Word: cocteau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...DIFFICULTY OF BEING, by Jean Cocteau. Autobiographical jottings of the Frenchman who enjoyed playing the flamboyant artist but who preserved for books and movies his creative fires...
...Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) may not have been a great artist, but he was great as an artist. He was a flashing volcano of creation and affectation in many arts, but he was best known for his strange novels (Thomas l'Imposteur, Les Enfants Terribles), his baroque plays (The Infernal Machine, The Human Voice) and, above all, his otherworldly films (The Blood of a Poet, The Eternal Return, Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, Les Enfants Terribles). He was also given to scandalous public poses as an overt homosexual and self-confessed drug user. But unlike Oscar Wilde, who tripped...
...Method. The Difficulty of Being, a notebook of autobiographical jottings and esthetic musings that Cocteau kept in 1946, and now published in this country, reveals some of the reasons behind the success of his performance. First, Cocteau believed as firmly as any Method actor in the truth of his role as an artist. Romantically convinced that the artist is the medium, he approached the novel, drama, painting, ballet and, finally, cinema, as if each art were merely another form or mold for his personal "poetry," and he did not so much study each new form as pour himself into...
...same time, however, Cocteau seems to have known in the marrow of his Paris-burgher bones that the only successful French Revolution was that which had been conducted by the bourgeois, not against them. Although he liked to shock and astonish them on his own terms, he was always careful not to offend or challenge on their terms. Astutely, he wrote: "I know to what extent...
...often rightly so. Cocteau was a master of the bon mot and the telling aphorism, and these pages teem with samples. Perhaps the best is the anecdotal quip that American Composer Ned Rorem relates in his introduction. A literary monthly once posed a question to several writers: "If your house were burning down and you could take one thing, what would it be?" "I'd take the fire," answered Jean Cocteau...