Thursday, August 25, 2005

Cocteau's Orphee

I heard today Helen Sword's talk on various metamorphoses of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. It was fascinating. Particularly interesting to me were, of course, Rilke and other poets who wrote on the myth from many different perspectives: H.D., D.H. Lawrence, Denise Levertov, Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Rich, Sheamus Heaney, among others. Each of them calls for a closer look. Then we saw some sequences from Jean Cocteau's Orphee (1949) which I have't seen for at least a quarter of a century.

At night I rerun the whole film at home. It's a masterpiece. It's quite faithful in tracing the original (whose original, by the way?) plot of the myth, with the Death and her chauffeur (Hermes the messenger?) depicted as humanly as possible.

This then will be the subject of an essay I'm asked to write on the subject of "l'invisible."

Homework: How is Cocteau's own drama of Orphee (1926) converted in the film retelling?