Jean Cocteau

Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ kɔkto]; 5 July 1889 – 11 October 1963) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright, artist and filmmaker. Along with other avant-garde artists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and René Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the algebra of verbal codes old and new, mise en scène language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde.[citation needed] His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María Félix, Édith Piaf (whom he cast in one of his one-act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940), and Raymond Radiguet. His work was played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theatres, the Boulevards and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both lived through and helped define and create. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim. Description above from the Wikipedia article Jean Cocteau, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.

Works

Beauty and the Beast

The story of a gentle-hearted beast in love with a simple and beautiful girl. She is drawn to the repellent but strangely fascinating Beast, who tests her fidelity by giving her a key, telling her that if she doesn't return it to him by a specific time, he will die of grief. She is unable to return the key on time, but it is revealed that the Beast is the genuinely handsome one. A simple tale of tragic love that turns into a surreal vision of death, desire, and beauty.

Release Date1946-10-29

DepartmentWriting

JobDialogue

Charactersd The Voice of Magic (uncredited)

Vote Count665

Orpheus

A famous poet in postwar Paris, scorned by the Left Bank youth, is in love with both his wife Eurydice and a mysterious princess. Seeking inspiration, the poet becomes obsessed and follows the princess from the world of the living to the land of the dead.

Release Date1950-09-29

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd Narrator (voice) (uncredited)

Vote Count294

En direct de...

Release Date1956-02-16

Charactersd self

Episode Count1

Testament of Orpheus

An 18th century poet travels through time in search of divine wisdom. In a mysterious wasteland, he has a series of enigmatic encounters with symbolic phantoms with whom he muses about the nature of art and his own career. Ultimately, the poet strives to achieve his rebirth as a celestial being.

Release Date1960-02-18

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd Le poète

Vote Count126

The Blood of a Poet

In a poet’s room, an armless statue abruptly comes to life. It invites the poet to step through a mirror and to discover another world. Strange places and characters present themselves to him. The poet tears himself away from these twisted fascinations and returns, with some difficulty, to his room.

Release Date1932-01-20

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd Bit Part (uncredited)

Vote Count194

The Image Book

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

Release Date2018-10-11

Charactersd (archive footage)

Vote Count83

Daedalus

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." A 7 day vlog during the summer of 2023, a story of dreamers and drowners.

Release Date2024-07-17

Charactersd Sampled Interview (voice) (uncredited)

Vote Count1

The Strange Ones

Elisabeth and her brother Paul live isolated from much of the world after Paul is injured in a snowball fight. As a coping mechanism, the two conjure up a hermetic dream of their own making. Their relationship, however, isn't exactly wholesome. Jealousy and a malevolent undercurrent intrude on their fantasy when Elisabeth invites the strange Agathe to stay with them -- and Paul is immediately attracted to her.

Release Date1950-03-29

DepartmentWriting

JobNovel

Charactersd Narrator (voice)

Vote Count121

The Phantom Baron

Elfy, Countess of Saint-Hélié's daughter, was brought up with her foster sister Anne, in an old dilapidated castle whose landlord, Baron Julius Carol, disappeared mysteriously some day. The two girls had a playmate, Hervé, the son of the gamekeeper. Now that they are adult, Anne is in love with Hervé while Elfy thinks she loves the young man. One day, the baron's mummified body is found in an oubliette and the secret of the estate is revealed...

Release Date1943-06-16

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Charactersd Le baron Julius Carol - le baron fantôme

Vote Count11

The Storm Within

Young Michel is in love with the attractive Madeleine, so he decides to tell his parents of his intention to marry her. He thinks his announcement is innocent enough; his engagement, however, threatens to reveal dark secrets lurking within his family's home. Yvonne, Michel's overbearing mother, concocts an elaborate scheme to drive Madeleine away, thus keeping uncomfortable household truths from being exposed.

Release Date1948-12-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd Narrator (voice) (uncredited)

Vote Count28

La Malibran

On the death of the famous singer Maria Malibran, Countess Merlin retraces the main lines of the unusual destiny of this young woman entirely devoted to her art.

