Jean+Cocteau

Jean Cocteau


Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker.

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

Cocteau was born in Maisons-Laffitte, Yvelines, once 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. He left home at age fifteen. 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. In 1912 he collaborated with Léon Bakst to produce Le Dieu bleu for the Ballets Russes – the principal dancers being Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky. During World War I Cocteau served in the Red Cross as an ambulance driver. This was the period in which he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, artists Pablo Picasso and 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," urged. This resulted in //Parade// which was produced by Diaghilev, designed by 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 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. "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.

//__**The Human Voice**__// 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 poétiques 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 16th century) 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 //La Voix humaine//, 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. "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.'"

__**Plays **__

//Parade//  //Les Mariés de la tour Eiffel // //La Voix humaine // //La Machine infernale // //L'École des veuves // //Les Monstres sacrés //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">//<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">La Machine à écrire //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">//<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Orphée // <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">//<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Le Bel Indifférent // <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Nouveau théâtre de poche <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> //L'Impromptu du Palais-Royal// <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">//<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Le Gendarme incompris // <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">//<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Théâtre //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;"> I and II <span style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 10pt; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">//<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">Bacchus //<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 12pt;">

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