Orpheus' testament
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | Orpheus' testament |
| Original title | Le testament d'Orphée |
| Country of production | France |
| original language | French |
| Publishing year | 1960 |
| length | 81 minutes |
| Age rating | FSK 16 |
| Rod | |
| Director | Jean Cocteau |
| script | Jean Cocteau |
| production | Jean Thuillier |
| music |
Georges Auric Martial Solal |
| camera | Roland Pontoizeau |
| cut | Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte |
| occupation | |
and as guests in alphabetical order: Françoise Arnoul , Charles Aznavour , Lucia Bosè , Yul Brynner , Nicole Courcel , Henri Crémieux , Luis Miguel Dominguín , Daniel Gélin , Jean-Pierre Léaud . Pablo Picasso , Françoise Sagan , Alice Sapritch , Annette Stroyberg , Roger Vadim | |
| chronology | |
|
← Predecessor |
|
The Testament of Orpheus is an experimental, avant-garde, associative, French cinema film. Jean Cocteau shot him in the fall of 1959 with himself in the lead role, his partner Jean Marais and numerous guest stars.
action
A coherent act? “There aren't any,” says Cocteau. He will use "the reality of places, people, gestures, words and that of music to give a shell to the abstraction that the thought undertakes". His film has no beginning and no end.
In the course of the scene, a poet is hit by a bullet and ends up in a kind of intermediate dimension in which all things that were previously owed to logic slide endlessly into one another. Oscillating back and forth between space and time, reality and fantasy, dream and imagination, pathos and irony, life and death, Cocteau tries to take the audience into his very own world, a world of inexplicable contradictions, myths and bizarre creatures like those related to the centaur, upright striding beings, but this time with human bodies and horse heads - in the spirit of his declaration in the opening credits that this is "a film for innocent people who are not afflicted by the vice of understanding at any cost".
At the beginning Cocteau slips into the role of Orpheus, who ten years earlier his temporary partner Jean Marais , who can be seen here as Oedipus, had played in the film of the same name . Orpheus walks down a long corridor with doors on each side. Each of these doors opens at a specific time period, so that the poet is free to enter any era. Orpheus is received in seven different ante-rooms by Yul Brynner , who, dressed in a tailcoat and adorned with a servant's chain, sits behind a desk and leaves the impression of a majordomo of the underworld. While wandering through the different epochs, the poet / Orpheus experiences encounters of the most confusing kind, in which epochs are just as blurred as ancient or historical figures are presented in modern garb and again illusion merges with reality.
For example, a man who, in the fashion of the time of Louis XV. dressed to a modern boy as if he were an old friend. The boy is amazed because he does not know the person opposite. The man explains his actions: "It is a mistake, I mistook you for the son of a professor, and you are this professor yourself - but only in forty years." Minerva, the goddess of reason, helps him through time in suede shoes hurried poet to leave the world, in which he has no place anyway, as she says. She pierces him with a lance and - supposedly - lets him die. But like Cocteau's other cinematic statements, this myth, that of his own death, is not reality. Pilgrim gypsies, who shed tears over the poet's last film resting place, lament over the empty grave.
Production notes
The shooting of The Testament of Orpheus began on September 7, 1959 and ended on October 18, 1959. The premiere took place on February 18, 1960. In Germany, The Testament of Orpheus premiered on October 26, 1961. In Austria, the strip started on the day of Cocteau's death, October 11, 1963.
The will of Orpheus was not received too kindly by the critics and was Cocteau's last feature film.
The film constructions come from Pierre Guffroy . François Truffaut was production assistant, Claude Pinoteau and Étienne Périer were run as technical consultants. Guest star Yul Brynner was also involved in the production management.
Alice Heyliger, who was 17 at the time of shooting and played the blonde Euridyke, was not an actress, but the daughter of the Dutch consul in Nice at the time.
Reviews
“The latest and - if you can rely on the announcements of its ingenious creator - also the last film by the versatile, headstrong, stimulating Jean Cocteau will be premiering in Paris these days. 'Le testament d'Orphée', the testament of Orpheus, is a non-objective film with no plot. And its creator says frankly: 'When I declared on television and radio that my film will have neither hand nor foot but a soul, I joked. But I joked in all seriousness ... It is undeniable: most of the people who will see my film will say that it is all nonsense and that they understand nothing. You will not be entirely wrong, for the fact is that I do not understand all of it myself. ' In Cocteau's work, the beauty and horror of the human subconscious appear in pictures full of poetic power. Suffice it to say that film 'can be a medium of poetry - because it allows us to show the unreality with a realism that forces the viewer to believe in it'. "
“Even before the premiere, the French film director, poet, painter and composer, whom the writer Klaus Mann once described as a 'visionary clown and clown visionary', warned cinema-goers about the puzzling events that would unfold on the screen in front of them. 'Most people who will see my film,' said Cocteau, 'will say that it is all nonsense and that they understand nothing. You will not be entirely wrong, for the fact is that I do not understand all of it myself. '"
Paimann's film lists summed up: “Unreal sequences of scenes“ of realism and unreality ”formed from figures from earlier Cocteau films, especially“ Orpheus ”and thought associations of the universal genius, at which their creator (according to him)“ became completely insane ”, so that we too have been granted an attempt to reproduce or interpret them. He himself in the main role narrating, suggesting, coming into contact with the schematic figures. In spite of all the fantasies and desires in the amalgamation of studio and open-air shots, idiosyncratic musical accompaniment and successful trick photography, friends of the unconventional are at least interesting. "
“Constantly changing between pathos and irony, Cocteau presents in his last work people and motifs from his very personal cinema world in conscious self-citation, in order to finally face the sybillinic judgment of his creatures. In his visually fascinating farewell performance, rich in jumps and contradictions, Cocteau pays homage to myths; Already in the opening credits he appeals programmatically to the intuition of the viewer: 'A film for innocent people who are not afflicted by the vice of understanding at any cost'. A fascinating essayistic discourse about poetic creation and recognition, about the subconscious and the dreamlike. "
Web links
- The Testament of Orpheus in the Internet Movie Database (English)
Individual evidence
- ↑ "Questions behind the door". Report on Cocteau's film work in Der Spiegel, 6/1960
- ↑ Jean-Claude Sabria: Cinéma français. Les années 50. Paris 1987, no.893
- ↑ The Testament of Orpheus in Paimann's film lists ( Memento of the original from September 13, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ The Testament of Orpheus in the Lexicon of International Films