Release Date1944-05-03

Charactersd Alfred de Musset

Vote Count4

America as Seen by a Frenchman

At the end of the 1950s, French documentarian François Reichenbach spent eighteen months traveling the United States, documenting its diverse regions, their inhabitants, and their pastimes. The result is a journey through a multitude of different Americas, filtered through a French sensibility.

Release Date1960-06-08

Charactersd Narrator (Afterword)

Vote Count11

8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements

8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements is an American experimental film directed by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau. Described by Richter as "part Freud, part Lewis Carroll" and filmed partially on the lawn of Duchamp's summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.

Release Date1957-03-15

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd

Vote Count13

From Joan of Arc to Philippe Pétain

Sitting at his desk, Guitry gives us a lecture on French history from Joan of Arc to the Occupation, with some focus on a number of its great writers and musicians.

Release Date1944-05-04

Charactersd Reciter (voice)

Vote Count1

Daughter of the Sands

This Moroccan romance is a kind of Arab Tristan and Isolde: the heroine kills herself when she is convinced no one cares for her, the young nobleman she thought would love her is killed by a madwoman.

Release Date1949-01-11

Charactersd Narrator (voice)

Vote Count2

Cocteau and Company

Jean-Paul Fargier's documentary is a montage of animated images, numerous drawings and interviews with Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), interspersed with filmed archives of personalities he met with the aim of telling us about the explosive and prodigious life of this poet whose thirst for discovery and knowledge led him to connect with all the arts: the visual arts, literature and poetry, cinema and theater, dance and music. This eclecticism was fueled throughout his life by a profusion of artistic and romantic encounters, from Stravinsky to Picasso , from Coco Chanel to Colette , from Raymond Radiguet to Jean Marais . This whirlwind of social events, this artistic profusion inspired this documentary, in light of a large number of archives that make us revisit the artistic and Parisian life of the time. A multiple work, a life that contains several.

Release Date2003-01-01

Charactersd Himself

Vote Count1

In This Atrocious Garden

This short documentary film is conceived as a stroll through the valley of Thebes and the temple of Karnak.

Release Date1964-12-14

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Charactersd Narrator (voice)

Vote Count1

Jean Cocteau Makes Cinema

A short film about a famous writer who loses control of his hand and begins to write letters and articles denouncing himself.

Release Date1925-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd

Vote Count1

Toute la vérité, rien que la vérité : Jean Cocteau

In 1959, Jean Cocteau looked back on his artistic journey for the Télé Monte-Carlo television show Tout la vérité, rien que la vérité. The program ends with a tasty anecdote about television that Cocteau describes as a “box of tricks”. A few weeks later, in the same Victorine studios, Cocteau directed most of the sequences for his last opus: The Testament of Orpheus (1959).

Release Date1959-02-07

Charactersd Himself

Black Friendship

The commentary recalls that Radio Brazzaville was, from June 18, 1943, the contact of the French settlements and the metropolis, bush stations participate in the organization of the resistance.

Release Date1946-07-14

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Charactersd Narrator

Cinépanorama

Release Date1956-02-04

Charactersd Self

Episode Count3

Vote Count3

Discorama

Release Date1959-02-04

Charactersd Self

Episode Count1

Vote Count1

Reflets de Cannes

Release Date1954-03-25

Charactersd Self

Episode Count4

Vote Count2

Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma

Produced for television by Claude-Jean Philippe, the « Encyclopédie audiovisuelle du cinéma », recounts the history of French cinema from its birth to the beginning of the 1960s. With commentary read by Jean Rochefort.

Release Date1978-09-24

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Episode Count2

Vote Count1

To Each His Own Cinema

Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.

Release Date2007-10-31

Charactersd Self (segment "47 Ans Après") (archive footage)

Vote Count153

Around the World with Orson Welles

A six-part British television travel series written, directed, and presented by Orson Welles for ITV in 1955. Filmed entirely in Europe, the series follows Welles through Vienna, the Basque Country, Madrid, Paris’s Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and London’s Chelsea Pensioners, blending travelogue, cultural portraiture, and personal essay. Moving between documentary observation and reflective commentary, the episodes combine interviews, local history, and Welles’s distinctive narration into a series that functions as both travel film and cinematic essay.

