Extending the analogy between the individual and the epoch, one can say that a literary trend is to its time what a dream is to man: an activity propelled by an unconscious design, which rebels against limits imposed by the conscience only in order to enlarge the scope of the conscience and the literature that inspires it. …

[Literature drawing on the orphic tradition] is diametrically opposed to realism. … These works therefore take advantage of everything in the dream that is undefined, ambiguous, in the sense that, just as it is difficult to find out whether the content of a dream is desired or feared, passionately longed for or violently recoiled from.

In tracing the place of the myth of Orpheus in the French literary tradition of the last one hundred years, Eva Kushner suggests three periods which reflect increasingly pessimistic visions of man's power and potential. The first period encompasses the writers of the 1885 generation (Grandmougin, Delorme, de Launay, Mallarmé) for whom Orphée was an inspiration, a guide whose heroic actions represented the first triumph of the free spirit over the forces of fate, over the Bacchantes.¹ For this pre-World War I visionary company, faith in man, goodness, and progress seemed to thrive on the most optimistic images of a dreamlike world. However, the writers of the post-World War I world saw Orphée as more limited, stressing his role as a poet and treating art as a religion. This generation (including Gide, Apollinaire, Valéry, Segalen, Maurras, Barzun) demonstrated the increasingly psychological concerns of French thought freed of illusions, what she terms “a scrupulously sincere analysis of the self, the ego.”² Gide, she points out, idealizes Orphée as the singer whose marvelous influence alone can put an end to the eternal torments of the Shadows of Hell.³ The world of Hell, which is the world of nightmares, threatens to erupt and consume, but at this stage can be tamed.

The third period, including Dada and surrealism, reveals the influence of Freud and provides yet another revision of the myth which stresses the importance of the mysterious figure of Eurydice.⁴ Orphée and Eurydice come to represent two poles: Orphée embodies truth and spirit and is tempted to the realm of Hell or instinct by Eurydice. The myth no longer affirms the grandeur of man. This generation suggests that Orphée (unconsciously) wished to be rid of his wife, who for him is the obsessive image of the Mother, the obstacle to the free development of Man. Woman becomes a symbol of Death and a perpetual menace to the creative spirit of Orphée. Or, Orphée becomes a man divided against himself in whom light and darkness cohabit.⁵ It is to this generation that Cocteau belongs. Cocteau embroiders strands of the nightmare into the Orphic tale by inventing a tempting, Vampirish figure of Death—the very opposite of loving, domestic Eurydice.

Yet, as Kushner herself points out, the writers who chose to resurrect this classical myth were a company of solitaries: Victor Segalen, Cocteau, Anouilh, Pierre Jean Jouve, and Pierre Emmanuel. The works of Baudelaire, Sade, Lautréamont, and Rimbaud constitute a broader tradition in the history of French literature which prefigures the Surrealists' interest in eroticism and hellish underworlds. Many of these writers, and many of the Symbolist painters as well, share a passionate urge to enter, decipher, and depict a world of nightmares. For Cocteau, who rejected and was rejected by the Surrealists, the key to that world was opium during the day, his dreams at night. A great number of his works, but most especially his films, focus on the mirror-thin borderline between reality and dream, Earth and Hell, love and hate, life and death, banality and art which the poet strives to transgress.

From 1924-25 Cocteau was an opium addict, later a steady user, and spent much of his time in and out of sanitoriums where, when off opium, he transposed his opium visions.⁶ At Villefranche he would smoke opium and spend his days sitting in front of the mirror “watching himself die.”⁷ Mirrors were the membrane “where Death comes and goes.”⁸ Opium for Cocteau was a transporting medium which, by causing the death of the exterior, allowed the interior to flourish. He said in Professional Secrets that “Life and death are as far apart from one another as heads and tails of a coin, but opium goes through the coin.”⁹ In his films the mirror recurs again and again as the passageway between the worlds of Life and Death, between reality and dream.

