Though unadmitted, The Testament of Orpheus has far greater ambitions and implications than its modest format indicates. And in this resides its particular significance. (p. 23)

Testament is too deliberate and lucid a work to be dismissed as an old man's self-indulgent gratification—as many critics chose to do. Wanting or capricious though it may be, Testament is neither pointless nor irrational and, least of all, senile. To the extent that this controversial film fails, as it ultimately does, it is for nobler reasons than pretentiousness, incompetence or declining power….

[It] is not only one of the great confessional documents of our time but probably the most original and audacious. The question remains, however, whether it has a chance to survive on its inherent merit, with the answer depending on the position one adopts toward the film as primarily a work of art or a poet's self-portrait. Of course, it is both at once, with the aesthetic and the private, the subjective and the objective so intimately intermingled that the poet himself got caught in the trap of ambivalences. In the Preface to the book edition of The Testament of Orpheus, Cocteau remarks that the filmis "possibly the first attempt of a transmutation of verbs into actions; of an organization of actions in the place of an organization of words, in a poem; of a syntax of images instead of a story accompanied by language."… Why does the poet, from the vantage point of his advanced age, make the claim of novelty for his last work rather than for Orpheus, the prototype of the poetic film and the model of an "organization of actions?" Why does the creator of Blood of a Poet consider this retrospective and nostalgic treatment of his favorite subject a first attempt, whereas it is so obviously intended to be the last and final one? Why does he disregard The Eternal Return and Beauty and the Beast, two films that are respectively visual embodiments of the poetic myth and the poetic fable rather than "stories accompanied by language?" If Testament is taken as lightly as it appears or pretends to be, these questions are confounding. There is good reason to believe, though, that Cocteau is guilty of a canny deception in that this seemingly slender work actually masks a confessional document of great personal import.

Testament is ostensibly nothing but a candid and informal autobiography, composed of loosely connected incidents literally referring to the author's past, his work, his friends and associates, as well as to things and places remembered. He wants his readers and viewers to believe that he produced the film as an unpremeditated venture, "without expecting anything else from it but the deep pleasure derived from making it."… The ease and candor he professes, however, only thinly disguise the urgency of his true endeavor, which is to establish the authentic public image by which he hopes to be remembered. That, essentially, is the legacy contained in this cinematic treatment, its "resurrectional" message and purpose, which is furthermore confirmed by the "phenixological" poem that precedes the printed scenario. Cocteau might well have proclaimed, with Camus' Caligula, "I do not have to make a work of art; I live it." Only, in this case, it implies less hubris than total self-obsession. (p. 24)

In 1932, Cocteau delivered an address in which he opens up new vistas of the poetic cinema: "With the film, death is killed, literature is killed, poetry is made to live a direct life. Imagine what the cinema of the future might be." At this point, it is important to appreciate that Testament is not a poetic film in any conventional sense, its subject notwithstanding. More accurately, it amounts almost to a lecture-demonstration, with the poet candidly explaining what it means to be a poet, why he is perennially on trial and "condemned to live," why he is fated to die "invisibly" as well as assured to be resurrected. Even more specifically, Testament tells us not only what it means to be a poet but what it means to be the poet Jean Cocteau. As a source of information, the film is probably more self-revealing than any other of his literary or cinematic works, and quite possibly beyond its author's actual intentions. While portraying the poet Cocteau, the film author Cocteau refrains, even more rigorously than in Orpheus, from dwelling on lyrical mood or evocative imagery. No sooner has he created a poetic atmosphere, or established a fictional illusion, than he destroys or subverts it…. If Pirandello created characters in search of an author, Cocteau may be said to have created an author in search of a character…. Cocteau's own method … consists in exposing one illusion as a deception while simultaneously authenticating another, equally artificial one. He resembles a prestidigitator pretending to reveal his trick in order to divert the spectator's attention from the decisive one he wants to bring off. In Orpheus, the realistic and illusory spheres are clearly separated, each one representing its own valid realm of existence; in Testament, they are so inextricably interwoven that the poet loses control and, consequently, the viewer loses his rational bearings. (p. 25)