Release Date1955-10-07

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Episode Count1

Vote Count8

A Night at the Opera

A documentary view of the galas of Paris’s Palais Garnier in the 1950s and ’60s.

Release Date2020-09-29

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Vote Count7

It Happened on the 36 Candles

Rejecting the union of her daughter Brigitte with a modest worker, Madame Magnin invents an adultery for the lover, then introduces Brigitte to a good-looking man working on the famous RTF entertainment show 36 Chandelles. The show ultimately seals the reunion of the two estranged young lovers. The story features a parade of music-hall stars from the era: Charles Trenet, Charles Aznavour, Georges Guétary, Juliette Gréco, Roger Pierre and Jean-Marc Thibault, Fernand Raynaud, Georges Ulmer and many more.

Release Date1957-10-16

Charactersd Self (uncredited)

Vote Count2

Callas Assoluta

This revealing documentary from director Philippe Kohly examines the storied life of renowned soprano Maria Callas, from her troubled childhood in New York City to her scandal-laden but triumphant international career in opera. Featuring archival interviews with Callas herself and footage of contemporaries such as her lover Aristotle Onassis, this celebration of "La Divina" pays tribute to her enduring legacy some three decades after her death.

Release Date2007-12-20

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Vote Count4

Venom and Eternity

In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.

Release Date1952-01-25

Charactersd Self

Vote Count18

Proust Palimpsesto: Pastiches e Misturas

"Proust Palimpsesto: Pastiches e Misturas" (2026) is a Brazilian experimental documentary and film essay directed by Carlos Adriano. The film, which explores the impossibility of filming Marcel Proust's "In Search of Time That Flew", is presented as a collage of archival images and theories.

Release Date2026-04-14

Charactersd Self (archive footage) (uncredited)

The Century Is Fifty

As the title of this French documentary indicates, Ce Siecle a 50 Ans examines the 20th Century at its halfway point. Utilizing the archives of several European film reserves, director Denise Tua offers a fascinating mosaic of the people and events that shaped the years 1900 to 1950. Complementing the vintage film clips are three dramatized sketches, delineating the romantic customs of three different points in time. These sketches are inadequately performed, and can easily be ignored. Ce Siecle a 50 Ans both preserved and provided celluloid material for scores of future documentaries.

Release Date1950-03-16

Charactersd Self

Vote Count1

Jean Cocteau: Lies and Truths

This documentary consists mainly of archive interviews of Jean Cocteau, and it features interesting contributions by Jean Marais and especially Jean-Luc Godard, who discusses Cocteau's foray into cinema. The film documents all the artistic media explored by a man who defined himself, first and foremost, as a poet.

Release Date1997-02-22

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Disorder

Variations on the cultural and intellectual explosion in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district in 1946.

Release Date1950-12-02

Charactersd Self

Vote Count5

Art of Style: Jean Cocteau

French artist Jean Cocteau's multifaceted work across poetry, plays, paintings and film made him one of the leading creative figures of the Parisian avant-garde movement. Featuring Cocteau's own writings read by actor Timothée Chalamet, explore the dream-like quality of Cocteau's one of a kind oeuvre.

Release Date2018-12-06

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Vote Count4

Disorder Is 20 Years Old

Release Date1967-06-06

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Vote Count1

Iran Darroudi: The Painter of Ethereal Moments

A look at the life and art of Ms. Iran Darroudi, one of the most important contemporary Iranian painters, who has divided her time between Tehran and Paris for the past fifty years. The film describes the various influences in her life and how she came to cultivate a style that merges the western surrealism with eastern mysticism

Release Date2009-01-01

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Vote Count1

Jean Cocteau, cinéaste

Release Date2001-01-01

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Vote Count1

Jean Cocteau

We film buffs grew up worshiping Jean Cocteau—particularly his BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ORPHEUS and BLOOD OF A POET—but in recent years he has perhaps ebbed from our consciousness.

Release Date2024-08-29

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Musée Grévin

A man dreams he is in a wax museum after it is closed for the night.The statues come to life and behave in mysterious ways.