In an interview with André Fraigneau he attributes the same power to dreams:

I live intensely only in dreams. My dreams are detailed, terribly realistic. They involve me in innumerable adventures, in contact with places and people who do not exist in a waking state and who are made up for me by the phenomenon of dreaming down to the smallest word. I try to rub it all out in the morning, dreading to confuse the two worlds and add the incomprehensible to the incomprehensible.

Naturally enough, I have no fear of death which seems to me a haven.¹⁰

In the same interview he confesses that film work becomes for him a similar addiction. He makes his first film in 1930, when he has given up opium.

… that [film] work, as I was saying, is so compact and takes one so far away from the world and its ways that it comes to resemble dreaming in that the people and the happenings of the film become the only things that matter.¹¹

On the other side of addiction or obsession Cocteau feared the pull of the void; he preferred the somnambulist's living death to the banality and emptiness of the mundane. Possession is the sine qua non of the poet. “Unless I happen to become the vehicle of an unknown force, which I then clumsily help to take shape, I cannot read, or write, or even think.”¹²

Death then is Cocteau's passion, and it is from his imaginings and dreams of that world that he claims that the figures and decor of certain of his plays and films are fabricated. He often spoke of Death as an Angel, who, like the poet, shuttles back and forth between life and death, between the visible and the invisible.¹³ Further elaborating the rituals of his writing, he spoke of five successive deaths which were required to transfer his poetry from his self to the world:¹⁴

1. the death of “opium consciousness.”
2. the death of traditional art forms.
3. the death of the poet during actual creation.
4. the death of the purity of the original vision as it is adapted and transformed.
5. the death of the poet's presence with the finished work of art.

Cocteau felt that he died after each poetic passage, and became another “I.”¹⁵ Narcissus was as frequent a visitor to the world of his works as Orpheus.

Cocteau's obsession with death was certainly a result of his acquaintance with death at an early age, an acquaintance that returned all too often. His father committed suicide when Cocteau was nine years old in 1898. His love of Raymond Radiguet ended with his death at age twenty in 1923, a grief eased with the help of opium. In 1944 he lost two other close friends at the hands of the Germans: Max Jacob at the Drancy camp; Jean Desbordes tortured by the Gestapo; La Belle et la Bête opened in 1946.¹⁶ His mother died before he began work on the film Orphée; his sister died before his creation of Le Testament d'Orphée. His fascination with the population of the world of death suggests his deep desire to join these lost loves there. Opium and art were his ways of entering that world.

Is this world of opium and dreams a nightmare world for Cocteau? Although the figures who populate that world, from his necessarily unverifiable accounts, resemble those of classical nightmares, Cocteau claims an inverted relationship of pleasure to that world, dreading, fearing, avoiding the ordinariness of the everyday world of light. Rather than using writing and filming to tame those worlds, he needed to keep those worlds alive and vivid as his primary source of imagery. John E. Mack has claimed in Nightmares and Human Conflict that creativity and madness are alternatives.¹⁷ Although I think it would be very difficult to psychoanalyse Cocteau at this distance from the realm of Death to which he was finally permanently delivered in 1963, it certainly seems that creativity and a kind of madness were divided in Cocteau's life by a very fragile line indeed. The contours and characters of Cocteau's world of Death will be traced here.

Nightmares occur in various works throughout Cocteau's career: the prophetic, somnambulist nightmare of Elisabeth in Les Enfants terribles (1925); the dream of Jocaste in La Machine infernale (1934) in which a mass of matter that sticks to her acquires a mouth as had the hand of the poet in Le Sang d'un poète (1930). Yet it is in the film work of Cocteau that the dream achieves its greatest hegemony and clarity, so permeating each shot of the film that we begin to wonder when the dream begins and ends. Most attractive of film's virtues to Cocteau was the freedom with which time and space could be manipulated, freeing man from his physical limitations.¹⁸ It is this flexibility of movement backward and forward, slow and fast, far and near which characterizes the dreamers in Cocteau's films who traverse mirrors at the bequest of a female temptress and float forward and backward in time and space. Early on Cocteau realized that vagueness would not suffice for the depiction of a dream world. He says of his friend and technical director Berard:

