by Jean Cocteau
* This was L’Aigle à Deux Têtes (The Eagle with Two Heads).
† This play is now included in the repertoire of the Comédie-Française in a new version.
ON DIAGHILEV AND NIJINSKY
IN A BOOK IN WHICH I BEAR WITNESS TO THE Socratic proceedings that society institutes against us, I must express my gratitude to two free men who lived to cry their cries.
Nijinsky was of less than average height. In soul and in body he was just a professional deformity.
His face, of Mongol type, was joined to his body by a very long and very thick neck. The muscles of his thighs and those of his calves stretched the fabric of his trousers and gave him the appearance of having legs bent backwards. His fingers were short, as if cut off at the knuckles. In short, one would never have believed that this little monkey with sparse hair, wearing a skirted overcoat and a hat balanced on the top of his head, was the idol of the public.
Yet he was, and with good reason. Everything about him was designed to be seen at a distance, in the limelight. On the stage his over-developed muscles became slim. His figure lengthened (his heels never touching the ground), his hands became the fluttering leaves of his gestures, and as for his face, it was radiant.
Such a metamorphosis is almost unimaginable for those who never witnessed it.
In Le Spectre de la Rose, in which he epitomized himself from 1913 onwards, he performed with a bad grace. Because the choreography of Le Sacre shocked people, and he could not bear it that the one should be applauded and the other booed. Gravity is a part of our being. He tried endlessly to find some trick to get the better of it.
He had become aware that half of the leap which ends Le Spectre de la Rose was lost when seen from the auditorium. He invented a double leap, twisting himself in mid-air and falling vertically into the wings. There they received him like a prize fighter, with hot towels, slaps, and water which his servant Dimitri spat in his face.
Before the opening of Le Faune, at supper at Larue’s, he astonished us for several days by moving his head as if he had a stiff neck. Diaghilev and Bakst were anxious, questioned him and got no answer. We learned later that he had been training himself to stand the weight of the horns. I could quote a thousand instances of this perpetual rehearsing which made him sullen and moody.
At the Hôtel Crillon (Diaghilev and he used to migrate from hotel to hotel, chased by fear of having their belongings distrained), he would put on a bath wrap, pull the hood over his head and make notes for his choreographies.
I saw him create all his roles. His deaths were poignant. That of Pétrouchka, in which the puppet becomes human enough to move us to tears. That of Schéhérazade in which he drummed the boards like a fish in the bottom of a boat.
Serge de Diaghilev appeared to wear the smallest hat in the world. If you put this hat on, it came right down to your ears. For his head was so large that any head-covering was too small for him.
His dancers nicknamed him Chinchilla because of one lock kept white in his dyed and very black hair. He stuffed himself into a coat with a collar of opossum, and sometimes fastened it with the help of safety-pins. His face was that of a mastiff, his smile that of a very young crocodile, one tooth sticking over his lip. Sucking at his teeth was with him a sign of pleasure, of fear, of anger. He chewed his lips, topped by a little moustache, in the back of some stage-box from which he kept an eye on his artists in whom he let nothing pass. And his watery eye was cast down with the curve of a Portuguese oyster. This man led across the globe a company of dancers as confused and motley as the fair at Nijni-Novgorod. The only luxury for him was to discover a star. And we saw him bring us out of the Russian ghetto the thin, long, glaucous Madame Rubinstein. She did not dance. She entered, she showed herself, she mimed, she walked, she went out, and sometimes (as in Schéhérazade) she ventured on a sketch of a dance.
One of Diaghilev’s triumphs was to present her to Paris audiences in the role of Cleopatra. That is to say to present her to Antony. A bale of material was brought on. It was set in the middle of the stage. It was unrolled, unpacked. And Madame Ida Rubinstein appeared, so thin-legged that you thought you were seeing an ibis from the Nile.
I am drawing these figures in the margin of the programmes of great occasions that played a decisive part in my love of the theatre. Indeed a reference to Vestris, to Talma whets my appetite. I should like to read more about them.
ON THE MARVELS OF CINEMATOGRAPHY
THE WORD MARVELLOUS IS IN CONSTANT USE. BUT we need to agree on its meaning none the less. If I had to define it, I should say that it is what removes us from the confines within which we have to live, and is like a ‘fatigue’ which is drawn outwards at our birth and at our death.
There is a fallacy that gives rise to the belief that the cinematograph is a suitable art to bring this faculty of the spirit into play. This fallacy is due to a hasty confusion of marvels with conjuring tricks. It is no great marvel to produce a dove from a hat. The proof is that this sort of trick can be bought, can be taught, and that such miracles at two a penny follow fashion. They are no more marvellous than is algebra, but present a frivolous and pleasing appearance, less of a strain on the intelligence. Does this mean that the cinematograph cannot put in our hands a weapon able to out-distance the target? No. But if it can do so, it is on the same basis as the other arts, from which people try to exclude it because its youth makes it suspect in a country (France) where, except when it is a matter of defending the soil, youth is not taken into consideration.
The cinematograph is fifty years old. My own age, alas. A lot for me. Very little for a Muse who expresses herself through the medium of ghosts and with equipment still in its infancy if one compares it with the use of paper and ink.