Release Date1958-01-01

Charactersd Self, a director

Vote Count1

La Villa Santo-Sospir

Cocteau takes the viewer on a tour of a friend's villa on the French coast (a major location used in Testament of Orpheus). The house itself is heavily decorated, mostly by Cocteau (and a bit by Picasso), and we are given an extensive tour of the artwork. Cocteau also shows us several dozen paintings as well. Most cover mythological themes, of course. He also proudly shows paintings by Edouard Dermithe and Jean Marais and plays around his own home in Villefranche.

Release Date1952-12-05

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

Charactersd Self

Vote Count16

Steel Cathedrals

20 minute music documentary shot in two days of November 1984 in, and around the outskirts of, Tokyo, Japan. A large part of the music was completed during that same month and recorded over a period of three days.

Release Date1985-05-17

Charactersd Self (voice) (archive footage)

Cocteau—Al Brown: the Poet and the Boxer

Portrait of Panama Al Brown, a great boxer in the 30's, and its story with France, with a focus on its relationship with Jean Cocteau, surrealist, poet, director, artist.

Release Date2020-02-29

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Eine Melodie - vier Maler

Each portrayed painter produced an experimental animated short film to be featured in this film. A short film by Herbert Seggelke.

Release Date1955-01-02

Charactersd Self

Vote Count4

Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000

In August 1963, just a couple of months before his death, Jean Cocteau made one last short film. The film comprises one still and highly sober shot of Cocteau facing the camera head-on to address the youth of the future. Once recorded, this spoken message for the 21st century was sealed and stored with the understanding that it would be opened only in the year 2000. As it turned out, it was discovered and exhumed a few years shy of that date. Where in The Testament of Orpheus Cocteau portrays himself as a living anachronism, a lonesome classical modernist loitering in space-time while lost in the spectral light of his memories, here he acknowledges explicitly the irony of his phantom-like state. By the time the viewer sees this image, he, J. C., our saviour Poet, will long be dead.

Release Date1962-06-12

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Charactersd Self

Vote Count5

Marcel Proust - Portrait Souvenir

This documentary is a portrait of Proust composed of recollections by those who knew him. Intercut with reading from his works.

Release Date1962-06-23

Charactersd Self

Jean Marais, le mal rouge et or

Release Date2006-01-01

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Charles Trenet, l'enchanteur

Portrait of Charles Trenet. Twenty years after his death, this documentary offers a new look at the artist. When, in 1956, the singer appeared on television, he was 43 years old. And it is a man of 60 or even 70 years old that today's audience has known. The first Charles Trenet, the one who transported France when he was 25 or 30 years old, remains largely unknown. Yet it was this kid of genius who, at the age of 25, invented French chanson. But the archives that are scattered throughout this portrait also show that he invented a certain idea of joy. For joy in Trenet was a sport, a daily gymnastics.

Release Date2022-03-01

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Vote Count1

Jean Cocteau: Autobiography of an Unknown

Jean Cocteau reminisces about the people he has known throughout his long life.

Release Date1984-11-15

Charactersd Self (archive footage)

Vote Count5

Great Writers: Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, and filmmaker, whose versatility, unconventionality, and enormous output brought him international acclaim. As a leading member of the surrealist movement, he had a great influence on the work of others.

Release Date1996-07-05

Charactersd Self

The Infernal Machine

A television adaptation of Jean Cocteau's surréalist take on the tragedy of Oedipus.

Release Date1963-10-01

Charactersd Self (voice)

Vote Count1

Portrait Souvenir: Jean Cocteau

Cocteau, at his home, remembers his childhood, talks at length about theater, cinema, literature, and draws portraits of friends.

Release Date1964-02-11

Charactersd Self

The Eagle with Two Heads

Political intrigue and psychological drama run parallel. The queen is in seclusion, veiling her face for the ten years since her husband's assassination, longing to join him in death. Stanislas, a poet whose pen name is Azrael, is a suicidal anarchist, his imagination haunted into hate by longing for this queen who's drawn apart. He enters her private quarters intent on killing her then himself, but they fall in love, in part because he looks like the king. Stanislas wants her to regain political power by appearing to the public, and she tries to convince him to find hope and escape. All the while, the queen's enemies plot to keep the lovers together but to thwart their plans.