He was the only one to understand that the marvelous cannot be evoked through vagueness, and that mystery exists only in precise things. He also knew that nothing is easier to create than false fantasy in the film world.¹⁹

It is obvious in this statement that Cocteau does not clearly distinguish his states of mystery, fantasy, dream, poetry, intoxication, and nightmare, states which seem to exist on one flowing continuum of intensified experience. Similarly it is rather difficult to label just what is dream and what is nightmare in his films, or who is the dreamer and what is dreamed. The interpretation of a sequence as nightmare seems paradigmatically a function of point of view. The points of view of the author (from written accounts, cinematic treatment, and voice-over texts), characters (from actions, reactions, and dialogue) and spectator (who matches these images with her own and with psychological paradigms) often diverge. Pleasure and pain, desire and repulsion, dream and nightmare are very closely wedded in Cocteau's imagery, as I will show in three films: Le Sang d'un poète, Orphée, and Le Testament d'Orphée. The overwhelming terror, helplessness, paralysis, and threat of extinction which the dreamer experiences in the classic nightmare rarely occur in full force in Cocteau's world, where death is seen as a refuge from the world of the ordinary.²⁰ I will concentrate here on the figure of Death in her many incarnations, for it is she who controls the life of the dreamer.

The three main incidents in Le Sang d'un poète are framed by two shots of a tower's collapse, suggesting that the events of the film take place in an instant, although the events within each incident are slow and attenuated. This framing event is both wondrous and terrifying, with clear connotations of castration, a proper metaphor, one can argue, for the poet's tormented relationship with his controlling muse. There is no dreamer specifically posited, although we hear the disembodied voice of Cocteau. The next sequence involving the hand-mouth dramatizes the frightful, devouring orality characteristic of certain nightmares, yet also makes clear the poet's pleasure in this self-seducing body part, even as he tries to resist temptation. The artist, drawing a portrait, discovers that the mouth of his figure is a real one, attempts to erase it, and finds the mouth embedded in his hand (vaguely resembling the deep ovoid scar that marks his naked shoulder). He discovers the hand as it sends bubbles up from a basin of water; he tries deperately to shake it off. In alternate shots plaster body parts are substituted, introducing the theme of the inanimate. The mouth pleads for air, which the artist gives it at the window.

Here the anxiety of the artist wanes and his erotic encounter begins. He raises those lips to his lips, and slips them over his body, resting at each breast in masturbatory ecstasy, his eyes painted wide-open on his closed eyelids, suggesting the illusory wide-awake state of the dreamer whose eyes are really closed. Traces of moisture are left as the hand-mouth moves over his body as his hand moves down. An incident which had seemed comic at first turns more serious and sensual. The next morning, as the voice-over informs us of the passage of time, we see the artist asleep, his hand-lips uttering the incoherent sputters of the dreamer. He awakens. We infer that the previous episode was not a dream, because the mouth is still there. His anxiety and anger censor the sensuality he had experienced before. He viciously approaches a statue from behind and holds the mouth over hers, transferring it to her in a gesture of triumph. The statue in her monodic, hypnotic voice refers to the mouth as a wound.

