Cocteau, Jean - Annette Shandler Levitt (essay date January-March 1988)
Annette Shandler Levitt (essay date January-March 1988)
SOURCE: Levitt, Annette Shandler. “Breasts, Couples, Children and Other Clichés: Visual/Verbal Imagery in Surrealist Drama.” Word & Image 4, no. 1 (January-March 1988): 292-96.
[In the following essay, Levitt examines the relationship between art and reality in Cocteau's Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel.]
In the first moments of Les Mystères de l'amour (1924), his only play labelled “drame surréaliste,” Roger Vitrac uses visual imagery to initiate a radical shift from conventional staging. The play opens with a Prologue in which the protagonist is seen “tracing sinuous lines in the mud with a stick.” He is, he tells a policeman, “finishing off [the] hair” of a female portrait painted on the wall of a house. According to the stage directions, “He leaves, tracing a sinuous line. The curtain slowly falls” (p. 229)1. In this brief...
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