Quote of the Day: Guess who’s coming to lunch?
Can I just recommend Cocteau’s Diary of a Film very very wholeheartedly? It’s tremendously reassuring to us filmmakers, and I would think amazing and fascinating to everyone else too, that the making of such a beautiful, graceful, seemingly “effortless” work like LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE should be nothing but physical and mental anguish. Cocteau is having such an exaggeratedly bad time it becomes perversely amusing, even as you feel for him. Just as you can open Klaus Kinski’s autobio at random and find him trashing some colleague or shagging some actress (usually both) on any given page, so Cocteau’s pages are stuffed with skin rashes, toothache, carbuncles, rain, faulty electrics abd general existential angst.
It’s what I call a PAGE-TURNER.
“Wednesday the 26th, 11p.m.
“My face is only a shell of rashes, ravages and itches. It’ll take me all my strength to forget this task, and go on living underneath it. Rained this morning, but the barometer was up. Built the scaffolding etc. for the cameras whilst the artists were making up a changing. At eleven o’clock we’ll do the two shots which we missed yesterday. The light was very difficult owing to the smoke machines. Marais won’t use a double. And does the jump from the terrace with the help of a spring-board. After which we remember that he’d carried his hat in his right hand yesterday, whilst today he hasn’t got one at all.
“Marais and I lunched at Madame de Labédoyère. A strange meal. I sat on the right of the old lady; she was dressed all in black, while Marais, on her left, was still made up as the Beast. I dare say her little girls will always remember it.”
I first read this right after making my own first short, THE THREE HUNCHBACKS, and I identified deeply. It’s all so unpleasant, why do we do it? As Cocteau and Marais are afflicted by carbuncles, I developed an unheard-of boil at the base of my spine, like the attachment for a Cronenberg gamepod, only EXISTENZ hadn’t been made yet. Horrible.
You make a film; it gets inside you; and then it EMERGES through your skin.
April 7, 2008 at 9:32 pm
Indeed. Cocteau was turning into the Beast as Beauty (Marais) drew further and further away from him.
What’ startling about the film to this very day si given how much more superficially sophisticated we’ve become with CGI and “special effects” it STILL retains its magic.
And part of the rreason for that is the beating heart at its core. Generations of film lovers have wept for the Beast — and will continue to do so as long as this film exists.
April 7, 2008 at 9:46 pm
There’s all that and, more prosaically, the fact that, as Cocteau says, he used the oldest, simplest special effects he could — we don’t spend time “wondering how it’s done”, and even at the time most audiences would have been completely aware of the nature of his illusions. So the images aren’t designed to TRICK, but to ENCHANT.
We don’t wonder (at least at first reading) how a poet achieves his “special effects” — Cocteau’s imagery corresponds to poetry partly because it disarms curiosity. Magic just happens.
April 8, 2008 at 12:13 am
Yes, a wonderful book on a magical film. One of the most edifying books about cinema and another glorious Dover Books nugget – check out Dore’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Divine Comedy and imagine Gilliam to the power of a hundred.
Have you ever taken a small detour when in Leicester Sq (in London’s fashionable West End) into the Notre Dame de France church and been taken aback by the murals by Jean Cocteau on the chapel wall inside? This and Bunuel’s My Last Breath are a counterbalance to all of the wiseacre Hollywood books of recent years (not that I’m knocking Easy Riders etc).
April 8, 2008 at 10:27 am
I love Dore, and especially his London, a documentary-style book that manages to be as fantastical and scary as his Inferno or Orlando Furioso.
Have never seen (or heard of!) the Cocteau church — next time I’m down!
August 24, 2008 at 2:19 am
am looking for La Fin du Jour
August 24, 2008 at 10:07 am
Good timing! Because I’m shortly to start The Great Fin Du Jour Giveaway! I want to promote the movie and help raise its profile. Watch this site carefully over the next week.