Reticent about inflicting any one interpretation, Cocteau nevertheless offers one in the form of a talk given at a showing of the film in 1932: “I could say:

The solitude of the poet is so great, he lives out his creations so vividly that the mouth of one of his creations is imprinted on his hand like a wound; that he loves this mouth, that he loves himself, in other words; that he wakes up in the morning with his mouth against him like a chance acquaintance; that he tries to get rid of it, that he gets rid of it, on a dead statue—that this statue comes to life—that it takes revenge; that it sends him off into terrible adventures. I could tell you that the snowball fight represents the poet's childhood and that he plays the card game with his Glory, with his Destiny, he cheats by drawing from his childhood instead of from within himself. I could tell you that afterwards, when he has tried to create a terrestrial glory for himself, he falls into that “mortal tedium of immortality” that one always dreams of when in front of famous tombs.²¹

The symbolic objects in the film we can infer to be projections and personifications of his emotions and thoughts, exhibiting all the characteristics of primary process thinking: symbolization, condensation, displacement, distortion, and projection.²² The actions of this sequence suggest an enactment of the mechanisms of repression of both erotic and poetic urges, which Cocteau shows us are one.

The problematic and transitional figure here is the statue-woman, who, like the Princess in Orphée and Le Testament d'Orphée, invites or orders the poet to enter through the mirror to the world beyond and resembles in many of her aspects Ernest Jones' paradigm of the vampire. In Le Sang d'un poète the statue is less hostile and bitter than she will become in the later films. When the poet awakes she is in the form of a classical plaster statue, armless, with short hair and an androgynous head that resembles the poet's, but with the body and features of a woman. After the lovemaking Cocteau had cut in a strange plaster mask that rotates back and forth with a suggestion of disapproval, preparing us for the arrival of the female figure. She also resembles the figure in the drawing whose lips become embedded in his hand. It is the voice of a woman that, through those lips, beseeches him for air. In the second sequence Cocteau specifically represents the figure of the hermaphrodite which is already suggested here. Cocteau wrestles with what he seems to consider the female aspects of his nature.

The poet approaches the statue as if half-afraid of waking her and clamps the hand-mouth over hers, which wakes her. She laughs and warns him that it is not so easy to get rid of a wound. The poet gropes along the walls of the set seen from high above and reaches a mirror which he beseeches her to open for him, as a child would ask his mother. Maternally she urges him to try. He ends up in the Hôtel des Folies Dramatiques where a series of voyeuristic adventures unfolds. This muse of poetry seems to represent inspiration and work which hold him in a love-hate relationship. The violent and voyeuristic nature of the next scenes suggest the loosely connected episodes of a dream.

The motion of the dreamer through the hallways of the Hotel of Dramatic Follies resembles the paralyzed efforts we experience in nightmares. Yet the motion is endowed with sensuality as the half-bare torso strains in slow motion against physical odds as he moves against gravity from door to door on this voyage of discovery. Like the lascivious, sadistic stare of the man in Un Chien Andalou, the poet seems to enjoy what he sees through the keyhole; yet to the spectator the images seem nighmarish: a Mexican is shot and reconstructed in reverse motion; a girl is kept hanging from the wall and ceiling to avoid the whip lashes and raised fist of a spinsterish woman; Chinese eyes stare out from an opium den; a Hermaphrodite raises a loincloth revealing a pillow warning: Danger of Death. The poet's responses to these views seem charged with eroticism as he quite literally climbs the walls to gain a better viewpoint. Freed from the mechanisms of repression, the poet experiences pleasure at these sights, but is subsequently punished: he shoots himself with a gun handed to him at the end of the hallway.

Returning through the mirror, he must encounter the imperious figure of the statue who is a perfect, neutral, white plaster screen for the projection of guilt feelings and who provides remonstrances as well. This repressed hostility, which Jones considers central in the incarnation of a vampire figure, is unleashed on her as he smashes the statue wildly, blaming her for his perilous journey.²³ The plaster dust from the smashed statue covers him so that he looks like a statue himself, and the voice-over warns: “by breaking statues one risks turning into one oneself.” This warning throws the story back to a childhood incident which begins with schoolboys pelting a statue with snowballs, suggesting the psychological genesis of the violence and initiating the scene which is most clearly nightmarish: the gagging on blood of a fallen comrade.