Release Date1948-09-22

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count20

The Human Voice

A woman watches time pass beside the suitcases of her ex-lover (who is supposed to come pick them up but never arrives) and a restless dog who doesn't understand that his master has abandoned him.

Release Date2020-09-03

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

Vote Count249

Les Dames du bois de Boulogne

A love story that follows the maneuverings of a society lady as she connives to initiate a scandalous affair between her aristocratic ex-lover and a prostitute.

Release Date1945-09-21

DepartmentWriting

JobDialogue

Vote Count119

L'Amore

L'Amore ('Love') is a 1948 Italian drama anthology film that consists of two parts, The Human Voice (Una voce umana), based on Jean Cocteau's 1929 play of the same title, and The Miracle (Il miracolo), based on Ramón del Valle-Inclán's 1904 novel Flor de santidad.

Release Date1948-11-02

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

Vote Count79

Black Crown

A woman suffers from amnesia after killing her husband, who was just about to demand a divorce for having found her engaging in an affair with a lover, who is only interested in her to find where some precious jewels are hidden.

Release Date1951-05-23

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count10

Princess of Cleves

When a young teen marries the Prince of Cleves, more than twice her age, she automatically becomes an official Princess and takes her new position to heart. Although distracted by the elite entertainments found at court, the princess cannot help but mourn her impossible love for the dashing Duc de Nemours.

Release Date1961-03-22

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count22

The Mystery of Oberwald

A man, mirroring the assassinated King, infiltrates a castle to kill the Queen but hesitates, leading to a deadly dare and revelation of shared history.

Release Date1981-09-03

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

Vote Count25

The Queen's Lover

Exiled from the court of Spain, Don Salluste, the chief of police, wants to take revenge on the Queen. One day he meets Ruy Blas, a young student who happens to be a lookalike of Don Cesar, his nephew. Salluste disguises Ruy Blas and presents him as Don Cesar. It doesn't take long before Ruy Blas, intelligent, virtuous and generous as he is becomes popular and the Queen, who has fallen in love with him, appoints him Prime Minister. All seems for the best in the best of worlds but Salluste has not forgotten his revenge, far from that ...

Release Date1948-02-17

DepartmentWriting

JobAdaptation

Vote Count17

Human Voice

Based on Jean Cocteau's iconic one-woman play of the same name; set against the backdrop of 1950 Naples, Angela is a woman in her twilight years, who rides the emotional rollercoaster of her last telephone conversation with the man she loves as he is leaving her for another woman.

Release Date2014-04-21

DepartmentWriting

JobStory

Vote Count22

The Eternal Return

A retelling of Tristan and Isolde set in 1940s France.

Release Date1943-12-13

DepartmentWriting

JobScreenplay

Vote Count32

Opium

The frustrated loves of Jean Cocteau and Raymond Radiguet at the beginning of the 1920s. The death of Radiguet that sank Cocteau into opium. A story under the influence of drugs. A narrative in the spirit of Cocteau. And all this in a musical.

Release Date2013-10-02

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count8

Thomas the Impostor

In the First World War, when Paris is expected to fall to the Germans, the attractive widow, Princesse de Bormes, organises a convoy of cars to evacuate the wounded from the front, and bring them back to her villa in Paris to recuperate. The authorities will not give them passes until an innocent 16-year-old boy, Guillaume Thomas de Fontenoy, joins them and is mistaken as the nephew of the popular General de Fontenoy. The Princess is enraptured by Thomas and her daughter, Henriette, falls in love with him. However Thomas feels impelled to see more of the action of the war.

Release Date1965-06-01

DepartmentWriting

JobScenario Writer

Vote Count16

The Human Voice

A woman’s last phone conversation with her lover, who now loves someone else.

Release Date2018-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Anna the Maid

An experimental movie based on a poem of the French writer and director Jean Cocteau about a servant who fantasises about killing the lady of the house.