It seems likely that the remark ‘Do write about the marvels of the cinematograph,’ derives from the films Le Sang d’un Poète and La Belle et la Bête, conceived at an interval of fifteen years, and in which everyone sees the embodiment of that curiosity which impels us to open forbidden doors, to walk in the dark humming to keep up our courage.
Now, Le Sang d’un Poète is only a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body. There the actions link as they please, under so feeble a control that one could not ascribe it to the mind. Rather to a kind of somnolence helping memories to break out, free to combine, to entwine, to distort themselves until they take shape unknown to us and become for us an enigma.
Nowhere is less fitted than France for the exercise of this faculty which has recourse neither to reason nor to symbols. Few French people are prepared to enjoy an exceptional event without knowing its source, its object, or without investigating it. They prefer to laugh at it and treat it with contempt.
The symbol is their last resort. It gives them some scope. It also allows them to explain the incomprehensible and to endow with hidden meaning whatever draws its beauty from not having any. ‘Why? Is it a joke? Whose leg are you pulling?’ are the weapons that France uses against the new form, which some proud spirit takes on when it manifests itself, contrary to all expectation, and intrigues a few of the open-minded.
These few open-minded people are at once taken to be accomplices. Sometimes snobs, who have inherited the flair of kings, follow them blindly. This creates a mix-up which the general public cold-shoulders, incapable of recognizing the signs of a new embryonic form which it will acclaim tomorrow. And so forth. The marvellous then, since a prodigy can only be a prodigy in so far as a natural phenomenon still eludes us, would be not the miracle that sickens by the disorder it causes, but the simple miracle, human and absolutely down to earth, which consists in giving to objects and to people an unusual quality that defies analysis. As is proved to us by Vermeer of Delft.
This painter certainly paints what he sees, but such accuracy, pleasing to everyone, shows us where he deviates from it. For if he does not use any artifice to surpris
e us, our surprise is the more profound, faced with the peculiarities which earn him his uniqueness and preclude us from making the slightest comparison between his work and that of his contemporaries. Any other painter of the same school paints with the same frankness. It is a pity that such frankness does not divulge any secret for us. In Vermeer space is peopled from another world than the one he depicts. The subject of his picture is only a pretext, a vehicle through which to express the realm of the marvellous.
This is what I was coming to: that the cinematograph can ally itself with the marvellous, as I see it, if it is content to be a vehicle for it and if it does not try to produce it. The kind of rapture that transports us when in contact with certain works is seldom due to any attempt to move us to tears, or to any surprise effect. It is rather, I repeat, induced in an inexplicable manner by a breach which opens unawares.
This breach will occur in a film in the same way as in a tragedy, a novel or a poem. The rapture will not come from its opportunities for trickery. It will come from some error, from some syncope, from some chance encounter between the attention and inattention of its author.* Why should he behave differently from the Muses? His talent for deceiving the eye and the mind also deceives one about his claim to nobility.
Cinematography is an art. It will free itself from the industrial bondage whose platitudes no more condemn it than bad pictures and bad books discredit painting and literature.
But, for mercy’s sake, don’t go taking it for a magician. This is the way people talk about a craftsman, avoiding by this term fathoming his ventures. His gift does not lie in card tricks. He goes beyond jugglery. That is only his syntax. It is elsewhere that we must salute the marvellous. Le Sang d’un Poète contains no magic, nor does La Belle et la Bête.
The characters in the latter film obey the rule of fairy-tales. Nothing surprises them in a world where things are accepted as normal, the least of which would disrupt the mechanism of ours. When Beauty’s necklace changes into a piece of old rope, it is not this phenomenon that shocks her sisters, but the fact that it changes into rope because they touch it.
And if the marvellous is to be found in my film, it is not in this direction that one should expect it; it will show rather in the eyes of the Beast when he says to Beauty: ‘You caress me as one caresses an animal’, and she answers him: ‘But you are an animal.’
Indolence, in the robes of a judge, condemns, in our poetic ventures, what it considers unpoetic, basing its verdict upon that semblance of the marvellous of which I am speaking, and deaf to the marvellous if it does not bear its attributes.
When one sees fairies they disappear. They only help us in a guise which makes them unrecognizable and are only present through the sudden unwonted grace of familiar objects into which they disguise themselves in order to keep us company. It is then that their help becomes effective and not when they appear and dazzle us with lights. It is the same with everything. In La Belle et la Bête I have not made use of that slope down which the public would like to slide more and more rapidly without it being spared any dizziness.
I persist in repeating: Marvels and Poetry are not my affair. They must ambush me. My itinerary must not foresee them. If I opine that a certain shady place is more favourable than another to shelter them, I am cheating. For it may happen that a road exposed to full sunlight shelters them better.
This is why I care to live just as much in Beauty’s family as in the Beast’s castle. This is why fairy-like atmosphere means more to me than the fairy element itself. This is why the episode, among others, of the sedan chairs in the farmyard, an episode which does not spring from any phantasy, is, in my opinion, more significant of this fairy quality than any artifice of the castle.
