Smash hit

In his meditations on death as a transformative state, Cocteau finds some of the principal themes for his best-known cinema. Richly mythic and rooted in the allegorical landscapes of both magical realism and psychology — but not without great wit and elegance — these films possess a high gloss of glamour which still seems modern.

In 1936, as the result of a bet with the newspaper Paris Soir, Cocteau made the journey imagined by Jules Verne in Around the World in Eighty Days, and in 1937 met the love of his life, the young actor Jean Marais, who would become both his star and his muse. Marais plays “the poet” in Orphée — a quintessentially Cocteauesque film which bridges deluxe modernity with a dream-like journey into the afterlife. It is typical of Cocteau, perhaps, that the allegorical journey should begin with a drunken young poet being hit by two motorbikes and carried to a princess’s Rolls-Royce by Orpheus. Modernity, after all, was everything.

The contradictions in Cocteau’s life begin to circle and enshrine him: he was both branded a “decadent” by the Vichy Government and accused of collaborating with the Nazis — a charge which was subsequently dropped. Friends with T. S. Eliot as well as Colette and Edith Piaf, he became in the 1950s a celebrity in the modern sense, was honoured by the French and Belgian Academies, yet still wasn’t taken as a serious artist by many of his peers.

Outrageously for the times, he had his face lifted, and took to wearing capes; he designed the handle of his ceremonial sword. And in the last scene of the last act of his most extraordinary life, he died of a heart attack in 1963 on hearing of the death of Edith Piaf — whose life he was preparing to celebrate on a radio broadcast.

Jean Cocteau: Sur le Fils du Siècle concludes with a subtle and touching curatorial flourish. Above the exit a small screen repeats a short loop of film: Cocteau writes “Adieu” on a blackened wall in Paris, signing his name with its customary star. Then, glancing this way and that to check that he’s no longer being followed, he strides off down the street with the broadest of smiles on his face — a free man at last, having finally gained his invisibility.

Jean Cocteau: Sur le Fils du Siècle runs until January 5 at the Centre Pompidou, Paris (www.centrepompidou.fr)

THE COCTEAU INFLUENCE

ON POP

With astonishing sophistication, the young Morrissey chose a film still of Jean Marais in Orphée as the cover for the Smiths’ first single, This Charming Man, while David Sylvian, on his ethereal album Brilliant Trees, cites Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet. Most famously, the post-punk duo the Cocteau Twins became famous throughout the early 1980s for their eerie and intense soundscapes.

ON BALLET

David Hockney’s stage designs owe much to the inspiration of Cocteau, while the Lindsay Kemp troupe’s legendary performances from the mid-1970s — Flowers, Cruel Garden, Salome — all echoed the allegorical landscapes, blood, mirrors and mythic characters of Cocteau’s films and drama. Similarly, both the Ballet Rambert and the Michael Clark company have made works which are deeply inspired by Cocteau’s aesthetic — not least Clark’s collaborations with the late Leigh Bowery, in which Bowery’s eccentric costuming renders him half human, half absurdist character.

ON FILM

Influential on Godard, Orson Welles, David Lynch and Derek Jarman, the cinema of Jean Cocteau connects the European avant-garde to American experimentalism and underground cinema. Having been honoured at the first Cannes Film Festival, Cocteau also discovered and supported the work of François Truffaut.