Release Date1958-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

The Human Voice

Short based on the Jean Cocteau play following a final telephone conversation between a couple.

Release Date2018-05-13

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

Vote Count1

The Eagle with Two Heads

On the 10th anniversary of the assassination of the King, his reclusive widow, the Queen, arrives to spend the night at the castle of Krantz. Stanislas, a young anarchist poet who seeks to assassinate her, enters her room, wounded; he looks exactly like the dead king, and the Queen shelters him instead of handing him over to the police. She sees him as the welcome embodiment of her own death, calling him Azraël. An ambiguous love develops between them, uniting them in a bid to outwit the machinations of the court politicians, represented by the Comte de Foëhn, the chief of police, and Édith de Berg, the Queen's companion. In order to remain true to their ideals and to each other, the Queen and Stanislas have to play their parts in a bizarre private tragedy, which the world will never understand.

Release Date2016-12-15

DepartmentWriting

JobOriginal Story

Django Reinhardt

One of the first filmed portraits of a jazz musician.

Release Date1957-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count4

The Four-Poster Bed

In his prison cell, the composer Remi Bonvent composed an opera, The columns bed. The director of the prison, Porey Cave, succeeds made believe he is the author of this work. The death of the two protagonists will prevent the discovery of the truth.

Release Date1942-07-09

DepartmentWriting

JobScreenplay

Vote Count3

The Human Voice

A monologue of a woman talking on the phone with her longterm lover who is about to marry another girl.

Release Date1966-08-12

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

Vote Count6

Le Bel Indifférent

An adaptation of Jean Cocteau's play of a woman lecturing her indifferent lover.

Release Date1958-11-01

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

Vote Count12

Comedy of Happiness

Monsieur Jourdain is a dangerous madman : he wants to share his fortune! His relatives do what any sensible fellow on earth would do: they have him committed to a mental hospital. But Jourdain manages to escape and decides to make everybody happy except... his heirs!

Release Date1940-12-23

DepartmentWriting

JobAdaptation

Vote Count6

The Human Voice

The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House presents a new production of Poulenc's short opera La Voix Humaine, featuring soprano Danielle de Niese and shot on location in Paris and London.

Release Date2022-04-15

DepartmentWriting

JobOriginal Story

Oedipus Rex

Impressed by Jean Cocteau’s rewrite of Antigone, Stravinsky asked the poet for an adaptation of Oedipus Rex. The resulting libretto brings together the key scenes of Sophocles’s tragedy translated by the Abbé Jean Daniélou into Latin—a language that, according the composer, “is not dead but engraved in stone, and so imposing that it is immune to any popularization”.

Release Date1993-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Le Bel Indifférent

TV movie adaptation of Jean Cocteau’s one-act play of a woman lecturing her indifferent lover, starring Alain Delon and Annie Cordy.

Release Date1978-01-14

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

Edwige Feuillère en scène

On stage, the actress talks about her life in the 20th-century French theatre, the great authors she played and the famous stage directors of the time who directed her.

Release Date1992-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

The Human Voice

After “five years of happiness,” a love affair is ending. The woman uses the telephone as the last remaining connection with the man, who is now planning to marry someone else.

Release Date1979-11-28

DepartmentWriting

JobStory

Pantomimes

Through a series of pantomimes, Marcel Marceau, the famous mime, evokes the three ages of life: youth, middle and old age.

Release Date1954-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobScreenplay

Vote Count1

Intimate Relations

Yvonne is seething when her devoted son, Michael, declares his intention to marry Madeleine, despite the latter's admitting to having an affair with a mysterious older man. At the same time, George, Michael's father, confides in Yvonne's sister, Leo, that he is in fact Madeleine's other lover. Together, they hatch a plot to end Madeleine's hopes of marriage - by threatening to reveal George's scandalous secret to his son.

