Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

This posthumous collection of writings illuminates Cocteau's own work for the cinema with detailed discussions of his aims, responses to criticism and his reflections on the relationship between poetry, theatre and film. He also comments on the movie stars he admires--Marlene Dietrich, James Dean, Brigitte Bardot--together with such great directors as Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

A second edition, "enlarged and enriched," of Cocteau's 1973 Du Cin'ematographe. It is misleading to group these thoughts or pens'ees into categories; they are undisguisedly random. It is misleading, too, to call the book The Art of Cinema; Cocteau writes, as he says, "without idle theorizing." There are brief, uncritical, often idolatrous tributes to particular persons: Eisenstein, Laurel and Hardy, Marcel Marceau, Renoir, Orson Welles, Brigitte Bardot, Chaplin, James Dean, Marlene Dietrich, etc. Cocteau writes in the same joyful vein about movies: Jules and Jim, Passion of Joan of Arc, Bicycle Thief, and of course his own. "Understanding comes to me in flashes, glimmers and spurts." The book is an assortment of "brief flashes that instantaneously reveal the [my] unexpected arrangement of things." Some of these flashes glance off large topics theater, poetry, the future of film, film craft, but they are always short, unsustained, and easy, and also lyrical and affectionate. The last 20 pages are synopses of his films. The two excellent introductions are quick witted and accurate. One says, "affection persuades him to behave as if he were under [some] kind of obligation, when he is not." The other says that Cocteau is "always in the dock with the accused, never on the bench with the judges." Truly serious scholars want Arthur B. Evans's Jean Cocteau and His Films of Orphic Identity (CH, Dec'77). Or his screen plays. Others may prefer his diaries and autobiographies. P. H. Stacy; emeritus, University of Hartford