Rhythm of Africa
Produced and conceived by French filmmakers Jean Cocteau and François Villiers, with a screenplay by Langston Hughes, Rhythm of Africa takes a look at the special ceremonial dance of atonement in Chad. The heartbeat of the jungle, the day-to-day life in the modernizing village, and the bustling marketplace take on a hypnotizing rhythm of their own. A changing Africa asserts itself in a changing world.
Jean Cocteau
François Villiers
Also Directed by Jean Cocteau
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.
At the Café des Poètes in Paris, a fight breaks out between the poet Orphée and a group of resentful upstarts. A rival poet, Cègeste, is killed, and a mysterious princess insists on taking Orpheus and the body away in her Rolls-Royce. Orphée soon finds himself in the underworld, where the Princess announces that she is, in fact, Death. Orpheus escapes in the car back to the land of the living, only to become obsessed with the car radio. This film is the central part of Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, which consists of The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).
Just a couple of months before his death, in August 1963, he made one last film: a 25-minute short entitled Jean Cocteau s’adresse à l’an 2000 (Cocteau addresses the year 2000). 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 wrapped up, sealed and posted on 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). If in The Testament Cocteau portrays himself as a living anachronism, a lonesome classical modernist loitering in space-time in the same buckskin jacket and tie 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.
Told in four episodes, an unnamed artist is transported through a mirror into another dimension, where he travels through various bizarre scenarios. This film is the first part of Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, which consists of The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).
Political intrigue and psychological drama run parallel. The queen is in seclusion, veiling her face for the ten years since her husband's assassination, longing to join him in death. Stanislas, a poet whose pen name is Azrael, is a suicidal anarchist, his imagination haunted into hate by longing for this queen who's drawn apart. He enters her private quarters intent on killing her then himself, but they fall in love, in part because he looks like the king. Stanislas wants her to regain political power by appearing to the public, and she tries to convince him to find hope and escape. All the while, the queen's enemies plot to keep the lovers together but to thwart their plans.
A short film about a famous writer (acted by Cocteau himself) who loses control of his hand and begins to write letters and articles denouncing himself.
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.
Outside time and reality, the experiences of a poet. The judgement of the young poet by Heurtebise and the Princess, the Gypsies, the palace of Pallas Athena, the spear of the Goddess which pierces the poet's heart, the temptation of the Sphinx, the flight of Oedipus and the final Assumption. This film is the third part of Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, which consists of The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).
8 × 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements (1957) is an American experimental film directed by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau released on March 15, 1957 in New York City. It features original music by Robert Abramson, John Gruen and Douglas Townsend. Described by Richter as "part Freud, part Lewis Carroll", it is a fairy tale for the subconscious based on the game of chess. While living in New York, Hans Richter directed two feature films, Dreams That Money Can Buy and 8x8: A Chess Sonata in collaboration with Max Ernst, Cocteau, Paul Bowles, Fernand Léger, Alexander Calder, Duchamp, and others, which was partially filmed on the lawn of his summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.
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.
Also Directed by François Villiers
A Canadian sailor (Jean-Pierre Aumont) becomes a fugitive for love after a night with a woman (Maria Montez) in Marseille.
In 1943, a group of high school students decide to take action against the Nazi occupying forces. Showing courage and imagination, they manage to blow up the Kommandantur and to release hostages. But after the killing of a German soldier the Nazi police apparatus strikes back. The young resisters are arrested and two of them are condemned to death.
In this crime drama, Michel Simon is cast as Pierrot, an elderly gangster who does not fit the stereotype -- he is soft-hearted. After a petty criminal betrays his cohorts by taking off with the loot from a big robbery, he is caught and sent to jail. Now he has served his time, and Pierrot is given the task of retrieving the stolen cash. The tyro criminal tries to use a pretty young woman who has fallen in love with him as a red herring for Pierrot's investigation. Everything backfires though, and Pierrot is left considering what to do with the loot, and with the criminal who does not yet realize he loves his attractive accomplice and could have a good life with her if he opts for walking the straight and narrow.
In this unusual feature, Manika (Ayesha Dharker) is a girl born in a Catholic family in a south Indian fishing village is convinced that she has recently had a former life as a Brahman wife in Nepal. Her parish priest, Father Daniel (Julian Sands) is under orders to convince her otherwise, as reincarnation does not accord with official Catholic doctrine. Instead, he agrees to journey with her to the site of her dreams of a previous life. Once there, they discover that all is just as she had dreamed it, and her former husband has remarried despite promising not to. Her arrival on the scene does not disturb the man, but it really upsets his new wife, who departs with her baby. Manika decides that it helps no one for her to remain there in Nepal, and returns to her home in the south. However, all this has caused a genuine crisis of faith for the priest who, witnessing all this, has had to grapple with some irreconcilable issues.
"Black Friendship" - 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.
The heroine in L'Eau Vive is the unwilling heir to a fortune. Young Hortense (Pascale Audret) has always known that her family was greedy, but until she inherits her father's hidden millions she has no idea how loathsome her relatives could be. Surrounded on all sides by grubby, outstretched hands, Hortense takes some comfort in the fact that her legacy is still missing. When the money is finally recovered, our heroine does the "right thing" with her windfall, leaving her mercenary family empty-handed. Throughout the film, Hortense's dilemma is likened to a government dam project not far from her home; as the bridge grows in size, so too does Hortense's resolve to rise above the nastiness all around her.
Rear Window meets Estate violenta. The middle-aged Constance watches a young couple that lives across the courtyard; the girl plays loud pop music and goes out of her way to be unpleasant to the classically educated and piano-playing Constance. Then one day Constance sees the boyfriend strangle the little tart in a fit of jealousy. He sees her, too, and has nobody else to turn to for help. Constance keeps silent about the murder and offers the young Hugo a place in her bed. Then the blackmail notes start to arrive...