Release Date1953-05-01

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

Vote Count4

Blues

Release Date2009-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

The Human Voice

La Voix Humaine is a concerto for soprano and orchestra, centering on the break-up of a relationship by telephone. It represents one side of a conversation between a young woman (sung by American soprano, Julia Migenes) and her lover, who has jilted her. In a 1930s, Parisian apartment, a woman is seen making for the door. As she passes the telephone, it rings. From now on she sings, sitting, standing, on her knees, pacing up and down the room, pulling at the telephone cord, going through every emotion until ultimately, in despair, she takes her own life. Jean Cocteau wrote, it is not just that the telephone is sometimes more dangerous than the revolver but that its tangled cord drains us of our strength, while giving us nothing in return.

Release Date1990-11-18

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

Parade

Recreation of Picasso and Cocteau's 1917 play. Apart of the ballet program, 'Picasso and Dance.'

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

Les parents terribles

Release Date2022-12-02

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count1

The Human Voice: A Story for Our Times

The Human Voice is a contemporary adaptation of the 1928 stage play by Jean Cocteau, and "La Voix Humaine," the 1958 chamber opera by Francis Poulenc. In a radically new production The Human Voice presents a flip of gender, and a metaphor of global pandemic. Now in English, Isaiah Bell sings to his male lover, and into the abyss of COVID. In a Zoom call impaired by lag and freeze and dropped signals, technology is once again enemy to intimacy. The agony of failed love is heightened by the necessity of distance, by the anaesthetic of the machine.

Release Date2020-11-01

DepartmentWriting

JobStory

Merlín

Merlin, shot on 35mm, is an adaptation of Cocteau's play "Knights of the Round Table."

Release Date1991-07-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Vote Count5

Anna the Maid

Short film by Harry Kümel based upon a poem by Jean Cocteau.

Release Date1958-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

Poulenc's The Human Voice / Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle

Running through Bartók’s disenchanted tale, whose haunting music was initially condemned as unplayable, and the expression of despair in Poulenc’s monologue, the director Krzysztof Warlikowski perceives a shared dramatic thread, a shared feminine consciousness and a shared sense of imprisonment and suffocation: for the woman who penetrates the confines of Bluebeard’s castle and Elle, the woman who clings to a telephone conversation with a man as the only thing worth living for, are condemned to share the same fate. And this man she speaks to, does he really exist? Unless the director has interpreted Cocteau’s words to the letter and the telephone has become a “terrifying weapon that leaves no trace, makes no noise”…

Release Date2018-06-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

La macchina da scrivere

DepartmentCreator

JobCreator

L'aigle à deux têtes

A queen lives secluded in her chambers, mourning the loss of her husband on their wedding day ten years from then. Stanislas, a suicidal poet and anarchist, enters her apartments with the intent of killing her. When he appears, wounded, fleeing the guards, she is struck by his resemblance to the late king...

Release Date1975-07-24

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

Vote Count1

Beautiful

A man waits for his lover alone at home. When he finally arrives, the story of their relationship is told while the beautiful lover is indifferent to everything he's hearing.

Release Date2002-01-18

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

Vote Count3

The Human Voice

A film adaptation of the one-woman play by Jean Cocteau starring Shelby Satterthwaite as a woman who deals with the emotional turmoils of talking to her lover one last time over the phone.

Release Date2019-12-18

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

The Human Voice

An elegant young woman in her messy room answers the phone call from her lover. This one, who intends to leave her, tries to make her understand what he is up to without hurting her too much, hypersensitive as she is. All means are good: big words, cajolery, denial, lies. As for the woman, who senses that this is the end, she desperately tries to win him back, passing from tenderness to passion, from the threat of attempted suicide to calm, from regret to outbursts of violence.

Release Date1971-11-26

DepartmentWriting

JobBook

Ľudský hlas

Release Date1965-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobTheatre Play

La Voce Umana

Over the course of one day, a woman carries on a vacillating conversation with her lover over several phone calls. She is at times conciliatory, playful, teasing, remorseful, sad, manipulative, depressed, understanding, patient, desperate, manipulative, cloying, and finally accepting of his final farewell. It seems her lover has now found a younger more accomadating woman who will supersede the main character. It is quite sad how he has toyed with her over the years and the efforts she takes to please him, when clearly to him she is just a garment to put on when convenient or to use when lonesome and he really does not care for her. Very well written and acted.