In Le Sang d’un Poète, the blood that flows throughout the film disturbs our critics. What is the point, they ask, of disgusting and shocking us on purpose? This blood which sickens us compels us to turn our heads away and prevents us from enjoying the happy inventions (by happy inventions they mean: the entry into the mirror, the statue that moves, the heart that beats), but from one to another of these shocks that awaken them what link is there, I ask you, except this blood which flows and from which the film derives its title? What do they know of the great river, those who only want to enjoy the ports of call? And what would these happy inventions, as they call them, be worth, if they were not the result of an architecture, even if an unconscious one, and connected to the rest by this bond of blood? They sleep and think that I sleep and that my awakening wakens them. Their torpor condemns them to taste nothing of a meal but the pepper. They feel nothing but the pricks. It is these that excite them, give them the fidgets, compel them to run from place to place.
In L’Eternel Retour the lovers’ castle seems to them right for poetry. The brother’s and sister’s garage wrong. They condemn it. Strange foolishness. Because it is precisely in this garage that poetry functions best. In fact to understand the surrender of the brother and sister to their innate and, as it were, organic disregard of grace, poetry is at our finger-tips—and I draw closer to the terrible mysteries of love.
Such is the fruit of certain experiments I have made, which I am still carrying out, and which are the sole object of my quest.
As Montaigne says: ‘Most of Aesop’s fables have several meanings and interpretations. Those who make myths of them choose some aspect that accords well with the fable; but for the most part this is only the first superficial aspect, and there are others more vital, more essential and innate, which they have been unable to penetrate.’
* And the capacity for wonder of the spectator. You get nothing for nothing.
ON FRIENDSHIP
THE PRINCE DE POLIGNAC USED TO SAY: ‘I DON’T really like other people.’ But when his wife asks him: ‘Why are you so gloomy?’ and he replies: ‘I like some people and some people like me,’ and adds: ‘Alas! They are not the same people,’ he admits his loneliness. I like other people and only exist through them. Without them the balls I serve go into the net. Without them my flame burns low. Without them my flame sinks. Without them I am a ghost. If I withdraw from my friends I seek their shadows.
Sometimes stupidity and lack of culture take their place. I am taken in by the slightest kindness. But then, how am I to make myself understood? They do not know what I am talking about. So therefore I must find a means of being understood. Do I go too fast? Is it due to syncopation? Are the letters of my words not large enough? I search. I find. I speak. They listen to me. And this is not the need for exercise. It is the taste for human contact.
I have said somewhere that I am better at making friends than at making love. Love is mainly an affair of short spasms. If these spasms disappoint us, love dies. It is very seldom that it weathers the experience and becomes friendship. Friendship between man and woman is delicate; it is still a form of love. In it jealousy is disguised. Friendship is a quiet spasm. Without possessiveness. The happiness of a friend delights us. It adds to us. It takes nothing away. If friendship takes offence at this, it does not exist. It is a love that conceals itself. I strongly suspect that this passion for friendship that I have always had comes to me from the sons of whom I am cheated. As I cannot have them I invent them. I should like to educate them. But I perceive that it is they who educate me. Apart from the fact that youth, and its presence in our house, compels us never to take any step which could not set it an example, it has weapons suited to its struggles for which ours are out of date. We have to learn from it. It has little to learn from us. Later our essence impregnates it and makes for it a soil in which to bloom. Words are futile. In my school one would hear the flight of a fly. And I’m a chatterbox.
The giving of guidance if asked for is quite another thing. I don’t excel in that either. I talk fluently about something else and it is by this means that I am of service.
Max Jacob used to say to me: ‘You have no sense of companionship.’ He was right. What Wilde said to Pierre Louys suits me better. Failing to understa
nd him, he made a scandal of it: ‘I have no friends. I have only lovers.’ A dangerous construction if it comes to the ears of the police or a man of letters. He meant to say that he always went to extremes. I think in this he was simply putting on side. He might have said: ‘I only have companions.’ And if I had been Pierre Louys, I should have been still more offended.
Where would I find pleasure in companionship? When I trail from café to café, from studio to studio, arm in arm with companions? Friendship occupies all my time, and if any work distracts me from it, I dedicate this to it. It (friendship) saves me from that anguish men experience as they grow old.
Youth is not what my friends want of me and theirs only interests me in so far as it reflects their shadow. Each one uses it to his advantage, enjoys his fun where he finds it. Tries to remain worthy of the other. And time flies.
‘Our attempt at culture came to a sad end,’ said Verlaine. Alas how many failures I record! There was reason enough for flight. But the soul is tenacious. Destroy its niche, it rebuilds it.
Garros’s plane is on fire. It crashes. Jean le Roy arranges my letters fan-shape on his mess-tin. He grasps his machine-gun. He dies. Typhoid carries off Radiguet. Marcel Khill is killed in Alsace. The Gestapo tortures Jean Desbordes.
I know quite well that I used to seek the friendship of machines that spin too fast and wear themselves out dramatically. Today paternal instinct keeps me away from them. I turn towards those who are not marked with the evil star. Cursed be it! I detest it. Once again I warm my carcase in the sunshine.