ChiaroScuro DVD-Collection
Alphabetically sorted by Director's last name
Total number of titles: 1397
Last updated: 09 Feb 2007
France 1952
d: Jean Cocteau
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Jean Cocteau
c: W. Iwanow (16mm, Kodakchrome)
m: Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi
w: Jean Cocteau, Edouard Dermithe, Francine Weisweiler
c: W. Iwanow (16mm, Kodakchrome)
m: Johann Sebastian Bach, Antonio Vivaldi
w: Jean Cocteau, Edouard Dermithe, Francine Weisweiler
rt: 36:26 min
dvd-rl: 09 Mai 2000
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: Extra Feature only on "Le Testament d'Orphée"
dvd-rl: 09 Mai 2000
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: Extra Feature only on "Le Testament d'Orphée"
Short about Mrs. Weisweiller's Villa in Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferat, on Côte d'Azur, which was decorated by Jean Cocteau.
(Das Blut eines Dichters [de])
France 1930
d: Jean Cocteau
Criterion (Region 0 us)
France 1930
d: Jean Cocteau
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Jean Cocteau
c: Georges Périnal (b/w)
e: Jean Cocteau
pd: Jean d’Eaubonne
m: Georges Auric
p: Vicomte de Noailles
w: Enrique Rivero, Elizabeth Lee Miller, Pauline Carton, Odette Talazac, Jean Desbordes, Fernand Dichamps, Lucien Jager, Féral Benga, Barbette
pr: 20 Jän 1930
c: Georges Périnal (b/w)
e: Jean Cocteau
pd: Jean d’Eaubonne
m: Georges Auric
p: Vicomte de Noailles
w: Enrique Rivero, Elizabeth Lee Miller, Pauline Carton, Odette Talazac, Jean Desbordes, Fernand Dichamps, Lucien Jager, Féral Benga, Barbette
pr: 20 Jän 1930
rt: 52:26 min
dvd-rl: 09 Mai 2000
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: Orphic Trilogy
The Criterion Collection #67
This digital transfer was created from the 35mm intermediate negative, made from the original camera negative. The digitally restored sound was mastered from a 35mm optical soundtrack negative
• A collection of rare behind-the-scenes photos
• Edgardo Cozarinsky’s renowned 1984 documentary "Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un Inconnu" (Autobiography of an Unknown) (4:3, 66:44 min)
• A transcript of Cocteau’s lecture given at a 1932 screening of "Blood of a Poet", and a 1946 essay by Cocteau
• A Cocteau bibliofilmography
• Booklet with Liner Notes by Jean Cocteau
dvd-rl: 09 Mai 2000
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: Orphic Trilogy
The Criterion Collection #67
This digital transfer was created from the 35mm intermediate negative, made from the original camera negative. The digitally restored sound was mastered from a 35mm optical soundtrack negative
• A collection of rare behind-the-scenes photos
• Edgardo Cozarinsky’s renowned 1984 documentary "Cocteau: Autoportrait d’un Inconnu" (Autobiography of an Unknown) (4:3, 66:44 min)
• A transcript of Cocteau’s lecture given at a 1932 screening of "Blood of a Poet", and a 1946 essay by Cocteau
• A Cocteau bibliofilmography
• Booklet with Liner Notes by Jean Cocteau
Cocteau described this first feature as the playing with one finger of a theme that he orchestrated in "Orphée" twenty years later. That puts it fairly enough: the movie has an avant-garde roughness and unpredictability in its construction and use of symbols, but it's fundamentally a very characteristic, neo-Romantic study of the joys and agonies of being an artist. It's in two distinct parts. The first presents the artist (Rivero) trapped by his own work, eventually opting for the rebirth of a romantic martyrdom; the second plunges back into autobiography (reworking the snowball fight from "Les Enfants Terribles"), and resolves itself into a 'cosmic' riddle. The honesty and robustness of the images prevents the movie from lapsing into pretension or preciousness; it remains extremely interesting as a source of Cocteau's later work.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Although Cocteau was never a member of the Surrealist movement, and in fact was criticized by the Surrealists, The Blood a Poet is often characterized as a Surrealist work. Its use of symbolic images and dream-like structure superficially suggest Surrealist preoccupations. However, Richard Abel, in French Film Theory and Criticism, distinguishes between their concerns: "In his introduction to Le Sang d'un poète, Cocteau seemed to literalize the Surrealists' mirror metaphor of the screen and take the poet/spectator through an elliptical, discontinuous series of 'dream' images that 'captured' his own 'poetic states.' These images may have been presented quite obviously through tricks . . . yet Cocteau's discourse itself clearly was framed within an idealist conception of the poet's superior awareness. . .