Release Date1978-06-22

DepartmentWriting

JobStory

La Dame de Monte-Carlo

On the banks of the Seine and in the metro, Édith Stockhausen performs a poem by Jean Cocteau.

Release Date1979-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobOriginal Story

La Voix Humaine: Tragédie Lyrique en un Acte

Film based on the lyrical tragedy of the same name by Jean Cocteau and Francis Poulenc, directed by Alain Françon at the Théâtre du Châtelet.

Release Date1989-01-05

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

La Voix Humaine

La voix humaine (English: The Human Voice) is a forty-minute, one-act opera for soprano and orchestra composed by Francis Poulenc in 1958 (Wikipedia). This is a version of it directed by Pierre Jourdan at the Théâtre Impérial de Compiègne.

Release Date1999-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

The Human Voice

On a foggy afternoon, a woman who is lost in the middle of the countryside, finally reaches him on the phone. She calls him “darling” but has to give back his letters.

Release Date2018-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobStory

Rhythm of Africa

Produced and conceived by French filmmakers Jean Cocteau and François Villiers, with a screenplay by Langston Hughes, Rhythm of Africa takes a look at the special ceremonial dance of atonement in Chad. The heartbeat of the jungle, the day-to-day life in the modernizing village, and the bustling marketplace take on a hypnotizing rhythm of their own. A changing Africa asserts itself in a changing world.

Release Date1947-01-01

DepartmentDirecting

JobDirector

The Human Voice

A woman spends a surreal evening unraveling on the phone with her recently lost lover.

Release Date2021-01-01

DepartmentWriting

JobStory

The Human Voice

She's alone in her huge, empty house. Just a dog. His dog. And the remains of what once was. Her lover of five years has left her. Only few of his things are left behind. His last call may change things.

Release Date2021-07-27

DepartmentWriting

JobWriter

The Human Voice

In 1930 Jean Cocteau premiered "La Voz Humana" in Paris. In 2013, actress Karina Gidi interprets "La Voz Humana" under the direction and adaptation of the renowned director Antonio Castro in Mexico.

Release Date2016-11-02

DepartmentWriting

JobStory

The Human Voice

Swedish soprano Elisabeth Söderström takes on Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice.

Release Date1985-07-10

DepartmentWriting

JobStory

Vote Count1

Oidipus Rex

Release Date1988-07-17

DepartmentWriting

JobOpera

Morceaux de Cannes

We thought we'd seen, read, and heard everything there was to see about the Cannes Film Festival, from the glitz and gossip to the scandals and censorship. And yet, Emmanuel Barnault's "Morceaux de Cannes" (Pieces of Cannes), by this leading expert on Italian and French cinema, convinces us otherwise. The third largest event in the world (after the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup) reveals its secrets only sparingly, as this film attests. The result of passionate research in the INA archives, these 52 minutes, without interviews or voice-over narration, string together rare and sometimes previously unseen footage. Taken together, they tell a surprising, original, and heartwarming story of the Festival. On the beach, on a street corner, in a restaurant, or in the privacy of a hotel room, these forgotten archives summon the greatest filmmakers, actors, and actresses of the last seventy years, from Jean Cocteau to David Lynch, for an anthology of the Festival's history.

Release Date2021-07-02

Vote Count1

The Last Days of an Icon: Edith Piaf

Piaf’s life is a legend, a tale, a story so powerful that one might end up asking oneself if it really existed. Beyond the icon, there is the woman the documentary talks about, a fragile figure with an extraordinary personality. A street girl who experienced fame, love and who died almost clandestinely in a rented house in the south of France.

Release Date2006-01-05

Beyond the Riviera

Travelogue exploring the coastline, towns and surrounding mountains of the French Riviera.

Release Date1960-10-24

In Search of Marcel Proust

"In Search of Marcel Proust" is a 1962 literary documentary directed by the Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci. It serves as a biographical and critical journey into the world of Marcel Proust, blending readings from his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, with rare filmed testimonies from those who knew him personally, including his housekeeper Céleste Albaret and friends like Jean Cocteau and François Mauriac.

Release Date1962-01-01