The statuesque woman reappears in this scene as a cosmopolitan woman who deals out the destiny of the poet in a cardgame: again, his death at his own hands. She sits opposite the poet at a cardtable that rests on the body of the schoolboy. They nonchalantly play cards as an audience of elegantly dressed aristocrats watches them from the stone loges above. Stealing his life away, the poet takes the ace of hearts from the little boy's pocket. The haughtiness of this elegant company is contrasted with the benevolent appearance of a supernatural creature: a polished, black, angel-man who lies over the little boy and envelops him in a cape. The guardian angel spirits the body of the boy up the stairs, taking the ace of hearts from the poet's hand. The homosexuality of these actions is evident.

We return to the woman who scornfully stares at the poet and warns him that he is lost if he does not hold the ace. The poet again shoots himself, which the audience applauds, confirming Cocteau's statement that glory and fame are reserved for dead poets. The woman becomes a statue again, wearing black gloves up to the place where her arms had been broken off. She walks off in a trance, slowly and deliberately, her eyes painted on her eyelids, accompanied by a mythological bull with a map of Europe as a saddle. We finally see her lying down with orb and lyre, her facial features outlined in black. Opium smoke emanates from her mouth; the factory chimney completes its fall.

The figure of the woman represents poetic inspiration and death, which in Cocteau's alchemy are one and the same. She is a cold, controlling temptress who leads him on the road to death and fame. As Cocteau stated in his talk at the Vieux Columbier:

The poet's work defeats and devours him. There isn't room for both the poet and his work. The work profits from the poet. Only after his death can the poet profit from the work. And anyway, the public prefers dead poets and they are right. A poet who isn't dead is an anachronism.²⁴

She is an inanimate statue who comes to life to haunt him, luring him on a trance-like journey through voyeuristic experiences of torture and death, conforming closely to Ernest Jones' description of the figure of death:

Even the idea of death itself may be used to represent this unknown being: dying is often depicted as an attack by a ruthless person who overpowers one against one's will.²⁵

A benevolent figure is introduced as her male counterpart, the black angelman whose gentleness and caring action contrast with her harsh, distant, stony visage. He is lithe, glistening, and sensuous. She resembles the surgically precise figure of Death in the play Orphée (1925-26) and the vampirish Princess in the film Orphée. He prefigures the guardian angel Heurtebise, the God among men whom Cocteau worshipped in poetry, plays, and film throughout his career. Jacques Brosse has suggested that the figure of Death first appeared to Cocteau during seances he held with friends, including Radiguet, in 1923 when a voice announced “Je suis la Mort.”²⁶ Some months later Radiguet died, seeming to confirm the prophecy, and Cocteau took up opium. During a detoxification cure and creative flurry, Cocteau wrote the play Orphée in which he introduces the female figure of Death.²⁷

Going deeper than Cocteau's own analysis might, we can infer from various facts of Cocteau's life that this figure represents his mother, the Mother, whom other contemporaries, as Kushner suggests, embodied in the figure of Eurydice, giving the myth psychological overtones proper to this century. His mother supported Cocteau financially and emotionally, introducing him to her salon world. His letters to her, after he left the household at age nineteen, show a constant need to justify himself to her. When Cocteau presented a fiancée, Mademoiselle Carlier, to his mother, she intervened and Mlle. Carlier left Cocteau. Jean returned to live at home where Mme. Cocteau welcomed his homosexual friends. The Oedipal theme is made even more explicit in Cocteau's play La Machine infernale (1934), an adaptation of the story of Oedipus and Jocasta. As they sleep together in incestuous sheets, they are propelled into horrifying nightmares which awaken them from their restless sleep.²⁸

In Blood of a Poet we could find potentially nightmarish images, but one could assert that Cocteau's personal images are overly hermetic; to use Mack's phrase: “… his capacity to relate to the world outside his own mind, must be sufficiently maintained to communicate the quality of shared illusion.”²⁹ In Orphée the feeling of a nightmare is communicated more clearly and coherently. The rhythm of the editing, the pace of the dialogue, and the threatening harshness of drums, music, and mise-en-scène suggest the hurried sense of anxiety and torture which Orphée experiences. The sinister attire of the motorcyclists and the caustic iciness of the Princess who lashes out her orders affect the audience as well. In Orphée one sees that the nightmare world for Cocteau is never really a separate world except in its physical, spatial sense. It erupts in the domestic tranquillity of the home. In that sense Cocteau shows that the world of nightmare and dream is but a psychological extension of everyday emotions and actions. It is a metaphor for the tortures of the mind's interior from day to day.