The Surrealists themselves (or former Surrealists), by contrast, envisioned a narrative cinema that constituted a sequence of events analogous in its illogic and spatio-temporal discontinuity to that of the unconscious or dream and that worked on the spectator in such a way as to make him 'lose consciousness' and thus liberate his unconscious being."
Antonin Artaud, in a letter to Jean Paulhan, January 22, 1932, wrote "The old quarrel between Cocteau and the Surrealists is absurd. For at bottom they are all the same and I assure you that anyone who was not aware of their petty bickering would put a film like L'Age d'or and a film like The Blood of a Poet on the same level, would throw them into the same bag, for one is just as irrelevant and pointless as the other... [T]he point is finally to produce the exemplary works of this poetry of the unconscious, this profound analogical poetry which I call poetry of the unconscious for lack of a better term, but which is the only poetry possible, the only true and possible poetry with metaphysical tendencies, on which films like The Blood of a Poet resolutely turn their back."
In 1946, Cocteau recalled, "It is often said that The Blood of a Poet is a Surrealist film. However, Surrealism did not exist when I first thought of it. On the contrary, the interest that it still arouses probably comes from its isolation from the works with which it is classified. . . At the time of the Blood of a Poet, I was the only one. . . to avoid the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious in favor of a kind of half-sleep through which I wandered as though in a labyrinth" (quoted by Herbert Reynolds in Through Surrealist Eyes).
— Kathy Geritz, PFA
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Although Cocteau was never a member of the Surrealist movement, and in fact was criticized by the Surrealists, The Blood a Poet is often characterized as a Surrealist work. Its use of symbolic images and dream-like structure superficially suggest Surrealist preoccupations. However, Richard Abel, in French Film Theory and Criticism, distinguishes between their concerns: "In his introduction to Le Sang d'un poète, Cocteau seemed to literalize the Surrealists' mirror metaphor of the screen and take the poet/spectator through an elliptical, discontinuous series of 'dream' images that 'captured' his own 'poetic states.' These images may have been presented quite obviously through tricks . . . yet Cocteau's discourse itself clearly was framed within an idealist conception of the poet's superior awareness. . .
The Surrealists themselves (or former Surrealists), by contrast, envisioned a narrative cinema that constituted a sequence of events analogous in its illogic and spatio-temporal discontinuity to that of the unconscious or dream and that worked on the spectator in such a way as to make him 'lose consciousness' and thus liberate his unconscious being."
Antonin Artaud, in a letter to Jean Paulhan, January 22, 1932, wrote "The old quarrel between Cocteau and the Surrealists is absurd. For at bottom they are all the same and I assure you that anyone who was not aware of their petty bickering would put a film like L'Age d'or and a film like The Blood of a Poet on the same level, would throw them into the same bag, for one is just as irrelevant and pointless as the other... [T]he point is finally to produce the exemplary works of this poetry of the unconscious, this profound analogical poetry which I call poetry of the unconscious for lack of a better term, but which is the only poetry possible, the only true and possible poetry with metaphysical tendencies, on which films like The Blood of a Poet resolutely turn their back."
In 1946, Cocteau recalled, "It is often said that The Blood of a Poet is a Surrealist film. However, Surrealism did not exist when I first thought of it. On the contrary, the interest that it still arouses probably comes from its isolation from the works with which it is classified. . . At the time of the Blood of a Poet, I was the only one. . . to avoid the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious in favor of a kind of half-sleep through which I wandered as though in a labyrinth" (quoted by Herbert Reynolds in Through Surrealist Eyes).
