Jean Cocteau

*

DIALOGUES
WITH
COCTEAU

André Fraigneau

I

A.F.: I’D LIKE this dialogue of ours to bear exclusively upon your activity in films, my dear Jean Cocteau. Would you be willing to approach our conversation from that angle?

J.C.: I can’t do that, because for me the cinematograph is only one medium of expression among others. Speaking about it will inevitably lead me into other paths. I use the word cinematograph deliberately, in order to avoid any confusion between the medium it expresses and that which is commonly called the cinema, a somewhat dubious Muse in that it is incapable of waiting, whilst all the other Muses wait, and should be painted and sculpted in waiting poses.

Whenever people see a film for the first time, they complain about some passages being too long or too slow. But quite apart from the fact that this is often due to the weakness of their own perception and to their missing the deep underlying design of the work, they forget that the classics, too, are full of passages that are long-winded and slow, but are accepted because they are classics. The classics must have faced the same reproaches in their lifetime. The tragedy of the cinematograph lies in its having to be successful immediately. It takes such a vast sum of money to make a film that it is necessary to get that money back as soon as possible by massive takings. That is a terrible, almost insurmountable handicap. I have just said that Muses should be represented in attitudes of waiting. All Arts can and must wait. They often have to wait for the death of their makers before they are able to live. Can, then, the cinematograph rank as a Muse? Besides, Muses are poor. Their money is invested. But the cinema Muse is too rich, too easy to ruin at one go.

To this we must add that, for the public, films are just a pastime, a form of entertainment which they have been accustomed, alas, to view out of the corners of their eyes. Whereas for me the image-making machine has been a means of saying certain things in visual terms instead of saying them with ink on paper.

A.F.: Can you give me a more explicit definition of the cinema as a form of mass entertainment, and also tell me what you understand, in contrast, by the cinematograph as a medium of self-expression? I think that this would help readers to grasp the distinction you so persistently draw between the two terms.

J.C.: What is commonly called “cinema” has not been, up till now, a pretext for thought. People walk in, look (a little), listen (a little), walk out, and forget. Whereas the cinematograph, as I understand it, is a powerful weapon for the projection of thought, even into a crowd unwilling to accept it. Orphée, for instance, irritates, intrigues and shocks, but forces people to discussions with others and with their own selves. A book has to be read and reread before it comes to occupy its rightful place. And cinema managers have noticed that some spectators of Orphée returned to see it several times and brought other spectators with them. Besides, however inert and hostile an audience may be, it enables a few attentive individuals to see the film. Without such audiences, my message couldn’t have reached the few unknown spectators for whom it was destined. You might say that if a film falls flat the message dies. Of course. And with Orphée I took enormous risks. But I was convinced that in the case of an unusual and difficult film, the curiosity that brings people to see it is stronger than the laziness that keeps them away. Every day I receive letters which show that I was right. Their authors usually complain about the audience with which they found themselves locked in for the duration of the performance. But they forget that it’s that very audience that enabled them to see the film at all.

A.F.: I was struck by an expression you used earlier on: “the image-making machine.” Do you mean that you use cinematic images just as a writer uses literary images?

J.C.: No. The cinematograph requires a syntax. This syntax is obtained through the connection and the clash between images. No wonder that the peculiarity of such a syntax (our style) expressed in visual terms seems disconcerting to spectators accustomed to slap-dash translations and to the articles in their morning paper. If the wonderful language of Montaigne were transposed into images, it would be as difficult for such spectators to watch as it is difficult for them to read his writings.

My primary concern in a film is to prevent the images from flowing, to oppose them to each other, to anchor them and join them without destroying their relief. But it is precisely that deplorable flow that is called “cinema” by the critics, who mistake it for style. It is commonly said that such and such a film is perhaps good, but that it is “not cinema,” or that a film lacks beauty but is “cinema,” and so on. This is forcing the cinematograph to be mere entertainment instead of a vehicle for thought. And this is what leads our judges to condemn in two hours and fifty lines a film epitomizing twenty years of work and experience.

