Orphée

Jean Cocteau's Orphée
or Orpheus

The second film in Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy (in chronological and thematic order: The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, The Testament of Orpheus). If you're not familiar with the myth, I included a wikipedia article on it under the links at the bottom of the post. Not to suggest that the film really adheres to the actual myth, but knowing the story certainly facilitates one's understanding of the film.

That said, I recommend you watch Orpheus before reading any further.



Of the three films in the trilogy, Orpheus is the most accessible, being the only one with anything like a story. But it is like Beauty and the Beast in the sense that much of the story seems arbitrary; we receive no explanations or reasoning, we must merely accept these things that happen and the decisions that the characters make.

Those characters, of course, are those plotted out in myth: Orpheus and Eurydice. The story in the film is placed in then-contemporary France, and the myth is altered significantly, leaving only some basic similarities. We have Orpheus and Eurydice (keeping the original names, despite the setting), we have the death of Eurydice, Orpheus crossing into Hades, the return, and the subsequent loss of Eurydice. Even the Maenads (the Bacchae) are represented by a bunch of feisty youngsters that kill Orpheus. Yet Cocteau's adherence to the myth seems based largely on convenience, because most of the story works within its own framework and merely borrows from the myth (more conceptually, with Cocteau's obsession about the nature of a poet, than literally).

The use of the myth isn't what interests me here. It's used well enough, and with originality, but it's something else that makes this film work.

Heurtebise.

I know Cocteau only in the context of his films. I've seen snippets of his art, I've read a poem or two, but I've only heard of his novels and plays. But from what I've read, Heurtebise was a sort of muse, an angel/demon, an entity that permeated Cocteau's work. I've linked two articles at the bottom of the post that give some brief background (the topic is elusive, so it's hard to find anything concrete). It happened after the death of a friend and (presumed) lover:

"As legend has it, Cocteau was standing in an elevator when the angel spoke to him and divulged his name: it was the same as that of elevator manufacturer Heurtebise."

Afterward, he wrote the poem "L'Ange Heurtebise". The character found its way into the play Orpheus, and then made his way into the film. And it's this character that seems to make the film work.

It's filled with plenty of other fascinating things, of course. I love the everyday quality of the supernatural, a sort of magical realism: motorcyclists as harbringers of death, a car radio that receives transmissions from a dead poet, the bureaucracy of limbo.




We have Cocteau's trick photography, often tricks from his previous films, but they still manage to work, to capture one's attention in unexpected ways. My favorites are the altered perspective set in the underworld, where Heurtebise and Orpheus fall sideways, and Orpheus putting the rubber gloves on in reverse.
A return of Cocteau's obsession with mirrors; his use of a vat of mercury to make the liquid-mirror effect is brilliant. Again, Cocteau manages a kind of casual poetry in the dialogue; for instance, when Heurtebise speaks of mirrors:

"Mirrors are the doors through which death comes and goes. Look at yourself in a mirror all your life, and you'll see death at work, like bees in a hive of glass."

It's beautiful, yeah, but this line also defines the essence of the film: the inconstant borders between life, identity, love, death, poetry, immortality. Heurtebise is at the center of all of this.
There's still plenty to do with Orpheus and the others. Orpheus is troubled with his identity as a poet, and Eurydice is concerned for him. Love and death are inextricably bound together, as they are in the original myth, and the love network is complex and clearly meaningful (Orpheus and his death loving one another, especially).

But Orpheus is too capricious to keep track of. He may have some feelings for Eurydice, but they are overshadowed by his obsession with the car radio poetry and his love of the princess. Yet at the end, they seem happily reunited in life. I don't presume to know what everything means, things change too often to settle on a satisfying answer, but it seems that the only reliable vein of interpretation lies in Heurtebise. He is the only character who seems wholly certain about who he is, where he is, what's happening.

He and Eurydice are the innocents of the film, the honest characters. Orpheus and the princess are manipulative and obsessed, egotistic and easily distracted. Their love feels false, although whether that's Cocteau's intent or my own reaction it's hard to say; I suspect it's just the latter. And while Orpheus is yearning for his death, Eurydice patiently yearns for him to return to her. Yet even when she dies, Orpheus ventures into the underworld not for her, but to seek out his own mortality.