There would be no doubt in Cocteau's own mind that Testament is a poetic film, by the same token as Blood of a Poet, which he claimed to be "completely indifferent to what the world considers poetic." Cocteau, it must be remembered, conceived of poetry not so much as a medium of spontaneous or intuitive expression than as of a means of revealing "the design and detail of images emerging from the profound night of the human body." They are called upon to represent at once internal and external reality, neither of which admits or recognizes its limitations. These poetic images, the poet insists, "have no recourses to either dreams or symbols"; rather, they represent different stages of consciousness, an assumption the poet would presumably refute. It is evident again that poetry, for Cocteau, is functional and instrumental. Testament, like Blood of a Poet thirty years previously, provides "a vehicle for poetry which may or may not serve its purpose." This reservation exonerates the poet conveniently of all poetic conventions and obligations, allowing him ample leeway for alternating freely between extremes: exact realism or pure fantasy, direct representation or allegorical transformation. "Still, this contempt for the rules does not go without a contempt for the danger that excites a great many souls." Surely the poet is aware that he is skating on perilously thin premises…. [The] two films are not only thematically related; they also pursue similar ends. But while premises and objectives are identical, the execution is radically dissimilar. It is not a facile play of words, but relevant to the nature of the works, to suggest that Cocteau's description of Blood of a Poet, as "a realistic documentary of unreal events," may be reversed to read an unrealistic documentary of real events for Testament. The distinctive quality of Blood of a Poet resided in the discovery of visual equivalents for traditional verbal poetry. It unwinds on the screen "like a band of allegories." The unique quality of Testament is neither cine-poetry nor, certainly, its consciously manipulated artistry (which tends to be precious), but its implicit self-revelation which is genuine—in fact intense and anxious….

In Testament it is virtually impossible to distinguish between symbols, allegories and metaphors because of their constant interaction. There is, however, the unmistakable symbol of the Hibiscus flower which the poet carries through the whole film, which he calls the film's "true star"…. As is so often the case, and consistent with Cocteau's stated principles, his treatment is rather too literal and explicit to be called symbolic. His pictorial style, in spite of its imagination and elaboration, is essentially descriptive. For instance, when Cocteau encounters himself in one of Testament's key episodes, he observes uneasily that the other self pretends not to see him, while his companion comments that "he probably goes whence you came and you go whence he comes." He is seeking himself, finding himself and disavowing himself all at once in one brief scene which is both admirably suggestive and thoroughly cinematic. At this instant it becomes evident that the film itself, the tangible image on the screen, is the point of encounter, of the meeting or the clash of illusion with illusion as well as of illusion with reality. It is noteworthy that the encounter does not occur in either a conceptual or a metaphysical point, as it might in verbal poetry, but in a concrete point in time and space….

Cocteau submits that "The Testament of Orpheus is nothing but a machine to fabricate meanings [significations]." Does he mean to suggest that nothing is to be taken literally, in fact that nothing is what it seems to be? If so, it would follow that Cocteau does not signify Cocteau, or Picasso not Picasso, which is patently absurd and surely not what the author has in mind. The assumption is, of course, that he is in complete control of the machine, hence also of the meanings he intends to fabricate. Testament proves his thesis wrong. As an artist, a maker of images, Cocteau relies on the fact that every image, including his own, is other than the original to which it refers. And yet, while every object is physically changed when transformed from one mode of existence into another, it becomes not automatically endowed with transcendent meaning, or indeed any meaning. This is Cocteau's error and the origin of a critical ambiguity in the film's concept. Minerva, the Idol, the Sphinx function on one level of meaning; the Princess and Heurtebise on another; Cégeste on yet another; Oedipus intrudes from the dramatic stage; Picasso and Aznavour are private visitors, while Cocteau himself remains altogether himself. The result is not a new poetic order but confusion and disorientation. (p. 26)

We should be wary, though, of judging anything in Testament as arbitrary or irrelevant, since the object and intent of the work are not lost out of Cocteau's sight for one single instant…. In Cocteau On Film, he confesses that "a film, whatever it may be, is always its director's portrait." That this portrait is not a metaphorical term for personal style, but a likeness of its creator, is affirmed in Testament. As Cocteau attempts to draw the Hibiscus flower, it keeps assuming the traits of his own face…. It is fitting to quote a statement from Blood of the Poet …: "I shall not conceal from you the fact that I have used tricks to make poetry visible and audible." In spite of this assertion, however, it is not so much poetry he makes visible as himself. His posthumous concern is blatantly evident. Lest there remain any doubt whatever, he even makes us, and his personal friends, witness his death and resurrection. He states, and elaborately stages, what Yeats put simply: "The tree must die before it can be made into a cross." All the evidence points to one inescapable conclusion: if everything we witness and observe contributes to the emerging self-portrait, the meaning of Testament becomes unequivocally clear. It fits the words of Jean Genet—"a true image born of a false spectacle." (pp. 26-7)