A.F.: Now I understand how much it meant for you, at a given moment in your career, to discover the cinematograph as a vehicle for thought—thought which you had previously expressed in so many different ways. But did you find a greater freedom in that new medium?

J.C.: No. Even if one is free to do as one pleases, there are, alas, too many heavy burdens (capital, censorship, responsibility towards the actors who agree to being paid later) to be what I would call completely free.

I am not thinking of actual concessions, but of a sense of responsibility which directs and restricts us without our even being fully aware of it. I’ve been completely free only with Le Sang d’un Poète because it was privately commissioned (by the Vicomte de Noailles, just as Buñuel’s L’Age d’or), and because I didn’t know anything about film art. I invented it for myself as I went along, and used it like a draftsman dipping his finger for the first time in Indian ink and smudging a sheet of paper with it. Originally Charles de Noailles commissioned me to make an animated cartoon, but I soon realized that a cartoon would require a technique and a team nonexistent at that time in France. Therefore I suggested making a film as free as a cartoon, by choosing faces and locations that would correspond to the freedom of a designer who invents his own works. Moreover, I’ve often been helped by chance (or at least by what is commonly called chance but never is for one who lets himself be hypnotized by a task), including even the petty vexations of the studio, where everybody thought I was mad. Once, for example, as I was nearly at the end of Le Sang d’un Poète, the sweepers were told to clear up the studio just as we had started on our last shots. But as I was about to protest, my cameraman (Périnal) asked me to do nothing of the kind: he had just realized what beautiful images he would be able to take through the dust raised by the sweepers in the light of the arc lamps.

Another example: as I didn’t know any film technicians, I sent out postcards to all the cameramen in Paris, giving them an appointment for the next morning. I decided to take the one who would come first. It happened to be Périnal, thanks to whom many images of Le Sang d’un Poète can vie with the loveliest shots of our time. Unfortunately, in those days a silver salt was used in film printing, which was done at a pace impossible today. This is why cinematic Art is so fragile. A very old copy of Le Sang d’un Poète is as bright and shows as much contrast as any modern American film, whereas more recent copies look like old copies and weaken the whole effect of the film.

Although this too is arguable. To quote an instance: a friend of mine, whose intelligence I respect, detested La Belle et la Bête. One day I met him at the corner of the Champs Elysées and Rue la Boétie. He asked me where I was going and whether he could come with me. I said, “I’m going to work on the subtitling of La Belle et la Bête, and I’d hate to subject you to such an ordeal.” He came along nevertheless, and I forgot him in a corner of the little cinema. I was working with my chief editor on a very old strip, almost unpresentable, gray and black and covered with stains and scratches. At the end of the projection I went back to my friend, and he announced that he found the film admirable. I concluded that he had seen it in a new perspective, rather as we do in film societies when we are shown old films in a disastrous condition.

A.F.: It seems to me that such strokes of chance, and all the miseries and splendors of film making, coupled with the difficulty of understanding a film, that is, to see and hear it with sufficient attention in the course of one fleeting projection, make it difficult, if not altogether impossible, for a message expressed in a film to have any lasting existence.

J.C.: Yes, indeed. The inevitable invisibility of any work of art which doesn’t conform to public habits which make things visible—I mean, an invisibility arising from habits which were themselves acquired through contact with things that were not visible originally, but which have become visible through habit—this invisibility is an almost insuperable problem for those who treat the cinematograph as an Art, as a vehicle of thought. It is almost impossible to solve it without resorting to some subterfuge which would make that thought visible in the immediate present, but would condemn it for the future. There is no future for a film. Or, at best (provided the American laws becomes more sensible and one ceases destroying a story told in one manner for the sake of being able to retell it in another) the film will have a future of a sort with film clubs and a handful of amateurs. A film thus takes a reverse course compared to that followed by other works of art, which start on a small scale and reach a big one later, when they have proved their worth. The industrial machine forces films to begin on a large scale; after which they may live to reach a small one, if they survive the thousand perils threatening the existence of a negative: human carelessness, fire, and all the changes that technique is bound to bring into film production.

A film worthy of the name encounters the same obstacles as does a canvas by Vermeer, Van Gogh or Cézanne. But whilst these paintings land in the public museum only after a long time, a film must begin in it. Then it ascends a slope, gets classed, and from then on can only count on being seen by a few individuals, similar to the few who saw the paintings when they first appeared, before the eye and mind had grown accustomed to them. In short, a painting that isn’t worth a penny to begin with will be worth millions later on. Whereas a film that was worth millions at the start will survive, if at all, in dire poverty.

A.F.: After these generalities on cinematography, will you allow me to ask you a more personal question? And will you promise to give me an exhaustive answer? Can you tell me the deep motives that brought you, first among the poets, to an art which most writers despise—even though we observe that they despise it less and less as time goes on?

J.C.: Before I reply to the main part of your question, I will say that these writers have a good excuse. Film making is a manual art, a craftsman’s job. A work written by one man and then transposed onto the screen by another is no more than a translation, and can, indeed, be of very little interest for a genuine writer (or be of interest only to his pocket). Before film art can be worthy of a writer, the writer must become worthy of film art. I mean, he should not be content with leaving some left-handed work of his to be interpreted by other people, but should seize hold of it with both his hands and work hard at building an object in a stlye equivalent to his written style. A desk-and-pen man is naturally quite uninterested in films, and doesn’t even value them as a means of propagating his ideas.

II

A.F.: Let’s come back to Orphée. How did you manage to avoid laboratory tricks, which you call “picturesque” and which you loathe? How, for example, do your characters walk in and out of mirrors?

J.C.: In a different way each time. Our subterfuges were based on the fact that in a film a mirror isn’t taken into account, but only the void, or, rather, the frame. We built twin rooms and filled them with twin objects, and if you look carefully enough you can easily notice it, for the mirror (which doesn’t exist) every image is reversed except the little engravings on the wall and the bust on the chest of drawers. I relied entirely on a card-trick speed. Do you realize that it would have been impossible to take some of the shots if we had been facing a proper mirror reflecting the camera and the camera crew? When Maria Casarès opens a three-leafed mirror, it would have been impossible for her to walk out of a two-dimensional surface. She walked out of the second room. A double, dressed like her and back to back to her, walked off in the opposite direction, playing the part of her reflection. The funny thing was that Maria Casarès changed three times during that scene (a black dress, a gray and a white), and that as my finances forbade me to reproduce all three, when Casarès had a black dress on, her reflection wore a gray one. Nobody noticed anything, and I assure you that I myself was duped when I saw the rushes, which shows to what extent a truth fabricated by us can be convincing, owing to the mere fact that it is seen. It has all the persuasiveness of a false witness. Another instance: when Marais goes towards the mirror and raises his rubber-gloved hands, a portable camera is placed on the shoulder of a studio-hand wearing a jacket and wet gloves similar to Marais’s. Thus I was able to approach facing the false room, from the back of which Marais in person advanced, playing the part of his own reflection. The gloved hands met. I cut, and passed on to another angle. Such an effect requires all the skill of the camera operator and the focus man, for neither the close up nor the medium shot must be blurred. The new American lenses permit that. Ours do not. All rests, as I have said before, upon the skill of our craftsmen, whose mental agility alone enables them to keep up with the progress of technique.

In some of the shots I made Nicholas Hayer’s task easier by substituting (in the Court scene) the real characters for the fictitious ones. This muddled people, presenting both childish difficulties and truly baffling riddles. You see the reflection of the judges: those are the judges themselves. But what is muddling is that Maria Casarès in the foreground, seen from the back, is the real Maria Casarès.

When Jean Marais and François Périer appear in the court room, Marais leaps in slow motion through the empty frame in which we saw (in the same shot) one of the motor cyclists playing the part of the reflection of another motor cyclist (they were two brothers). I cut, and take Marais motionless. After that he moves back and his movement draws the camera with him towards Périer in front of a real mirror (quickly substituted in the meantime) from which he seems to have emerged saying the line, “Nous sommes faits comme des rats.” I forgot to explain that when Jean Marais jumps, he jumps backwards through an identical frame (since the real judges are supposed to be their reflections in the mirror). The entire mechanism, which oftens remains a riddle even for those who take part in it, falls into place in the projecting room, where the whole unit rushed every evening in order to understand what they had done entirely on trust during the day.

I don’t pretend to have invented the method of having the reflection in a mirror acted by another person. I used it as a syntax. You find it in the Delannoy-Sartre film (done with twin sisters). In fact, none of these things is new. They’re all the same old dictionary words. Already Méliès used them, and to use different ones would mean to be emphatic, which is as deplorable in the visual language as it is in writing. Besides, even if a film is made without any attempt at tricks, they are still there. They are the secret arsenal of painting and of poetry. A bad film is like a poet without culture, content to tell a story in verse (with nothing of that which makes a poem a poem).

A.F.: I hoped, like many other members of the audience, to have spotted a few of the special effects of Orphée. Thus in the dunes, after the scene in the chalet, I thought I noticed a cut in the sound, a deliberate silence.

J.C.: This would have been impossible. A cut in the sound would make a hole that is not silence. What you heard was real silence, and I insist on the word “heard” because an attentive ear can detect the thousand and one imperceptible sounds of which that silence is composed. There is deliberate silence, yes. But that silence is derived from the locality itself. And it sometimes happens that the locality resists, refusing to be at our beck and call. The ruins of Saint-Cyr, for instance (which very nearly caused my own, for the night shooting, as I’ve already mentioned, cost us a fortune in generating equipment) gave me a nasty shock. There were about one hundred and fifty trains passing there every night. The sous-préfet, Amade, stood watch in hand announcing the times of the trains and the intervals in the din. But it was very rare, alas, that a shot could be made to coincide with the railway timetable. This is why in Orphée you occasionally hear distant whistles and a kind of hollow factory noise. We tried to dub these passages. But in the projecting room I realized that the whistles and the factory noises gave a background of mystery to the dialogue, and that they should on no account be cut.

A.F.: So you made use of accidental noises as though they were a trick? But have you on any other occasion manipulated sound as you manipulate the pictures?

J.C.: I’m quite as interested in the use of sound as in the use of images. When we were making Le Sang d’un Poète, as the sound film had just appeared, we kept experimenting till we were quite exhausted. We kept building up walls and then demolishing them, trying in vain to obtain the sound of a crash. At last in desperation I hit upon the discovery that the only way to get that sound was by crumpling up two newspapers simultaneously. It happened to be the Temps and the Intransigeant (one of which is printed on stiffer paper than the other). In the same film, with the exception of Rachel Berendt’s voice, who dubbed for Miss Lee Miller, all the voices are my own, disguised. The chatter in the theatre box consists of various phrases said by me and made to overlap in the mixing.

A.F.: And what about Orphée?

J.C.: In Orphée, for the coming and going through the mirror we used the entire range of the actual sound, but without the initial shock. I kept only the prolongation of the waves (to be in fashion, I should say the undulatory prolongation). I told you about the drums. After shooting the scene where Cégeste rises up in front of the Princess in reverse and in slow motion, I took the whole scene twice in close-up, once with the camera trained on Maria Casarès and once on Dermithe. As the Casarès shots didn’t come out very well, I kept only the Dermithe ones. But as I liked Dermithe’s voice better during the Casarès shots, I put the words of the shots we had taken from behind him on to the shots of the close-up of his face, making them coincide with his lip movements. There are so many subterfuges of that kind in Orphée that I couldn’t enumerate them all now. But since you seem so interested in these secrets of our trade, and since you think that they might interest the reader, I will tell you about the wall of Saint-Cyr at the corner of which Orphée and Heurtebise fly away. It is a trick I had previously used in Le Sang d’un Poète, and which I reproduced this time in a corridor of the Folies Dramatiques. We built a model of the arcades of Saint-Cyr erected in a horizontal position on a large scaffolding half way up to the ceiling. On the floor, some photographic devices produced scenes that gave the effect of a distant perspective. We were in a tip-bucket suspended from rails, so that what we saw when we looked through the camera lying flat on our stomachs were the normal arcades.

At the extreme left-hand corner of that vast contraption was a wooden sheet which sloped down almost perpendicularly and ended in a trench filled with straw. An old woman, leaning her back against some railings suspended over the void, with her legs flat against the décor, appeared to be sitting in a corner of the arcade and added to the deception. One saw (although, alas, they could be barely distinguished) two children asleep, lying against a plank in front of one of the fake pavements, in such a position that Orphée and Heurtebise could slip between them and the wall. The two actors (Marais and Périer) had to drag themselves towards the slope without allowing their feet to leave the false ground, which was all there was between them and a long fall; or if they did leave it, they did so with a peculiar clumsiness which, once the picture was set upright, assumed the extraordinary ease of movement of a dream. At the end of that journey, Orphée rolled over the edge and fell down the slope. Heurtebise was supposed to follow him. But Jean Marais is a daredevil, whereas François Périer is not accustomed to that kind of sport. I was afraid to put him to such a test. But after four takes with a stand-in I realized that I would have to impose that sacrifice on him. He agreed readily, and sprained his ankle in the straw. His sole comment was to ask if the shot was all right, and as it was good (or at least I told him it was, so as not to make him roll down again), he declared that the thing was well worth a sprained ankle, which didn’t matter tuppence anyway. That is the kind of man he is.

A.F.: I don’t want to tire you, but all these details are so fascinating that I must try and record as many as I can. Nobody except you is so willing to speak of what happens behind the scenes, which shows to what extent you are free from relying on secrets and surprises for communicating your poetry.

J.C.: Well, here are a few more. The mirror into which Orphée dips his hands required about eight hundredweight of mercury. But there is nothing harder to come by than mercury, and nothing less simple to find than a tank big enough and strong enough to hold it. On top of that, it wouldn’t have been safe to keep such a treasure in the Studio. So we had to do the shooting in one day, and we wasted a lot of time because it was almost impossible to get the caps off the drums in which the mercury had been delivered, and because the mercury itself was dirty. It had to be polished with chamois leather, like a silver dish. No sooner had one got that soft heavy surface clean than the impurities rose again and floated on top like oil stains. I thought I might be able to do without Jean Marais by putting the gloves on somebody else of his size. But when I tried I saw that hands were like a person, and we would have to have the actor himself. So he was sent for, an we spent the entire day, from seven in the morning till six in the evening, on that one shot.

A.F.: Why, if it so difficult to handle, did you have to have mercury?

J.C.: Because mercury shows only the reflection and not the part that has penetrated into the mirror, as water would have done. In mercury the hands disappear and the gesture is accompanied by a kind of shiver, whereas water would have produced ripples and circles of waves. On top of that, mercury has resistance.

A.F.: This provides me with an opportunity to ask you about a shot that must have been extremely difficult, namely when Orphée knocks against the mirror immediately after the last motor cyclist has passed through it.

J.C.: You guessed right. As there’s only one shot, the motor cyclists couldn’t have disappeared if there had been glass. Jean Marais knocked against an empty space and simulated the collision. I added the noise afterwards. The glass was put in only for the following shot, when Marais brushes against it and his cheek is flattened by the pressure. The third shot, in reverse, is taken with a real mirror; the fourth (the one after the room, in the deserted countryside), with a mirror buried in the sand, which plays the part of a glass-like puddle.

Another kind of trick effect, akin to a device used by novelists, is the creation of an unknown deserted little town through a combination of several different districts of Paris. For this, the streets had to be empty of people and extracted from their proper surroundings. The car pulls up at the bottom of the Grenelle steps, at the top of which there is a lamp-post of an unusual shape and some chalky blocks of flats, very much like another unusual lamppost and some chalky houses in the Square Bolivar (in the Buttes Chaumont district) where Marais enters in the following shot. Maria Casarès disappears in a gateway in the street which runs at the top of that sloping square. Marais dashes in after her, to emerge under the arcades of the Place des Vosges. He turns round the corner and walks into Boulogne, at the covered market where the sequence ends. As to Maria Casarès appearing in the market, it was simply done in two shots and doesn’t require any special explanations.

But what I’d find more fascinating than dwelling on the kind of things every film-maker knows, or on the thousand funny incidents which inevitably occur when a crowd that must be hidden persists in trying to be seen, would be to speak about Time and Space. Film art is the only art form that allows us to dominate both. It very seldom happens that adjoining rooms are erected on the same floor, or that an interior set corresponds to the exterior set to which it is supposed to lead. And shooting is very rarely done in the right time order. We are free to manipulate as we please a world in which nothing seems to permit man to overcome his limitations. Not only is our situation similar to that of a painter, who endeavors to transpose the three-dimensional world in which he lives into two dimensions, but what’s more, in films these two dimensions express more than three, for we overcome time as well, which is also a dimension, and we can therefore say without any fear of ridicule that we operate in the fourth. In La Belle et la Bête, Jean Marais and Michel Auclair walk into the merchant’s house (after the archery tournament) in Touraine, and finish the gesture of shutting the door behind them two months later in Paris, having during all the inadmissible lapse of time led their own lives. It is thanks to the magnificent American camera owned by Pathé (there are only two or three of them in existence) that I was able to shoot Orphée and Heurtebise in the ruins of Saint-Cyr. One is walking (Marais), the other standing motionless (Périer). The atmosphere around the one is dead and diffuse, the other is made animate by wind and light. Marais played his part in Saint-Cyr. François Périer played his much later, in the studio on the banks of the Seine. The system of mirrors is well known and in current use. But for a scene of such precision, where the characters speak to each other and aren’t content with merely moving across a given locality, it was imperative to use a perfect machine. I ought to have gone even further, and put two Orphées in the picture, one shoulder to shoulder with Heurtebise and the other behind him. “Why,” he would have asked, “are there two of us?” and Heurtebise would have said his line, “Why, always why? Don’t keep asking me questions,” and the rest. Unfortunately a film costs too much money to be corrected after it’s been made and, besides, by the time these good ideas come to us it is usually roaming the world over. This is just one more instance of victory over our limitations, and of the kind of work that the laymen who come to visit us don’t understand. That’s why the visitors in a film studio get bored and cannot follow what’s going on, for what they see are only some phenomena of punctuation. They never read a complete sentence.

A.F.: I would be tempted to generalize, and to extend your description of visitors in a film studio to life in general, in which time is a phenomenon of perspective, and where we wait without understanding what we are part of and who the director is whom we are expected to obey.

J.C.: You are quite right. One always comes back to the amusing reply made by Sainte-Beuve (I think), when somebody declared, “At bottom, all is in all,” and he said: “And vice versa.”

A.F.: The more you speak, the more you enter into details, the more I become aware of the hard work involved in the creation of a film which is designed for public entertainment but at which the public barely looks, speaking at the same time as the actors, commenting on the story or the actresses’ dresses throughout the entire performance.

From Jean Cocteau and André Fraigneau, Cocteau on the Film (London: Dobson, 1954), translated by Vera Traill.