The princess, played by Maria Casarès, first appears in the café scene where she is tending to the reputation and irritability of the young poet laureate Cégeste. She has arranged the publication of his book of poetry Nudisme which contains blank pages, so that here as well she is linked irrevocably with the art of the poet. Orphée and the Princess exchange glances in which one senses their erotic attraction. He bitterly expresses his jealousy regarding the other poet's fame and following, and he is surprised when she beckons him to accompany her as a witness to the death of the young poet in an “accident” with the menacing motorcyclists. They drive off in a chauffeur-driven car on a journey reminiscent of Nosferatu. Negative images of the highway seem the landscape of a cloud world of the dream. The Princess orders him around fiercely, calling him stupid and berating him for asking questions. She is the figure of the Bitch personified, and as such, we feel, a projection of his own anger and frustration.

The dream-like quality of the actions as they unreel in a strangely lit space and hurried tempo is specified in the dialogue in which we discover that he sleeps and therefore sleep-walks:

SHE:
Dormez-vous debout?
HE:
Je crois.
SHE:
Décidément vous dormez.
HE:
Oui, je dors. C'est très curieux.
SHE:
Si vous dormez, si vous rêvez, acceptez vos rêves, c'est le rôle du dormeur.

He is in a trance, under her spell, and submits to her orders. She is the supreme Vamp, the seductress, who, like the statue, overpowers the man who is in her spell. Orpheus falls asleep, his face against a mirror which dissolves into an icy puddle on a sandy beach. Confused and anxious he awakens and returns home with Heurtebise. From then on his angers and obsessions become the nightmare of Eurydice.

In the next scene Orphée, like Juliette Janson's husband in Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'Elle, is obsessed with his radio transmissions from the Beyond which he copies down furiously. One detail from the play Orphée is worth mentioning here in tracing the morphology of Cocteau's nightmare world. In the play Orphée receives his messages through a horse who, like the wiseman Balthazar in Bresson's later incarnation, taps his hoof a number of times which Orphée translates into a letter. Orphée defends himself: “Ma nuit. Ce cheval entre dans ma nuit et il en sort comme un plongeur. Il en rapporte des phrases.”³⁰ Jones's nightmare paradigm and etymology are almost perfectly expressed here. “My night. This horse enters my night and leaves like a plunger. He brings back phrases.” A counterpart to the female figure of Death, this horse, figure of the father, communicates messages from the beyond, where his father's suicide had taken him. One of the messages the horse taps out is M-E-R-C-I, echoing Jones's etymology of the word “nightmare;” and one should not forget that the French word for mother is mère. In the film Orphée the litany of nightmare symbols is broadened. Maria Casarés' horse-like mane of hair and chin coincide with the replacement of the horse by a hearse-like car, inspired by Bresson's use of the same in Les Dames du bois de Boulogne. Death's accomplices ride through the night on motorcycles; surrogate, electrified horses. In Le Testament d'Orphée a man with a horse's head is reintroduced as a seductive figure whom Cocteau follows through a labyrinthine world. The homosexual overtones of the figure in this film are further foregrounded.