— Kathy Geritz, PFA
(Es war einmal [de] • Beauty and the Beast [en])
France 1946
d: Jean Cocteau
Criterion (Region 0 us)
France 1946
d: Jean Cocteau
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Jean Cocteau (based on the story by Mme. Leprince de Beaumont)
c: Henri Alékan (b/w)
e: Claude Ibéria
pd: René Moulaërt, Lucien Carré
m: Georges Auric
p: André Paulvé (Discina)
w: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély, Nane Germon, Michel Auclair, Raoul Marco, Marcel André, Janice Felty, John Kuether, Ana María Martinez, Hallie Neill, Gregory Purnhagen, Zhang Zhou
pr: 15 Sep 1946
aw: Prix Louis Delluc 1946
c: Henri Alékan (b/w)
e: Claude Ibéria
pd: René Moulaërt, Lucien Carré
m: Georges Auric
p: André Paulvé (Discina)
w: Jean Marais, Josette Day, Mila Parély, Nane Germon, Michel Auclair, Raoul Marco, Marcel André, Janice Felty, John Kuether, Ana María Martinez, Hallie Neill, Gregory Purnhagen, Zhang Zhou
pr: 15 Sep 1946
aw: Prix Louis Delluc 1946
rt: 92:53 min
dvd-rl: 02 Jun 1998
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #6
This digital transfer was created from a 35mm composite fine grain master
• Audio Commentary by critic Arthur Knight
• Documentary "Angel of Space and Time" on the movie and the fable, an episode of "Cinematic Eye", written and hosted by Benjamin Dunlap for South Carolina Educational TV (20:18 min)
• A reprint of Mme. Leprince de Beaumont's original fable translated from the French
• Restauration Demonstration (4:32 min)
• Booklet with Liner Essay by Francis Steegmuller
dvd-rl: 02 Jun 1998
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono • Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: The Criterion Collection #6
This digital transfer was created from a 35mm composite fine grain master
• Audio Commentary by critic Arthur Knight
• Documentary "Angel of Space and Time" on the movie and the fable, an episode of "Cinematic Eye", written and hosted by Benjamin Dunlap for South Carolina Educational TV (20:18 min)
• A reprint of Mme. Leprince de Beaumont's original fable translated from the French
• Restauration Demonstration (4:32 min)
• Booklet with Liner Essay by Francis Steegmuller
Cocteau's fairytale set standards in fantasy which few other film-makers have reached. Despite the Vermeer-like compositions, he has some trouble capturing the right tone for the 'realistic' scenes, but the sequences in the enchanted castle - wonderfully designed by Christian Bérard complete with fantastic living statuary, and dignified by a Beast at once ferocious, erotic and genuinely tragic - are pure magic. René Clément is credited as co-director, but had very little to do with the mise en scène.
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Jean Cocteau's classic fairy tale remains one of the cinema's most enchanting and sensuous excursions into the realm of poetic fantasy. It is the story of Belle (Josette Day), who, in order to save her father, agrees to live with the hideous Beast (Jean Marais) in his castle in a great forest. Slowly, she grows to feel some emotion for him, and her love transforms him into a handsome prince. With its superb cinematography by Henri Alekan, splendid makeup creations and fantastic sets, Beauty and the Beast stands out as one of Cocteau's great successes--visually, it is a feast for the fairy-tale faithful. But Cocteau reverses the happy ending of his fairy-tale world by making the Beast's transformation a cause for regret. "My aim," he has said "would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty, condemning her to a humdrum marriage and a future that is summed up in that last sentence of all fairy tales: 'And they had many children.'"
— PFA
•••••
Beauty and the Beast, the first film of Cocteau’s own since The Blood of a Poet, is by general consent one of the most enchanting pictures ever made, and its production was one of those undertakings that with a kind of general benevolence shed luster on all its participants. It brought new accolades to Madame Leprince de Beaumont, the eighteenth-century author of the fairy tale. Jean Marais suggested the film: For him, his face masked by the fur and fangs of the Beast, his body padded and swathed in velvet, his hands made into claws, it was a triumph of acting over physique. Lovely Josette Day plays Beauty, the good country girl, with an intelligence and a dancer’s grace that Cocteau praised without reserve. She, the actresses who play her wicked sisters, and the rest of the cast are outstanding in the way they speak, move, wear their clothes, and form tableaux à la Vermeer and Le Nain. ...
