Whit Jean Cocteau drawings you're flying on erotic clouds.Yes,this the Dreamtime of sex,when anything is possible.
While being essential, Jean Cocteau's drawing is gentle and evocative. I loved it!

I accidentally stumbled across the work of this artist during a recent trip abroad. I had never heard of Cocteau or his reputation as an artist. His nudes are both provocative and engaging. Although this book only shows one dimension of his craft, it is well assembled and the quality of the publication is exceptional. Don't miss your chance to see his work if you can. There is really nothing else like it.

The book is comprised of a series of interviews, reviews, speeches and writings of Cocteau. It is an interesting glimpse into Cocteau's thought on cinema. He covers both his own films and his contemporaries finishing up near the French New Wave. His opinions are not those from an intellectual or an elitist. Cocteau is a unique talent with an intuitive grasp on cinema's role as a vehicle of poetry.

Throughout the book you will notice a lack of reviews concerning cinema he does not like. He is silent on that which he does not like preferring instead to focus on what attracts him. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in film as art.

Cocteau will not appeal to thinkers who admire clarity and concise thinking. He is not a professional thinker one might say. he prides himself on his amateur standing and will appeal to others who find the word amateur appealing. He is a dilettante, granted he is the grandest of the dilettantes but a dilettante nonetheless. His rather slender examinations of different topics makes one realize he is driven exclusively by his own ego whose highest value is sensibility, namely his own, so the essays strike one as self celebrations more than serious investigations. This will interest those who love Cocteaus every word and gesture but there is not really that much in his writing to recommend him to a wide readership. he can be very amusing and occasionally you will find an insight that is striking and completely original but not that often. Mostly this is someone who writes in a comfy chair and concocts little sketches which remain rather sketchy albeit charming much of the time. In his time there was something rebellious about being defiantly amateur but there are limits to what one can accomplish when ones wayward instincts remain ones only driving force. That and the continual refining of sensibility. He remains a kind of enfant terrible and when he got older he was a much mellowed enfant terrible. He is an important figure that everyone interested in any or all the art forms must respect because he certainly made a contribution to nearly every form there is but these essays are not for rigorous thinkers. There is a vagueness in everything Cocteau did that makes it seem that maybe this was the key to his sensibility. I would recommend the book Les Enfant Terribles over this, there is literary power in that. These essays just leave you feeling hungry they are so slight.

Five characters, two different settings, three acts; an overpowering mother, a doting son, a jilted aunt, a lecherous father, and an innocent young girl -- Cocteau takes all of this, and weaves together an odd story of the ultimate dysfunctional family. This translation was used by the Royal National Theatre in London for the recent "revival" of the play, which eventually came to New York and starred Kathleen Turner and British newcomer Jude Law. Cocteau adapted this play for a french film version several years after it closed. Not for those looking for "light entertainment;" some may be disturbed by the oedipal themes which Cocteau explored in this work, but definitely satisfying for those looking for "different" or "thought-provoking" theatre (or the "just strange" style for that matter).

Robin Buss is a respected French academic and translator for Penguin Classics; he has also written a number of books on French cinema, inclusing one on French film noir. You might therefore think him the ideal candidate to write an introductory monographe on 'Les Enfants Terribles', the most famous literary work by sometime filmmaker Jean Cocteau, a book famously adapted by Jean-Pierre Melville, the master of French film noir.

Buss, hilariously mocking the received (i.e. Anglo-Saxon) view of the novel as a study of four eccentric, self-destructive children wilting in a hothouse world of their own making, insists the novel must not be read according to traditional, 19th century realist expectations. He does this so often, his assumed reader must be quite dim - surely no-one reading Cocteau could confuse him with Balzac or Zola (except the English?!).

He is very good at discussing the different temporal and spatial levels in the novel, its mythical and mythological impulse, and its collapsing linear narrative into ritual and theatre. His ultimate conclusion that it is a novel about love is a bit bland, and his argument old-fashioned (and rather English); he is better at discussing the children as surrogate artists, maintaining a child-like vision of the world.

His discussion of Melville's film, however, in many ways superior to its source, is hopeless. Because it is a 'bad' transcription of Buss' interpretation of Cocteau's book, rather than the magical source of themes, images, characters and stories that would flower and underpin Melville's later work, the film is apparently a failure (Melville's use of theatrical metaphors alone are an ingenious rendering of Cocteau).

There are too many pages for for what Buss has to say, so, especially towards the end, there is a lot of padding.

I read this one in French and I don't think it would translate well. His use of language is what make the book a good read, not his actual accounts. The guy does artwork, makes films, writes poetry and books- let's give him some credit!

Cocteau clarifies his odd obsessions, indignations, and general viewpoints in this drawn out diary of an unknown. The book has its moments but usually reiterates the concepts of invisibility and falsities. For Diehard Cocteau fans.