosaic of the people and events that shaped the years 1900 to 1950. Complementing the vintage film clips are three dramatized sketches, delineating the romantic customs of three different points in time. These sketches are inadequately performed, and can easily be ignored. Ce Siecle a 50 Ans both preserved and provided celluloid material for scores of future documentaries.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1950-03-16
Popularity:
Jean Cocteau: Lies and Truths
Overview: This documentary consists mainly of archive interviews of Jean Cocteau, and it features interesting contributions by Jean Marais and especially Jean-Luc Godard, who discusses Cocteau's foray into cinema. The film documents all the artistic media explored by a man who defined himself, first and foremost, as a poet.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1997-02-22
Popularity:
Black Friendship
Overview: The commentary recalls that Radio Brazzaville was, from June 18, 1943, the contact of the French settlements and the metropolis, bush stations participate in the organization of the resistance.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1946-07-14
Popularity:
La Villa Santo-Sospir
Overview: Cocteau takes the viewer on a tour of a friend's villa on the French coast (a major location used in Testament of Orpheus). The house itself is heavily decorated, mostly by Cocteau (and a bit by Picasso), and we are given an extensive tour of the artwork. Cocteau also shows us several dozen paintings as well. Most cover mythological themes, of course. He also proudly shows paintings by Edouard Dermithe and Jean Marais and plays around his own home in Villefranche.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1952-12-05
Popularity:
Eine Melodie - vier Maler
Overview: Each portrayed painter produced an experimental animated short film to be featured in this film. A short film by Herbert Seggelke.
Genres: Animation Documentary
Original Language: de
Release Date: 1955-01-02
Popularity:
Art of Style: Jean Cocteau
Overview: French artist Jean Cocteau's multifaceted work across poetry, plays, paintings and film made him one of the leading creative figures of the Parisian avant-garde movement. Featuring Cocteau's own writings read by actor Timothée Chalamet, explore the dream-like quality of Cocteau's one of a kind oeuvre.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 2018-12-06
Popularity:
The Blood of a Poet
Overview: In a poet’s room, an armless statue abruptly comes to life. It invites the poet to step through a mirror and to discover another world. Strange places and characters present themselves to him. The poet tears himself away from these twisted fascinations and returns, with some difficulty, to his room.
Genres: Fantasy
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1932-01-20
Popularity:
Musée Grévin
Overview: A man dreams he is in a wax museum after it is closed for the night.The statues come to life and behave in mysterious ways.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1958-01-01
Popularity:
The Phantom Baron
Overview: Elfy, Countess of Saint-Hélié's daughter, was brought up with her foster sister Anne, in an old dilapidated castle whose landlord, Baron Julius Carol, disappeared mysteriously some day. The two girls had a playmate, Hervé, the son of the gamekeeper. Now that they are adult, Anne is in love with Hervé while Elfy thinks she loves the young man. One day, the baron's mummified body is found in an oubliette and the secret of the estate is revealed...
Genres: Drama
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1943-06-16
Popularity:
The Storm Within
Overview: Young Michel is in love with the attractive Madeleine, so he decides to tell his parents of his intention to marry her. He thinks his announcement is innocent enough; his engagement, however, threatens to reveal dark secrets lurking within his family's home. Yvonne, Michel's overbearing mother, concocts an elaborate scheme to drive Madeleine away, thus keeping uncomfortable household truths from being exposed.
Genres: Drama
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1948-12-01
Popularity:
Marcel Proust - Portrait Souvenir
Overview: This documentary is a portrait of Proust composed of recollections by those who knew him. Intercut with reading from his works.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1962-06-23
Popularity:
Disorder
Overview: Variations on the cultural and intellectual explosion in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district in 1946.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 1950-12-02
Popularity:
A Night at the Opera
Overview: A documentary view of the galas of Paris’s Palais Garnier in the 1950s and ’60s.
Genres: Documentary Music
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 2020-09-29
Popularity:
Cocteau - Al Brown: the Poet and the Boxer
Overview: Portrait of Panama Al Brown, a great boxer in the 30's, and its story with France, with a focus on its relationship with Jean Cocteau, surrealist, poet, director, artist.
Genres: Documentary History
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 2020-02-29
Popularity:
To Each His Own Cinema
Overview: Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.
Genres: Comedy Drama
Original Language: fr
Release Date: 2007-10-31
Popularity:
Great Writers: Jean Cocteau
Overview: Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, and filmmaker, whose versatility, unconventionality, and enormous output brought him international acclaim. As a leading member of the surrealist movement, he had a great influence on the work of others.
Genres: Documentary
Original Language: en
Release Date: 1996-07-05
Popularity: