Jean Cocteau

"Proust Palimpsesto: Pastiches e Misturas" (2026) is a Brazilian film essay directed by Carlos Adriano. The film, which explores the impossibility of filming Marcel Proust's "In Search of Time That Flew", is presented as a collage of archival images and theories.

Portrait of Panama Al Brown, a great boxer in the 30's, and its story with France, with a focus on its relationship with Jean Cocteau, surrealist, poet, director, artist.

We thought we'd seen, read, and heard everything there was to see about the Cannes Film Festival, from the glitz and gossip to the scandals and censorship. And yet, Emmanuel Barnault's "Morceaux de Cannes" (Pieces of Cannes), by this leading expert on Italian and French cinema, convinces us otherwise. The third largest event in the world (after the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup) reveals its secrets only sparingly, as this film attests. The result of passionate research in the INA archives, these 52 minutes, without interviews or voice-over narration, string together rare and sometimes previously unseen footage. Taken together, they tell a surprising, original, and heartwarming story of the Festival. On the beach, on a street corner, in a restaurant, or in the privacy of a hotel room, these forgotten archives summon the greatest filmmakers, actors, and actresses of the last seventy years, from Jean Cocteau to David Lynch, for an anthology of the Festival's history.

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

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.

"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." A 7 day vlog during the summer of 2023, a story of dreamers and drowners.

Portrait of Charles Trenet. Twenty years after his death, this documentary offers a new look at the artist. When, in 1956, the singer appeared on television, he was 43 years old. And it is a man of 60 or even 70 years old that today's audience has known. The first Charles Trenet, the one who transported France when he was 25 or 30 years old, remains largely unknown. Yet it was this kid of genius who, at the age of 25, invented French chanson. But the archives that are scattered throughout this portrait also show that he invented a certain idea of joy. For joy in Trenet was a sport, a daily gymnastics.

In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.

French artist Jean Cocteau's multifaceted work across poetry, plays, paintings and film made him one of the leading creative figures of the Parisian avant-garde movement. Featuring Cocteau's own writings read by actor Timothée Chalamet, explore the dream-like quality of Cocteau's one of a kind oeuvre.

The documentary "Les Enfants terribles du cinéma" (The Terrible Children of Cinema) tells the little-known story of one of the crossroads of cinephilia, *OBJECTIF 49*, which culminated in the organization of the Biarritz Festival of Cursed Films during the summer of 1949. This festival was initiated by Jean Cocteau, then at the height of his cinematic career. In Biarritz, films deemed "cursed" were screened because they had not yet found an audience or had been banned by censors. This selection offered a radically different vision of cinema from that of other festivals, such as Cannes. An entire generation of active filmmakers was celebrated: René Clément, Robert Bresson, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Eric Rohmer...

Commissioned to mark the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, "To Each His Own Cinema" brought together 33 of the world's pre-eminent filmmakers to produce short pieces exploring the multifarious facets of cinema and their perspective on the state of their chosen artform in the early 21st century.

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 interviews with Callas herself and footage of contemporaries such as her lover Aristotle Onassis, this celebration of "La Divina" pays tribute to her enduring legacy some three decades after her death.

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 came to cultivate a style that merges the western surrealism with eastern mysticism

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No synopsis available yet.

Piaf’s life is a legend, a tale, a story so powerful that one might end up asking oneself if it really existed. Beyond the icon, there is the woman the documentary talks about, a fragile figure with an extraordinary personality. A street girl who experienced fame, love and who died almost clandestinely in a rented house in the south of France.

Jean-Paul Fargier's documentary is a montage of animated images, numerous drawings and interviews with Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), interspersed with filmed archives of personalities he met with the aim of telling us about the explosive and prodigious life of this poet whose thirst for discovery and knowledge led him to connect with all the arts: the visual arts, literature and poetry, cinema and theater, dance and music. This eclecticism was fueled throughout his life by a profusion of artistic and romantic encounters, from Stravinsky to Picasso , from Coco Chanel to Colette , from Raymond Radiguet to Jean Marais . This whirlwind of social events, this artistic profusion inspired this documentary, in light of a large number of archives that make us revisit the artistic and Parisian life of the time. A multiple work, a life that contains several.

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, and filmmaker, whose versatility, unconventionality, and enormous output brought him international acclaim. As a leading member of the surrealist movement, he had a great influence on the work of others.

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 explored by a man who defined himself, first and foremost, as a poet.

20 minute music documentary shot in two days of November 1984 in, and around the outskirts of, Tokyo, Japan. A large part of the music was completed during that same month and recorded over a period of three days.

Jean Cocteau reminisces about the people he has known throughout his long life.

An 18th century poet travels through time in search of divine wisdom. In a mysterious wasteland, he has a series of enigmatic encounters with symbolic phantoms with whom he muses about the nature of art and his own career. Ultimately, the poet strives to achieve his rebirth as a celestial being.

This documentary is a portrait of Proust composed of recollections by those who knew him. Intercut with reading from his works.

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 Americas, filtered through a French sensibility.

"In Search of Marcel Proust" is a 1962 literary documentary directed by the Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci. It serves as a biographical and critical journey into the world of Marcel Proust, blending readings from his masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time, with rare filmed testimonies from those who knew him personally, including his housekeeper Céleste Albaret and friends like Jean Cocteau and François Mauriac.