Heurtebise, of course, has fallen in love with Eurydice. You saw what happened. Heurtebise is quiet about it, restrained, full of the self-sacrificial virtue. Eurydice is too worried about Orpheus to notice, at least not until Heurtebise must declare it outright at the trial, and by then it's too late. I like that they have trials in a place where people can't lie. Something about it seems very intimate, to be forced to admit something in those circumstances.




Anyway, I leave the film wondering whether Orpheus is supposed to be arrogant, self-absorbed, uninspired, the image of the poet without the substance, without the essence. Heurtebise and even the princess commit an act of self-sacrifice to restore Orpheus and Eurydice to supposed happiness. That pleases Eurydice well enough, I'm sure, but she's oblivious to any real suffering. Heurtebise, who is dead because he committed suicide, who is a servant in the afterlife, who falls into unrequited love, who sacrifices himself, who is not a poet but who has all the admirable traits a poet should have. He does not waver. He takes pain and frustration with the impassive professionalism one would expect of a chauffeur.

It's hard to define what exactly it is about Heurtebise that affects the film so profoundly; even as the most consistent character, he is perhaps the most difficult to understand. Surely a significant part of it is his tolerance, his role as the angel, patient and guiding even when we feel he should have left Orpheus long ago. In fact, we're never quite sure why Heurtebise dedicates himself so fully to Orpheus. He guides without any clear motivation, sacrifices without any benefit, but still he travels alongside the poet.

Perhaps Heurtebise is the spirit who guides a man through his mortality, who opens up the mirror into the self, who makes the man a poet.


We will discuss Heurtebise again, when I write about The Testament of Orpheus. I'd also like to mention one more thing, though:
Orpheus was made in post-war France, and the atmosphere is prevalent in the film. The ruins Orpheus wanders through in the static limbo are buildings that were actually bombed out during the war. The committee that the princess, Orpheus, and Heurtebise must stand before is based on such trials held in occupied France. Interesting, that Cocteau should impliment these features in his underworld.

Below are links with extra information on them (I recommend, once again, reading Cocteau's essay on the Criterion site), the Orpheus myth, and the background on Heurtebise as he exists throughout Cocteau's work.

Links:
Film Reference
Criterion Collection
Criterion Contraption

Orpheus myth:
Wikipedia

Heurtebise links:
Background 1
Background 2

Le Sang d'un poète

Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poète
or The Blood of a Poet


Cocteau: "a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body."



The second of the four Cocteau films I'll be watching within the next few weeks. This film (his first) differs quite a lot from Beauty and the Beast, which was made fifteen years later. They use the same brand of magic, the trick photography and the surreal environments, but otherwise they are different creatures entirely. Beauty and the Beast is a fairy tale, a strange and possibly subversive one, but a fairy tale nonetheless. The Blood of a Poet revels in its own abstraction, in some cases seems to intentionally alienate the audience, seems anything but the film trying to speak to the child's eyes watching behind our filtering gaze.
So why have I reacted more nostalgically to this film than the fairy tale?

I recommend watching the film before reading any further.