In Orphée the vampirelike sensuality of the Princess is contrasted with the simple domesticity of the wife, suggesting the Freudian paradigm of the nightmare as an expression of repressed sexual desires. His obsession with his transmissions is the extension of his trance-like subservience. In her second appearance the Princess resembles the classic succubus, watching Orphée sleep. Similarly Heurtebise watches over Eurydice. The anxious state of a nightmare is reintroduced as Orphée runs after the Princess who walks sternly through the frame in a series of disconnected spaces which constitutes a synthetic city. During this frustrating search for her, Orphée encounters the persons who will become the occupants of the world through which he travels to Hell in dreamlike motion: the angel-like figure of the vitrier carrying windowglass like wings (Heurtebise was the vitrier in the play Orphée). His fans follow, leer at, and attack him, a premonition of Fellini's haunted world in 8[frac12]. The Princess visits his room a second time.

Her function as the mediator of the dead's journey to the underworld is clarified as she spirits Eurydice in reverse motion off the bed and through the mirror, ordering her fumbling assistants around in a petulant manner, demanding a meticulous discipline. She seems the very image of the superego detached from its integrating function, the accusatory image par excellence.³¹ The judgmental quality is further elaborated as the characters appear before the judges of the underworld, who prefigure word for word Godard's depiction of computerized interrogation, a modern, totalitarian nightmare world, in Alphaville. In this court the tables begin to turn on the Princess as Orphée, with the help of Heurtebise, takes control of the journey and proceedings through the magic gloves. The Princess is accused of loving Orphée and entering his room without orders. Heurtebise is accused of loving Eurydice.

The phenomenon of incubation is made manifest in the room where the Princess and Orphée declare their passion to each other, a scene of ecstasy and pleasure, a fantasy fulfilled. At this point, the Princess suggests a key to the interpretation of the genesis of the nightmare depicted here. Orphée asks who gives the orders. She proposes an existentialist answer:

ORPHéE:
J'irai jusqu'à celui qui donne ces ordres.
LA Princesse:
Mon pauvre amour … Il n'habite nulle part. Les uns croient qu'il pense à nous, d'autres qu'il nous pense. D'autres qu'il dort et que nous sommes son rêve … son mauvais rêve.(32)

God then is the primary dreamer; the existence of man his nightmare. The nightmare becomes in the modern tradition a metaphor for all of existence. Resnais' Nuit et Brouillard whose title clearly evokes this metaphor, is the prime example: the holocaust was a nightmare come true.

Orphée's return from Hell is assured by the vanquishing force of love, temporarily that is, inasmuch as the Princess is his Death and must finally claim him. The love of Orphée and Eurydice will be tested by a nightmarish ritual: Orphée may not look at Eurydice. Shot by the angry mob who accuse him of appropriating Cégeste's poetry, Death sends him back to earth again, to be able to claim him as an immortal later on. What has been done is undone. Reverse motion awakens them all from the nightmarish spell cast on them. The whole action of the voyage to Hell and back has taken place within an instant between the ringing of the bell by a postman and the deposit of a letter, repeating the extreme temporal condensation of Blood of a Poet.

The nightmare world is most vividly suggested, in these voyages to and from Hell, by the motionless motion through space of Heurtebise and the torturous flight along walls and slow-motion paralysis of Orphée. Occupants of the underworld float by aimlessly, deformed by professional narrow-mindedness. The mirror, where one can see Death at work on the surface of the face, is again the entryway to that world.

In The Testament of Orpheus, which begins with the closing images of Orphée, Cocteau, playing himself, takes a long, dream-like voyage, led by a man-horse. The scenes are disconnected and full of references to his whole life and work, like the last dream Cocteau might dream. The Princess reappears at the table of judges, incarnating yet again the accusatory voice. She accuses him of being a nightmare image:

SHE:
Don't forget that you are a nocturnal amalgamation of caves, forests, marshes, red rivers, populated with huge and fabulous beasts who devour each other.(33)

She condemns him to a life sentence. He ambles on and on, encountering himself whom he despises and wishes to kill, a voyage like that of the Professor's dream in Wild Strawberries. Other women appear as statuesque, mythological figures: a machine that eats autographs and turns out books, and Minerva, flanked by two horsemen guards. The Sphinx with her prominent breasts, horns, and feathery wings slides along a wall, a character from La Machine infernale. Like the insectoid, angel-man in Blood of a Poet the horsemen carry away his body, speared through the shoulders. The film returns to the disconnected syntax of Blood of a Poet in this retrospective film which reiterates the judgments and thoughts that haunted Cocteau's works and world.

