It's not unusual nowadays for broking firms - four in this case - to get together to set up their own network to develop long-term relationships with interested insurers; establish their own branded products; foster regular contact with each other and adopt joint marketing...

OFFENBACH Orpheus in the Underworld * Marek Janowski, cond; William Workman (Pluto/Aristaeus); Kurt Marschner (Orpheus); Elisabeth Steiner (Eurydice); Liselotte Pulver (Public Opinion); Toni Blankenheim (Jupiter); Inge Meysel (Juno); Theo Lingen (John Styx); Hamburg St PO; Hamburg St Op Ballet & Ch * ARTHAUS 101...

Orpheus simultaneously presents two aspects of the poetic process: that of the poet—Cocteau; and that of an ideal poetic instrument—the cinema…. The central theme of Orpheus is poetry's all-pervading power.

Perhaps the most tell-tale tip-off to the nature of the "Orpheus" of Jean Cocteau … is thoughtfully offered by the author in a signed statement in the program: "When I make a film," says M. Cocteau, "it is a slumber and I dream." That is as fair a forewarning as any that we can provide to the curious conceits of fancy that you may expect in this film. For plainly the writer-director has let his imagination roam through a drama of images that resemble the vagr...

I cannot pretend to know what [Orpheus] all means, and I have a lurking suspicion that Cocteau doesn't know either, but I do know that it sent me out of the theatre quivering with excitement, and more provocatively engaged than I have been by any film for seasons. Cocteau, of course, has two prevailing ideas, that run like coloured thread through all his work: the idea of a poet as an extra-sensory medium, and the idea of a hungry marriage between life and death. He twists these two ideas together in...