Two Screenplays

Cocteau was one of the most versatile of the 20th-century's artists, actors, poets, novelists and filmmakers and a pivotal figure in modern French art as a whole. Above all, he was a myth-maker with the ability to make the shadowy world of the subconscious and the occult more real than everyday life. It is perhaps for the startling, fantastical imagery that he is best remembered and which most influenced subsequent artists and filmmakers.

The two film scripts comprising this volume show Cocteau at his most surreal, employing dreams, subconscious fantasy and poetic imagery in disturbing ways. The Blood of a Poet is a natural extension of symbolist and surrealist poetry into cinematic art, juxtaposing a bewildering series of ideas and images into a pattern where darkness, decadence and death are threaded with elements of eroticism and the search for love. It has long been one of the classics of the cinema. The Testament of Orpheus is later Cocteau and his last film. It features Orpheus and Oedipus, two of his favorite characters from the ancient world, in a dream-like exploration of the poet's mind; his horror at ageing, his need for an ideal love, his fascination with blood, cruelty, eros, the legendary past, and crucially, with death. More self-conscious and narrative than the earlier film it could be interpreted as a deliberate summing up of his life's work and preparation for the end.

The volume also includes a number of short essays on the cinema and is highly illustrated with film stills.