Word: cocteau
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Like most other artistically inclined young men of the time, Rorem felt the call of postwar Europe. An ardent Francophile, he became an American in Paris par excellence, finding still headier mentors in the likes of Jean Cocteau, Nadia Boulanger, Francis Poulenc and Marie-Laure de Noailles, the legendary patroness of the avant-garde.Rorem never misses the opportunity to tell us whom he slept with -- and whom he didn't. (Cocteau belongs in the small, latter category...
Ekerot, swathed in black robes, his angular, bony face impossibly white, stands with Maria Casares in Jean Cocteau's "Orpheus" and the peasant in Roberto Gavalodon's "Macario" as one of the greatest visualizations of death in cinema. At one point, Jof sees the Knight playing chess with Death, and he escapes with Mia and their son. The Knight travels to his castle with several of his companios, and it is there that Death finds them. As the film closes, Jof has a vision of Death leading the Knight and his companions in a dance across the horizon...
...writer and filmmaker Jean Cocteau, who ushered Genet's novels into print in 1946 in under-the-counter editions, Genet was a singing erection, a poet who cultivated his homosexuality in ways the fastidious Cocteau never permitted himself. Genet's work "disgusts me, repels me, astonishes me," Cocteau wrote. "It poses a thousand problems...
Then again, that did hold true in his case. By the time he died in 1986 -- of cancer, at the age of 75 -- Genet was revered as one of the greatest 20th century French writers. But White's book reminds us that Cocteau was right when he said Genet was a bad thief. Nothing he stole could compare in value with what he left behind...
...keeps it bubbling is a melodic succession of wheezy parlor waltzes, barroom blues, moon-June pop and ersatz Kurt Weill. What gives it fizz is gallows humor, antiwar mockery, sweet sentiment and an inventiveness that more than honors the imperative laid down years ago by Sergei Diaghilev to Jean Cocteau: "Astonish...