The filming of Beauty and the Beast brought Cocteau an enchantment reminiscent of his days with the Diaghilev troupe, the sensation of being part of a hard-working family of sacred monsters; moving from manor to château to Paris film studio they were like mountebanks. Cocteau’s journal celebrates the camaraderie and good will of the company—the actors’ professional tolerance of each other’s crises de nerfs, their busy shuttling between the film studio and the legitimate theaters where some of them were simultaneously appearing in plays, the combination of familiarity and respect shown by the grips, their never failing improvisation when rescue was needed, the studio sweepers’ praise after the first rushes, the Vouvray wine with the picnic meals, cast and crew playing cards during rests.
— Cocteau: A Biography by Francis Steegmuller
— TM, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Jean Cocteau's classic fairy tale remains one of the cinema's most enchanting and sensuous excursions into the realm of poetic fantasy. It is the story of Belle (Josette Day), who, in order to save her father, agrees to live with the hideous Beast (Jean Marais) in his castle in a great forest. Slowly, she grows to feel some emotion for him, and her love transforms him into a handsome prince. With its superb cinematography by Henri Alekan, splendid makeup creations and fantastic sets, Beauty and the Beast stands out as one of Cocteau's great successes--visually, it is a feast for the fairy-tale faithful. But Cocteau reverses the happy ending of his fairy-tale world by making the Beast's transformation a cause for regret. "My aim," he has said "would be to make the Beast so human, so sympathetic, so superior to men, that his transformation into Prince Charming would come as a terrible blow to Beauty, condemning her to a humdrum marriage and a future that is summed up in that last sentence of all fairy tales: 'And they had many children.'"
— PFA
•••••
Beauty and the Beast, the first film of Cocteau’s own since The Blood of a Poet, is by general consent one of the most enchanting pictures ever made, and its production was one of those undertakings that with a kind of general benevolence shed luster on all its participants. It brought new accolades to Madame Leprince de Beaumont, the eighteenth-century author of the fairy tale. Jean Marais suggested the film: For him, his face masked by the fur and fangs of the Beast, his body padded and swathed in velvet, his hands made into claws, it was a triumph of acting over physique. Lovely Josette Day plays Beauty, the good country girl, with an intelligence and a dancer’s grace that Cocteau praised without reserve. She, the actresses who play her wicked sisters, and the rest of the cast are outstanding in the way they speak, move, wear their clothes, and form tableaux à la Vermeer and Le Nain. ...
The filming of Beauty and the Beast brought Cocteau an enchantment reminiscent of his days with the Diaghilev troupe, the sensation of being part of a hard-working family of sacred monsters; moving from manor to château to Paris film studio they were like mountebanks. Cocteau’s journal celebrates the camaraderie and good will of the company—the actors’ professional tolerance of each other’s crises de nerfs, their busy shuttling between the film studio and the legitimate theaters where some of them were simultaneously appearing in plays, the combination of familiarity and respect shown by the grips, their never failing improvisation when rescue was needed, the studio sweepers’ praise after the first rushes, the Vouvray wine with the picnic meals, cast and crew playing cards during rests.
