Movies: Jean Cocteau

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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....

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

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 exc...

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 Ame...

One of the first filmed portraits of a jazz musician....

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 int...

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....

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

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 ...

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 authorit...

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 ca...

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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...

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 con...

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 me...

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....

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...

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. ...

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....