Orphic Trilogy - Criterion Collection (1950)

Poetry from the Underworld

The Blood of a Poet - Orpheus - The Testament of Orpheus - even the titles are evocative!

Superlatives fall short in attempting to describe these magical, dreamlike films, so rich with myth & beauty & mystery. Cocteau accomplishes something very difficult: he manages to be in control of his symbols, but handles their reins with a deceptively casual touch, so that there's never a hint of didactic rigidity, which would be death to such works. The overall atmosphere remains mysterious, with meaning only partially glimpsed, something that's felt on a complex level. There's plenty of room for analysis, to be sure -- part of the fun is discussing the films with others! -- but it's never a cut-and-dried matter of Symbol A = Object B. Like actual dreams, they exist & work in many dimensions at once, never exhausting their depths.

There's a lesson here for modern filmmakers as well -- the special effects are simple, perhaps even crude by contemporary standards -- but they not only work superbly, they outshine the fanciest CGI available today. And why? Because they exist to serve the artistic purposes of the films & their creator, not simply to dazzle the audience with superficial technique & explosive eye candy. There's always the genuine sense of the unknowable, of the otherworldly -- these are films that plunge deeply into the psyche, draw their enduring power from that underworld, and reward repeated viewings.

And in case that sounds much too sober & daunting, let me add that they're both a visual & intellectual delight. Yes, there's plenty of Meaning ... but they're also out-and-out enjoyable, always offering something new & startling. You don't need a handful of university degrees to appreciate them! The simultaneous shock & pleasure of encountering the marvelous is more than sufficient.

In short, this collection is an essential work of art -- most highly recommended! June 19, 2008

An Ephemeral Vision of Life and Death

Orpheus is the second film in the Orphic Trilogy by Jean Cocteau and after watching "The Blood of a Poet" it makes much more sense. You are thrown into a similar world, and if you embrace the magical realism that is somewhat haunting, it becomes quite a delicious story with a purpose.

Based on the Greek myth of Orpheus, the main couple, Orpheus the poet and his wife the somewhat fragile Eurydice (killed by a motorbike instead of a snake), experience life in a world where they are presented with otherworldly temptations and serious life-changing contemplations.

They visit a strangely modern underworld where Orpheus seems to be looking for death/the Princess or perhaps Persephone (queen of the underworld - but she seems to be more like the temptress/siren in this movie) more than his recently departed wife. She seems to have a good sense of humor and reminds the participants of her plots not to look back lest they be turned into pillars of salt, as she remembers from the past.

There are all sorts of lovely visual metaphors like "kiss of death" and other ideas you pick up on as you are watching the story unfold. Just as in "The Blood of a Poet," we find humans moving through mirrors as easily as their underworld conspirators. Death falls in love with a poet, although we assume he fell in love with the idea of her first. In a way, he writes her into his life.

Everyone seems to live in reality all while moving from death to life and from life to death. Keeping up with who is dead and who is alive only makes it all the more fun. It is not quite as frightening as a horror movie, but somewhat like a twilight zone with an unexpected ending. I found this to be rather intriguing and it kept my attention better than most modern movies of today. There is something very elegant, contemplative and intriguing about the movies in Jean Cocteau's trilogy. I love the way the mirrors turn watery and how the characters move so easily from one world to the next.

~The Rebecca Review
October 13, 2006

A superb centerpiece.

Jean Cocteau's "Orphee," along with his earlier "La Belle et la Bete," must be ranked among the greatest of French films. This highly personal version of the myth of Orpheus remains a testament both to the the power of poetic imagery on film and to Cocteau's genius as a creator of such imagery. Cocteau's Orphee (Jean Marais) is a brusque, egocentric, dissatisfied soul who, to paraphrase Keats, is more than half in love with Death. As portrayed by Maria Casares, Death is far from the easeful presence Keats envisioned, but imperious, severe, and tres, tres chaud. Setting his fantasy in then-contemporary France (1949, to be exact), Cocteau dresses his angels of Death in leather and puts them on motorcycles, the roar of their engines as inexorable as a buzzsaw, and sends Orphee cryptic messages from the underworld via a car radio. "Orphee" is an unforgettable story of obsession and renunciation, the characters constantly going forward and backward through mirrors in a miasma of love, pain, and time lost and regained. Just as Orphee and Death act out their torrid passion, Eurydice (Marie Dea) carries on a sadder, more delicate version of the same story with Death's servant Heurtebise (Francois Perier). Meanwhile, the drunken poet Cegeste (Edouard Dermithe) finds himself a nearly mute witness to the drama, severed for eternity from the passions swirling around him. This three-disc set is worth owning for "Orphee" alone; the other two films are interesting, but not extraordinary. "The Blood of a Poet" (1930) feels like warmed-over Bunuel these days, while "The Testament of Orpheus" (1959), Cocteau's valedictory address to the cinema, is an intermittently interesting but overly talky apologia for Cocteau's life and career. They are interesting mainly for the light they shed on "Orphee"; "The Blood of a Poet" contains many of the motifs found later in "Orphee," especially Cocteau's fascination with mirrors, while "The Testament of Orpheus" brings back the lead actors from "Orphee" to serve as Cocteau's guides and artistic judges. (Cocteau, always a bit of a name-dropper, also brings in his pals Pablo Picasso and Yul Brynner for cameos.) The judgment is unavoidable: "The Blood of a Poet" proved that Cocteau needed a story on which to hang his images, while "The Testament of Orpheus" proved that he told a story better with images than with words. Among the many excellent technical credits is that of Georges Auric, surely one of the greatest of all film composers, who wrote the superb music for all three films. The first disc also contains a fascinating and informative documentary about Cocteau, in which he reminisces about Picasso, Nijinsky, Debussy, Satie, Diaghilev, and all the other great artists he knew. It was Diaghilev who exhorted Cocteau, "Astonish me!" Cocteau proceeded to astonish him and everyone else for the next fifty years. (In watching "Orphee," it's also fun to play Cocteau's version of "La Ronde"; he cast both his former lover, Jean Marais, and his current one, Edouard Dermithe, while simultaneously Marais was having an affair with Marie Dea. Only Michael Powell--having his former mistress Deborah Kerr and his current mistress Kathleen Byron fight to the death at the edge of a cliff in "Black Narcissus"--was equally daring.) July 29, 2006

