[In Le Testament d'Orphee Cocteau] observes the continuity of a dream and not the logical pattern of a drama. [The film] therefore proceeds broadly from image to image and from symbol to symbol in its presentation of Cocteau's poetic concept of existence, and like his other personal films it is a most powerful demonstration of the cinema's technical capacity to project the world of the image created by the fluent but captive imagination of a poet, who claims to be pressing passionately against the cell-walls of the mind for the release his spirit demands.

Cocteau the poet confronts the creatures of his personal mythology in settings which occur not because they exist solidly in time and space (the bare studio stage, the cliff path above the sea, the crumbling but still colossal ruins), but because the atmosphere they successively create is appropriate to the symbolic action taking place within them. "The secret of poetry," says Cocteau, "is to take things from the places in which habit has set them and reveal them from a different angle as though we see them for the first time." He also states that the film itself is not a projection of a dream; it is "realist in so far as it depicts, with exactitude, the personal world of the artist." It gives, as he said once of Orphee, reality to the unreal….

Cocteau's own work as a painter appears now and then in the background, and, as witnesses of friendship, Cocteau's more famous admirers, including Picasso and Yul Brynner, appear momentarily in the film. There is always the touch of showmanship in Cocteau's work, but, as he says, he resorts to the cinema in order to make contact with the world.

Whether Cocteau's images and symbols seem valid or not is a matter for each individual who sees the film to decide; for those to whom mythology no longer embodies imagery which remains relevant to mankind, Le Testament d'Orphee will no doubt appear little but dream-like decorations created in a mood of human decadence. But Cocteau's eye and ear are so well tuned to realising images corresponding to psychological states that he has in this and his other personal films revealed a form which extends the cinema still further into the virtually unexplored field of imagery and symbolism.