— Cocteau: A Biography by Francis Steegmuller
(Orphée [de])
France 1949
d: Jean Cocteau
Criterion (Region 0 us)
France 1949
d: Jean Cocteau
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Jean Cocteau
c: Nicolas Hayer (b/w)
e: Jacqueline Sadoul
pd: Jean d’Eaubonne
m: Georges Auric
p: André Paulvé (Films du Palais Royal)
w: Jean Marais, François Périer, María Casares, Marie Déa, Henri Crémieux, Juliette Gréco, Roger Blin, Edouard Dermithe, Maurice Carnege, René Worms, Raymond Faure, Pierre Bertin, Jacques Varennes, Claude Mauriac
pr: 29 Sep 1950
c: Nicolas Hayer (b/w)
e: Jacqueline Sadoul
pd: Jean d’Eaubonne
m: Georges Auric
p: André Paulvé (Films du Palais Royal)
w: Jean Marais, François Périer, María Casares, Marie Déa, Henri Crémieux, Juliette Gréco, Roger Blin, Edouard Dermithe, Maurice Carnege, René Worms, Raymond Faure, Pierre Bertin, Jacques Varennes, Claude Mauriac
pr: 29 Sep 1950
rt: 95:07 min
dvd-rl: 09 Mai 2000
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: Orphic Trilogy
The Criterion Collection #68
This digital transfer was created from a 35mm fine-grain master positive. The sound was mastered from a 35mm optical track print
• A Cocteau bibliofilmography
• Booklet with Cocteau’s 1950 essays on the film
dvd-rl: 09 Mai 2000
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: Orphic Trilogy
The Criterion Collection #68
This digital transfer was created from a 35mm fine-grain master positive. The sound was mastered from a 35mm optical track print
• A Cocteau bibliofilmography
• Booklet with Cocteau’s 1950 essays on the film
Marais (Cocteau's companion) plays the '40s poet (alias Cocteau) who's won fame, fortune and the hatred of Left Bank youth. Desperate for inspiration, he follows an imperious Princess flanked by Fascist (or 'Cruising') type police. Her rubber-gloved hand leads through the looking-glass to a slow-motion night kingdom. This Sur-Noir fantasy has more meanings than the Book of Revelations. It's an allegory for Poetry. It's the "Confessions of a Gay Opium-Eater". Its mirrors and misogyny, optical tricks and enigmatic phrases, mark it as prime meat for Lacanians and feminists. With its Resis-tance Band radios and brutal militiamen it catches the terrors of Occupation life. Its tight cross-lacing of paranoid dreaming and poetic realism grips like a bondage corset. When Alain Resnais in Japan couldn't get the crew of "Hiroshima, Mon Amour" to understand, he'd refer to "Orphée", whose weird myth fascinated them all.
— RD, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
In Cocteau's dream-like, personal version of the legend of Orpheus, the Princess of Death (Maria Casare's) travels in a Rolls Royce, receives her instructions in code via radio, and is escorted in her travels between this world and the next by an entourage of living-dead, leather-clad motorcyclists. Orphée (Jean Marais) is a successful French poet who, on hearing these strange radio messages, becomes fascinated by them and determines to discover their secret for himself. Cocteau's masterly photography (through which he creates an imaginary town out of Paris locations) draws the viewer into the poet's fascination with the tension between the real world and the world of the imagination. Cocteau has stated: "I tried to use the camera not like a pen, but like ink. I interwove many myths. It is a drama of the visible and the invisible." Jean-Luc Godard, whose Alphaville contains echoes of Orphée, writes: "Orphée: a documentary where it is established, chronicled once and for all, that poetry is a craft for mortals and therefore mortlly dangerous."
— J.B., PFA
— RD, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
In Cocteau's dream-like, personal version of the legend of Orpheus, the Princess of Death (Maria Casare's) travels in a Rolls Royce, receives her instructions in code via radio, and is escorted in her travels between this world and the next by an entourage of living-dead, leather-clad motorcyclists. Orphée (Jean Marais) is a successful French poet who, on hearing these strange radio messages, becomes fascinated by them and determines to discover their secret for himself. Cocteau's masterly photography (through which he creates an imaginary town out of Paris locations) draws the viewer into the poet's fascination with the tension between the real world and the world of the imagination. Cocteau has stated: "I tried to use the camera not like a pen, but like ink. I interwove many myths. It is a drama of the visible and the invisible." Jean-Luc Godard, whose Alphaville contains echoes of Orphée, writes: "Orphée: a documentary where it is established, chronicled once and for all, that poetry is a craft for mortals and therefore mortlly dangerous."
