The French writer Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) explored nostalgia for childhood and adolescence, frustration in love, and fear of solitude and death. Jean Cocteau was born in a suburb of Paris and brought up in a well-to-do home frequented by the artistic...

Jean Cocteau's role in twentieth-century French poetry is not unlike that of the rather too talkative Sphinx in his play, La Machine infernale (1934; translated as The Infernal Machine, 1936), who asks of Oedipus the well-known, oft-repeated riddle but...

Jean Cocteau was first introduced to the Parisian public in 1908, when he was eighteen. The colorful and popular actor Edouard de Max, with colleagues from the Comédie-Française, gave a public reading of his friend's poems at a theater on...

"The worst tragedy for a poet," Jean Cocteau wrote in 1926, "is to be admired through being misunderstood." Yet that is what has happened to Cocteau. Indeed, he may be the most famous 20th-century artist whose works remain unknown. A respected poet in...

Is there an example in the history of cinema of a poet and writer turned filmmaker to compare with that of Jean Cocteau? One other name comes to mind--Pier Paolo Pasolini. But Cocteau's life, because it was longer and because he lived earlier,...

It's one of the functions of anniversary celebrations to evoke happy memories, and on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Zabriskie Gallery in New York, I want to recall an event from the spring of 1979. To do so, however,...

Opera, it might be said, is a kind of madhouse: Musically, it pushes vocal capacities to the breaking point; dramatically, its protagonists are often in the grip of something so grievous that suicide may be the only way out. In Cooperstown, N.Y., where Glimmerglass Opera...

In the following essay, Long contrasts the mythical, dramatic, and cinematic versions of Orphée, emphasizing Cocteau's versions of the Greek myth.

In the following essay, Franko discusses the presentation of gay identity and gender roles in Cocteau's “Une leçon de théâtre: Le numéro Barbette” and the Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno's performance of the piece Suiren.

In the following essay, Hatte examines the significance of the appearance of snow in Les Enfants terribles and its meaning to the “mythology” of Cocteau's other works.