Let me first make it absolutely clear that my childhood was long, blessed, full of fairy tales, but that I was the sort of child that saw the strangeness in things. That not only saw it, but was attracted to that strangeness.
And let's also be absolutely clear: The Blood of a Poet is a strange film. It's the sort of film that annoys most people, because the artist expects us to "interpret it for ourselves". So in the beginning, we could say the mouth coming off on the artist reflects the way a piece of art influences, or perhaps infects, its creator. We could say plenty about him making out with his own hand. We would be overwhelmed by the possibilities once he rubs it off onto a statue and gives it life. The further we make our way into the film, the less footing our explanations have. For the purposes of this write-up, I'm going to avoid explanations and focus instead on reactions. Well, one reaction. Mine.
I read (check the Senses of Cinema link below) that the film "looks more like an animated cartoon then a true live-action film", and while I wouldn't use that term exactly, it's a reasonable description. What impressed itself upon me most about the film was the sense of artificiality. We witness highly expressive and nonrealistic acting, performances that are more allegorical or metaphorical than they are representative of any true persona. Mixed in with the live action we see various paintings, sculptures (wire, stone, stone/flesh), and tableaux which correspond with the action taking place, often involving direct interaction between the two and in some instances even replacing the live action (such as the poet and his mouth-hand being shown as a statue). The settings are unfamiliar, in part because they're so sparsely decorated; there is no sense of trying to convince us of true location, we are in a false world and we know this. Most artificial of all, or most clearly artificial, are the cinematic qualities of the film. The film quality itself is fine, for the time, but the trick photography, the transitions, the use of the medium throughout the film, are all obviously filmic techniques. They don't have the invisible smoothness of special effects today, they don't engage the suspension of disbelief as urgently. Of course, that has something to do with it being a novice effort and the limitations of technology at the time, but that's not explanation enough. Cocteau seems to encourage this sense of fakeness, of something constructed. It certainly adds to the atmosphere of the piece. But it also hints at the essence of imagination, the beauty of poetic observation, and the ways they must be hindered by the failings of established artistic media.
What better way to make something seem alien than to mediate it so heavily that we know, quite consciously, that it is alien. Certainly not natural, not something that can exist outside of the cinematic realm. Film has often been described as the artistic medium that comes closest to the state of dreaming: images, best seen in the darkness, a projection of. . .



(So why did I mention my childhood before? Remember the part where the poet is stalking through the hallway of the hotel, struggling to walk against the bizarre gravity of the place. Walking through the hallway, peeking through the keyholes of DOORS. Doors. With a capital D. It was the name of a game two friends of mine created, a puzzle game that the creator narrated in person while the participant tried to figure it out. It involves a series of hallways or chambers filled with different doors, each hiding a unique and surreal scenario. The Blood of a Poet reminded me of unrestrained imagination, the kind I was free to exhibit and revel in as a child. Beauty and the Beast is nice, and creative, and beautiful, but it still adheres to a story, to characters, to expectations. Watching the poet peek into the keyholes, I am reminded of Wednesday evenings on the branches of the oak near the schoolboard office with Andrew, trying to figure out what to do with the purple lightbulb or that gargoyle. It doesn't seem like a dream to me so much as an adventure one might stumble into, lucid and awake. I can see the Mexican die and fall and rise and fall again and it will not seem strange, because there are worlds where this happens. The poet observes, and poetic observation is often like a dream. The film seems less like a dream to me and more like the waking life of the poet, however dreamlike that might be.)



Should be clear by now, but my favorite part of the film was the sequence within the mirror. Well, I've always liked mirrors, and doors, and that part stood out to me for its own merits and the personal merits it reminded me of. There is the snowball fight, of course, and the card game that follows. These also deal with the essence of the poet, although these deal less with perception and more with the nature of the artist and his struggle. Cocteau, temporarily disengaging his open interpretation, suggested that:

"The poet's solitude is so great, he so lives what he creates, that the mouth of one of his creations lives in his hand like a wound, and that he loves this mouth, that he loves himself in short, that he wakes up in the morning with this mouth against him like a pickup, that he tries to get rid of it on a dead statue-and that this statue begins to live-and that it takes its revenge, and that it sets him off upon awful adventures. I can tell you that the snowball fight is the poet's childhood, and that when he plays the game of cards with his Glory, with his Destiny, he cheats by taking from his childhood that which he should draw from within himself."

Maybe I'm wrong to think of my childhood, then. But I wouldn't call this drawing from my childhood. I'd call it recognizing a common strand of conscious perception running between my childhood, myself, and the ideas that Cocteau suggests in this film. If The Blood of a Poet was meant to portray the struggle of the artist, it didn't work its wonders on me. It achieved something else, which I would consider more admirable.
Either way, it makes me want to play Doors.

(Regarding the links below, I have the regular imdb, the Criterion page (check out the essay, by Cocteau), the Senses of Cinema article, and another blog called the Criterion Contraption; the latter features what basically function as reviews, but I'll give him credit, because it has some interesting stuff and he's more open-minded than most)




Links:
Imdb entry
Criterion page
Senses of Cinema
Criterion Contraption