Astonish Us

Criterion's done a nice Criterion-quality job in assembling Jean Cocteau's 3 most famous films, but seeing them all together left me a little disappointed. In returning to the Orpheus myth three times over a thirty year span, Cocteau displayed an ongoing fascination with the artist as a chosen creature, attuned to a special realm of beauty that eludes the common run of humankind. To my mind though, these films are more concerned with revering the Poet than with being poetic. The special effects they rely on to convey the world on the other side of the mirror, the artist's domain of wonder and dreams, are awkward even for their time and struck me more as stagecraft than a real engagement with the subconscious as a creative force. Outside of the imagery, the films have little to offer in the way of narrative or acting or cinematographic wizardry. For surrealist filmmaking, Buster Keaton has Cocteau beat hands down.

Watching these films it occurred to me--and I'm sure I'll get a lot of negative votes for this!--that Cocteau was at heart a poseur. He recognized the genius in his famous friends and collaborators (Picasso, Stravinsky, Satie, Apollinaire) but when it came to expressing his own, relied on a canny restatement of the Romantic idea of the suffering artist, one that would play well to the public but had little to do with the radical new art burgeoning around him. That may be too harsh, but I wonder if I'm alone in finding these movies a little too self-consciously poetic to be really moving. December 11, 2005

When the death dies for love!

If you are one of those people who still doubts the movie is far from being an artistic ecpression; come to Cocteu's world and please convince by yourself about the veracity of this affirmation.

Cocteau adapted the classic Orpheus's myth to the present times, but keeping the essential basis of the myth and its veil's mystery. The poetry literally loads the picture all along the way.

Blood of a poet constitutes undoubtedly, the first reference step you must ascend to higher peaks. The surrealist airs are present with all the frenzy of the First Opus; rapture images and seductive illusion, irreverence and disobey; a real captive journey through the Fourth Wall where the dreams and love live.

In Orpheus,we will assist to the dramatic premise: Orpheus is obsessed with his wife's death. Heuterbise and Cegeste will his fellows friends and his lamentations and complaints are at last satisfied when he will get the opportunity to get through the frontier between the life and death. She will visit to his beloved wife in clear reference to Dante and Beatrice but he will sign a pact with the underworld's Jury: he will return with his beloved wife with jus one condition: he won't be able to watch her under any pretext or reason.

To look behind: this is the most important reflection that feeds not only this fabulous myth but even an apparent far distant work as Faust: to look behind means to be frozen in the time's shadows; and Faust through the decision of becoming to the dead youth will establish his own agreement with Satan. But you have more: When Lot's wife in the Christian mythology looks behind becomes in salt's statue. The memories constitue a real matrix: it's seductive, the enviroment temperature is so warm and seductive that you can be engaged through your entire life. Narcisus comes to our mind when the human being, once has reached the experience's stage, pretendes, mistakenly, to get back to the ancestral origin: the naive innocence. If you decide to get back, you are committed to pay a prize, that's why Orpheus will be murdered in the Hades.

Finally in Orpheus' testament we assist to the last farewell of the poet. Inquired by the Great Jury Cocteau answers: "A film is the petrified image of the mind which resurrects the dead acts". He will be punished to live in his final days till the time will come for him to fade. The final encounter with Oediphus literally will invade you of perplexity and cosmic anguish; to be so close and unable to meet one each other.

Consider this film not only one of the twenty giants films one any age ever made but one of the ten top French films and perhaps one the three most admired and perfect film in the whole cinema's story. The other two to my mind would be: Carne 's Children of the paradise and Robert Bresson 's A man escapes.

When a rose vanishes, the poetry will wait for it and the cycle will start over and over! April 15, 2005

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