SCREENING LOG -3/29-4/04, 2004

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Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1945, Sergei Eisenstein) second viewing

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0037824/

YES

The Search (1948, Fred Zinnemann)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040765/

mixed

Orphee (1949, Jean Cocteau) second and third viewings

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041719/

YES

Blood of a Poet (1930, Jean Cocteau)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021331/

yes

The Exorcist (1973, William Friedkin) second viewing

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070047/

mixed

Man of the West (1958, Anthony Mann)

YES -- almost less than a YES, but there's so much that's masterful about it that I forgive its clunkier elements (Julie London is a babe deluxe but she doesn't quite belong in this movie). The action sequences are exceptional in their staging, editing and use of space, worthy of John Woo. I've said before that I consider Mann's RAW DEAL is a more potent, no-nonsense version of OUT OF THE PAST; here I'll take Mann over TOUCH OF EVIL. Cooper blows Heston away as the hero (though I guess this isn't entirely fair as one of TOUCH OF EVIL's strokes of brilliance is how it refuses to identify with a central protagonist -- on the other hand, Lee J. Cobb is amazing as Cooper's old mentor and doppelganger), and if ali was as bothered as I was by the glossed-over treatment of Janet Leigh's rape, well Mann pulls no punches when it comes to a similar scene -- it is simply a devastating realization of the brutality of the frontier and the brutal legacy of a renegade civilization taking its last desperate gasps. That striptease scene in the farmhouse sets us up in a brilliant way for the unspeakable that happens and it is then that we realize that it was inevitable to have happen, if the film was to be totally, brutally honest to the world it had conceived.

The Testament of Orpheus (1960, Jean Cocteau)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054377/

yes

I guess the best way to go is journal-ize my journey through these films, after all, Cocteau's films are about journeys.

First was ORPHEE, which I originally saw as a teen; at first the manner of acting, which I found dry and stagey, put me off as it had with BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. Also the way the poet's milieu was presented put me off in its wearisome preocuppation with expounding poetic virtues, the life and the role of the poet, all that artistic persona blah blah blah; at this point I found Cocteau to be incredibly self-absorbed and self-aggrandizing. I reacted negatively to how the wife was mistreated -- though the irony here was that I was watching this one morning before work and when my wife tried to talk to me about something I got visibly annoyed at having to pull myself away from the movie (which like Marais with the car radio I was trying with difficulty to understand), which in turn annoyed her.

A moment like that is when you realize how difficult it is to be honest with yourself, and this came aroudn the point that I could start to feel a certain honesty in this film, that Cocteau was saying all this artsy mumbo jumbo because he really believed it, which was disarming. (But it took me another re-viewing to be fully disarmed.) I also thought how prototypical he was to Charlie Kaufman -- they're both highly self-referential in a way that's both off-putting and charismatic and often brilliantly inventive.

I also had an ambivalent response to the constant use of the same camera and editing tricks -- jeezuz, how many times can you play film backwards to get the same effect??? This was pretty much the only thing I remembered from my childhood viewing and I found it haunting then... this time, despite it being done to death, I could get a sense of how much this lo-fi special effect means something to him. and that's what's touching about it -- to think that in an age we live in today where multi-million dollar CGI effects are generated for the sake of fleeting, momentary sensations, something as simple as running film backwards can cut into the deepest mystery of the line of time that circumscribes our lives and deaths.

More thoughts in this vein can be found in this great essay comparing Cocteau's fantasy films to modern day mainstream escapist entertainment: http://www.bostonphoenix.com/boston/movies/documents/03327816.asp Reading Cocteau's biography (which can be found on the sensesofcinema.com Great Director's page) also helped me decode a lot of the personal references in his films to his life and loves. Having read it reignited my curiosity, and so on to BLOOD OF A POET.

This basically struck me as being a 50 minute music video, or, perhaps more to the point, a blueprint for all the technical gimmicks that Cocteau was to recycle -- only with a more strongly defined sense of thematic relevance -- in the later entries in his Orphic trilogy. People climbing on walls (which are actually on the floor), people moving backwards, but all of this does have a wonderful sense of tacticity that is quite rare -- you really feel the physicality of how people move through space and time in these effects. But still it's largely conceptual, if not technical -- at best you can say "it was all a dream" so it doesn't encroach upon the realm of reality as boldly as, say, UN CHIEN ANDALOU. But when we get to the later films there's a whole new layer of emotional resonance as Cocteau employs these experimental effects to reflect on mortality.

Then I watched the documentary JEAN COCTEAU, AUTO-PORTRAIT (1985), included inthe Criterion disc of BLOOD OF A POET and which had generous clips of Cocteau talking about himself, his life, his work. TESTAMENT OF ORPHEUS came next and perhaps the only reason I don't give it a YES is because the documentary in its own way served as a critical counterpoint -- it was direct, informative, and jovial in a non-pretentious way -- in other words, it was lively and illuminating prose that cast doubt on TESTAMENT's poetry and the degree to which it amounts to affectation. The thing about TESTAMENT, for me, is that it tries to be un-pretentious by presenting Cocteau's fantasies in a casual, charming way, but this still strikes me as kind of pretentious because I feel like he could do more with his beguiling but still somewhat half-arsed presentations of his dreams, and all the things he does to justify them (the opening monologue of ORPHEE, the closing monologue of TESTAMENT) strikes me as excessive apologia, or a way of coming on to the viewer and taking sides with them, which as a result lowers the stakes by making it all more comfortable.

Still there's no doubt that the closing passages of this film are as moving an evocation of an artist anticipating his death as any I've seen. To be carried aloft into eternity by the figments of one's own creative imagination is a powerful idea. It was great seeing the actors of previous films reprising their roles (sort of the same thrill I got seeing BEFORE SUNSET, not to mention Kiarostami's Koker Trilogy -- which I guess is a kind of Cocteauesqe enterprise) upon which the film becomes more like a kind of open party for anyone who's privy to Cocteau's cinematic world to enjoy as if it were a second home. Again, this strategy has its allures and detractions.

With that I returned to ORPHEE and this time just relaxed and enjoyed the ride, and it was much better that way, to let the story float by without challenging its logic or the attention lavished on the poetic ego at is center. This time I got a better sense of how much fun the film was having with its own invention -- and balancing that lightness, there's Casares and Francois Perier, who to me are the real heart and soul of the movie, and I think the magnificent, chilling ending bears that out.

All in all I feel Cocteau is the progenitor for the brand of self-conscious, formally inventive cinema that came to prevalence in the '60s of Bergman and Fellini and is enjoying a revival in the present American cinema of Kaufman's screenplays as well as meta-films like MEMENTO, FIGHT CLUB, etc. I'm as ambivalent to all those films as I am to Cocteau but on the whole I find them interesting and vital.

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