— J.B., PFA
(Das Testament des Orpheus [de])
France 1960
d: Jean Cocteau
Criterion (Region 0 us)
France 1960
d: Jean Cocteau
Criterion (Region 0 us)
sc: Jean Cocteau
c: Roland Pontoizeau
e: Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte
pd: Pierre Guffroy
m: Georges Auric, Martial Solal, Jacques Météhen
p: Jean Thuillier (Les Editions Cinégraphiques)
w: Jean Cocteau
pr: 18 Feb 1960
c: Roland Pontoizeau
e: Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte
pd: Pierre Guffroy
m: Georges Auric, Martial Solal, Jacques Météhen
p: Jean Thuillier (Les Editions Cinégraphiques)
w: Jean Cocteau
pr: 18 Feb 1960
rt: 80:11 min
dvd-rl: 09 Mai 2000
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: Orphic Trilogy
The Criterion Collection #69
This digital transfer was created from the 35mm fine-grain master positive. The sound was mastered from a 35mm magnetic soundtrack
• "La Villa Santo Sospir", a 16mm color film by Cocteau featuring many of the locations used in Testament of Orpheus (36:25 min)
• A Cocteau bibliofilmography
• Essay by Jean Cocteau
• Booklet with a collection of Cocteau’s writings on the film
dvd-rl: 09 Mai 2000
ar: 1.33:1 (4:3 Academy Ratio)
sd: French Dolby Digital 1.0 Mono
st: English
supp: Orphic Trilogy
The Criterion Collection #69
This digital transfer was created from the 35mm fine-grain master positive. The sound was mastered from a 35mm magnetic soundtrack
• "La Villa Santo Sospir", a 16mm color film by Cocteau featuring many of the locations used in Testament of Orpheus (36:25 min)
• A Cocteau bibliofilmography
• Essay by Jean Cocteau
• Booklet with a collection of Cocteau’s writings on the film
Cocteau's last film is as personal and private as its title suggests, and it makes little sense for viewers unfamiliar with his other work. It's a wry, self-conscious re-examination of a lifetime's obsessions, with Cocteau playing himself at the centre of the mythology that he created in countless books, plays, films and paintings. This mythology yields a torrent of familiar characters, situations, effects and images, all of them quoted in a spirit of bewilderment and growing disillusionment: Cocteau finally disappears into his fictional world, leaving the real world to a noisy new generation. Nothing about the film is in the least seductive except for its fundamental openness; the tone veers between gentle irony and low-key pessimism. Cocteau admirers will probably find it very moving.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"I shall not conceal from you the fact that I have used tricks to make poetry visible and audible" (Jean Cocteau in The Testament of Orpheus). "This film mixing life and death, present and future, nightmare and dream was unfortunately Cocteau's last film...It forms the third part, with Le Sang d'un Poète (Blood of a Poet) and Orphée, of a private diary whose allegory and metaphorical obsessions are confessions and whose esotericism is an expression of his sincerity. The film is a series of poetic gags that cannot be adequately summarized but that illustrate Cocteau's theme: 'My great desire is to live a reality which is truly mine and which is beyond time. Having discovered that this state was my privilege, I improved myself and plunged in deeper.'"
— Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
"I shall not conceal from you the fact that I have used tricks to make poetry visible and audible" (Jean Cocteau in The Testament of Orpheus). "This film mixing life and death, present and future, nightmare and dream was unfortunately Cocteau's last film...It forms the third part, with Le Sang d'un Poète (Blood of a Poet) and Orphée, of a private diary whose allegory and metaphorical obsessions are confessions and whose esotericism is an expression of his sincerity. The film is a series of poetic gags that cannot be adequately summarized but that illustrate Cocteau's theme: 'My great desire is to live a reality which is truly mine and which is beyond time. Having discovered that this state was my privilege, I improved myself and plunged in deeper.'"
— Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films
d = director; sc = screenplay; c = cinematographer; e = editor; pd = production design / art director;
m = music score ; p = producer; w = cast; pr = premiere; aw = awards;
rt = runtime; dvd-rl = dvd release; ar = aspect ratio; sd = soundtracks; st = subtitles; supp = supplements
m = music score ; p = producer; w = cast; pr = premiere; aw = awards;
rt = runtime; dvd-rl = dvd release; ar = aspect ratio; sd = soundtracks; st = subtitles; supp = supplements