This short documentary film is conceived as a stroll through the valley of Thebes and the temple of Karnak.

Cocteau, at his home, remembers his childhood, talks at length about theater, cinema, literature, and draws portraits of friends.

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A television adaptation of Jean Cocteau's surréalist take on the tragedy of Oedipus.

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 message for the 21st century was sealed and stored with the understanding that it would be opened only in the year 2000. As it turned out, it was discovered and exhumed a few years shy of that date. Where in The Testament of Orpheus Cocteau portrays himself as a living anachronism, a lonesome classical modernist loitering in space-time while lost in the spectral light of his memories, here he acknowledges explicitly the irony of his phantom-like state. By the time the viewer sees this image, he, J. C., our saviour Poet, will long be dead.

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

A famous poet in postwar Paris, scorned by the Left Bank youth, is in love with both his wife Eurydice and a mysterious princess. Seeking inspiration, the poet becomes obsessed and follows the princess from the world of the living to the land of the dead.

In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.

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

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 Southbury, Connecticut.

Elisabeth and her brother Paul live isolated from much of the world after Paul is injured in a snowball fight. As a coping mechanism, the two conjure up a hermetic dream of their own making. Their relationship, however, isn't exactly wholesome. Jealousy and a malevolent undercurrent intrude on their fantasy when Elisabeth invites the strange Agathe to stay with them -- and Paul is immediately attracted to her.

Rejecting the union of her daughter Brigitte with a modest worker, Madame Magnin invents an adultery for the lover, then introduces Brigitte to a good-looking man working on the famous RTF entertainment show 36 Chandelles. The show ultimately seals the reunion of the two estranged young lovers. The story features a parade of music-hall stars from the era: Charles Trenet, Charles Aznavour, Georges Guétary, Juliette Gréco, Roger Pierre and Jean-Marc Thibault, Fernand Raynaud, Georges Ulmer and many more.

Cocteau takes the viewer on a tour of a friend's villa on the French coast (a major location used in Testament of Orpheus). The house itself is heavily decorated, mostly by Cocteau (and a bit by Picasso), and we are given an extensive tour of the artwork. Cocteau also shows us several dozen paintings as well. Most cover mythological themes, of course. He also proudly shows paintings by Edouard Dermithe and Jean Marais and plays around his own home in Villefranche.

A man dreams he is in a wax museum after it is closed for the night.The statues come to life and behave in mysterious ways.

As the title of this French documentary indicates, Ce Siecle a 50 Ans examines the 20th Century at its halfway point. Utilizing the archives of several European film reserves, director Denise Tua offers a fascinating mosaic of the people and events that shaped the years 1900 to 1950. Complementing the vintage film clips are three dramatized sketches, delineating the romantic customs of three different points in time. These sketches are inadequately performed, and can easily be ignored. Ce Siecle a 50 Ans both preserved and provided celluloid material for scores of future documentaries.

Each portrayed painter produced an experimental animated short film to be featured in this film. A short film by Herbert Seggelke.

In conversation, in her Paris apartment, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, mime, dancer, novelist, wonders whether she should give the green light to a proposed film about the houses in which she lived. “I’m no longer photogenic,” she insists; nearly 80, marriages, affair with a stepson and intermittent lesbianism behind her, refusing now even to mention the arthritis that confines and assaults her, Colette is vivacious. Yannick Bellon’s captivating postmodernist film, as much a study of evanescence as any poem by Dickinson, segues into the film that Colette, a few years before her end, has just said she doesn’t want to do. Giving voice(over) to her own commentary, she goes back, first, to the home in Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne, where she was born.

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 later, in the same Victorine studios, Cocteau directed most of the sequences for his last opus: The Testament of Orpheus (1959).

The story of a gentle-hearted beast in love with a simple and beautiful girl. She is drawn to the repellent but strangely fascinating Beast, who tests her fidelity by giving her a key, telling her that if she doesn't return it to him by a specific time, he will die of grief. She is unable to return the key on time, but it is revealed that the Beast is the genuinely handsome one. A simple tale of tragic love that turns into a surreal vision of death, desire, and beauty.

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.

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.

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. Now that they are adult, Anne is in love with Hervé while Elfy thinks she loves the young man. One day, the baron's mummified body is found in an oubliette and the secret of the estate is revealed...

This Moroccan romance is a kind of Arab Tristan and Isolde: the heroine kills herself when she is convinced no one cares for her, the young nobleman she thought would love her is killed by a madwoman.

Young Michel is in love with the attractive Madeleine, so he decides to tell his parents of his intention to marry her. He thinks his announcement is innocent enough; his engagement, however, threatens to reveal dark secrets lurking within his family's home. Yvonne, Michel's overbearing mother, concocts an elaborate scheme to drive Madeleine away, thus keeping uncomfortable household truths from being exposed.

The commentary recalls that Radio Brazzaville was, from June 18, 1943, the contact of the French settlements and the metropolis, bush stations participate in the organization of the resistance.

In a poet’s room, an armless statue abruptly comes to life. It invites the poet to step through a mirror and to discover another world. Strange places and characters present themselves to him. The poet tears himself away from these twisted fascinations and returns, with some difficulty, to his room.

A short film about a famous writer who loses control of his hand and begins to write letters and articles denouncing himself.