Thus Cocteau's nightmare visions are paradoxical and ambiguous, demonstrating that dream and nightmare in his world are contiguous realms in which eroticism and creativity cohabit. The imagination, whether awake, drugged, or dreaming shuttles back and forth with an independence of spirit and will which led Cocteau to represent it as a mythical being, the classical, controlling muse. Above all, his images represent an attempt to domesticate and control his conception of death which intimately colored and determined much of his life and work. His highly symbolic, allegorical psychodramas represent in separate figures the conflicting impulses of the mind and body, battling, tormenting, and tempting each other. Well aware of the Freudian paradigm, Cocteau, in his films and literary works, attempts to project on the blank screen and page a host of fears and frenzies. Whether or not the images actually represent the troubled workings of Cocteau's self can only be left to speculation.

Yet as such his films greatly influenced his psychologically obsessed French contemporaries and especially the romantic visionaries of the American avant-garde. His free-wheeling conception of film space and time, his intrusive, subjective, and often literary narrations, his rejection of photographic realism in certain instances, and his imaginative annexation of symbolic objects juxtaposed freely in an original context greatly influenced the avant-garde who followed him on his labyrinthine subjective meanderings. Claiming that he merely documented scenes from another realm, Cocteau said:

There is nothing we cannot convey in a film, provided we succeed in investing it with a force of expression sufficient for changing our phantasms into underniable facts.³⁴

Notes

1. Eva Kushner, Le Mythe d'Orphée dans la littérature française contemporaine (Paris: A. G. Nizet Publishers, 1961), p. 21.

2. Kushner, p. 22.

3. Kushner, p. 22.

4. Kushner, p. 23.

5. Kushner, p. 25.

6. Arthur Evans, Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity (Philadelphia: Art Alliance Press, 1977), pp. 38-39.

7. Jean Cocteau quoted in Evans, p. 39.

8. Cocteau quoted in Evans, p. 44.

9. Cocteau quoted in Evans, p. 36.

10. André Fraigneau, Cocteau on Film: Conversations with Jean Cocteau (New York: Dover, 1972), pp. 25-26.

11. Cocteau in Fraigneau, p. 26.

12. Cocteau in Fraigneau, pp. 22-23.

13. Evans, p. 32.

14. Evans, p. 49.

15. Evans, p. 52.

16. Jacques Brosse, Jean Cocteau: Orphée, Extraits de la tragédie d'Orphée ainsi que des films Orphée et Le Testament d'Orphée. (Paris: Bordas, 1973), pp. 6-9.

17. John E. Mack, Nightmares and Human Conflict (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1974), p. 99.

18. Evans, p. 46.

19. Evans, p. 41.

20. Mack, pp. 12, 16-17.

21. Jean Cocteau, “Postscript” in Jean Cocteau: Two Screenplays, trans. Carol Martin-Sperry (New York: Orion Press, 1968), p. 65.

22. Mack, p. 65.

23. Ernest Jones, On the Nightmare (New York: Liveright, 1971), p. 113.

24. Jean Cocteau, “Postscript,” p. 67.

25. Jones, p. 106.

26. Brosse, p. 35.

27. Brosse, p. 5.

28. Jean Cocteau, La Machine infernale (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1934), pp. 153-56.

29. Mack, p. 99.

30. Jean Cocteau, Orphée, p. 45.

31. Mack, p. 66.

32. Cocteau, filmscript of Orphée, p. 97.

33. Cocteau, filmscript of The Testament of Orpheus, p. 108.

34. Cocteau, On Film, p. ix.—I would like to thank Jean-Claude Martin and Steven Stockage of the Brooklyn College faculty for their helpful suggestions.