Movies: Jean Cocteau

Yvonne is seething when her devoted son, Michael, declares his intention to marry Madeleine, despite the latter's admitting to having an affair with a mysterious older man. At the same time, George, Michael's father, confides in Yvonne's sister, Leo...

8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements is an American experimental film directed by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau. Described by Richter as "part Freud, part Lewis Carroll" and filmed partially on the lawn of Duchamp's summer house in S...

Variations on the cultural and intellectual explosion in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district in 1946....

A woman’s last phone conversation with her lover, who now loves someone else....

In 1959, Jean Cocteau looked back on his artistic journey for the Télé Monte-Carlo television show Tout la vérité, rien que la vérité. The program ends with a tasty anecdote about television that Cocteau describes as a “box of tricks”. A few weeks la...

This documentary consists mainly of archive interviews of Jean Cocteau, and it features interesting contributions by Jean Marais and especially Jean-Luc Godard, who discusses Cocteau's foray into cinema. The film documents all the artistic media expl...

An adaptation of Jean Cocteau's play of a woman lecturing her indifferent lover....

Film based on the lyrical tragedy of the same name by Jean Cocteau and Francis Poulenc, directed by Alain Françon at the Théâtre du Châtelet....

Merlin, shot on 35mm, is an adaptation of Cocteau's play "Knights of the Round Table."...

A queen lives secluded in her chambers, mourning the loss of her husband on their wedding day ten years from then. Stanislas, a suicidal poet and anarchist, enters her apartments with the intent of killing her. When he appears, wounded, fleeing the g...

We film buffs grew up worshiping Jean Cocteau—particularly his BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ORPHEUS and BLOOD OF A POET—but in recent years he has perhaps ebbed from our consciousness....

Impressed by Jean Cocteau’s rewrite of Antigone, Stravinsky asked the poet for an adaptation of Oedipus Rex. The resulting libretto brings together the key scenes of Sophocles’s tragedy translated by the Abbé Jean Daniélou into Latin—a language that,...

Short film by Harry Kümel based upon a poem by Jean Cocteau....

Sitting at his desk, Guitry gives us a lecture on French history from Joan of Arc to the Occupation, with some focus on a number of its great writers and musicians....

The Orchestra of the Royal Opera House presents a new production of Poulenc's short opera La Voix Humaine, featuring soprano Danielle de Niese and shot on location in Paris and London....

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On the death of the famous singer Maria Malibran, Countess Merlin retraces the main lines of the unusual destiny of this young woman entirely devoted to her art....

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...

Travelogue exploring the coastline, towns and surrounding mountains of the French Riviera....

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...