Epitome of French pretentiousness

I like thick people. When they don't like something and want to get endorsed by the listener, they will use any bunch of prejudices, common perceptions (no matter how morally wrong or just plainly made up they may be) and insignificant details blown out of proportions. They will utter the most blatant fallacies (most often unaware of their complete failure at luring out their targeted audience), using the whole book of rhetorical cheap tricks: textbook catachreses out of fascist vade mecums (hello Mein Kampf!) like so many dust bowls of non-sense, barely short of preaching out their revisionist new views of human rights and freedoms. Or circular reasoning, hedging, lining up tautologies after tautologies: there's no limit to how much wrong they do to their single most direct and dangerous enemy: truth. And that's what "thick" people (and I refrain from using better labels for them, because there are a good number of them) spend most of their energy doing: instead of addressing what really bugs them around them, they look for scapegoats of their ignorance and intellectual blindness.

Take the little concentrate of fallacies that was served to us by the OP: a classic. Take the title: "An epitome of French pretentiousness". An ad hominem fallacy right from the start, to attract a sympathetic audience to his xenophobic views, through the use of a derogatory metonymy that will appeal to a few Neanderthal-brained francophobes or anti-intellectuals. So you don't think that an educated public reading opinions on a public forum about "Le Testament d'Orphée" won't see the putrid associations you make here between what you perceive as "pretentiousness" and the fact that Cocteau is French? So your rotting bait is out there, luring frustrated hillbillies who probably freedom fries in their hometown that used to be called Lafayette before the second Iraq invasion. I may joke about it here, but I’m not amused at such opinions. Such opinions only reflect backward-minded opinions worthy of inbred endemic populations of illiterates with a degree that populate the richest country in the world (a land of opportunities, they say, where I’ve seen the best side by side with the worst).

I’m sure that people reading this already appreciate the extent of subjective, completely irrational and wildly xenophobic opinions found in that nutshell of a title. What does it mean, really. Is it Cocteau’s artistic legacy (or oeuvre) (the extremely derogatory use of the French word “oeuvre” as a synonym for ... crap in the preceding post didn’t fall in a deaf person’s ears: shame on you sir) that is pretentious as a whole, or is it a general opinion about French artists that their works are “pretentious”, according to the brilliance and scope of your knowledge ? One has the right to find Cocteau pretentious at times, and he was a man of many contradictions, which is part of his personal charm and also of the complexity of his accomplishments. Unfortunately for you, the purpose of your remark and of the tiny reaction it triggered are clear: French art is pretentious, and Cocteau’s Testament is an epitome of it. Or perhaps is it Godard who beats Cocteau at pretentiousness, asks timlin-4 ?

When I comment on films at IMdB or RT, or on music on various forums, I think I’m no different as the vast majority of those who have however small but original and valuable opinion. I will forge an opinion based on the film or record at hand. The artist’s nationality does count sometimes depending on the context. For instance, the political point of view of an artist from a country with a small internationally distributed cinematographic output (e.g. Iran, Mongolia, etc.) - might be relevant for obvious reasons in order to understand the significance or message of his/her film(s). But when strictly xenophobic opinions are uttered against an artist or the collective output of his country of origin of the sad kind I find here, they should be denounced for what they really are. And banned from IMdB, as they are elsewhere and as they should be in 2014 anyway.

Or perhaps this is the clumsy way of unsophisticated, culturally deprived individuals to express their perplexity in view of a puzzling work of art such as the Testament of Orpheus ?
So be it, but please try to work harder on your syntax and your choice of words. Not all French are pretentious, in any case no more than Americans are all Big Mac-fed obese cretins – which is not the case, but see how you would feel if singled out with some unfortunate trait such as the one that led you to use this film to vent out your francophobic colic?

Xenophobia in bar counter jokes can be funny, but there was no case for hilarity here.... pardon my French.

Le Testament d’Orphée is an uneven work compared to the more achieved and better realized Orphée (to which it is very tightly related of course) and for this reason, may not appeal to everyone, even those who were enchanted by Cocteau’s visual poetry in Orphée. There are of course a good number of puzzling scenes, but they remain quite tame compared to Le Sang d’un Poète, a much more hermetic and typically surrealistic film (a la Bunuel), and Cocteau’s approach, far from being that of some elitist intellectual, is in fact caring for his audience. The imagery presented to us in Le Testament is often introduced by Cocteau’s off voice and very often also, by himself on screen. I always felt welcome to his world, comfortable in his poetic universe, because he truly seems preoccupied by how we react to what is shown to us. The numerous scenes with the hibiscus flower are at the heart of how the various components of Cocteau’s clockwork interact for the benefit of his spectators. We marvel at simple things now: Cocteau debunks the symbolism of the second part of the Trilogy: we’re reminded that Cégeste and Heurtebise are the fruits of an early poem by Cocteau. We are reunited with the Princess (Maria Casares) and Heurtebise (François Périer) at a tribunal where everything and everyone now seems to be less threatening, where everyone is taking oneself less seriously than in Orphée. Le Testament is truly a work of love, of true affection from Cocteau to everyone of us.

There is nothing pretentious here, and only a few philistines may remain impervious to Cocteau in the same way as they likely are to poetry in general. Poets are the least well understood workers in our society, and for the densest among us, they are probably completely useless parasites living out of public charity. But if Cocteau’s message is to be of any significance today to his fellow humans, 50 years after his death, it is that poetry does not need to be some hermetic language published in expensive editions for a happy few enlightened elite cut from the rest of society. One of Cocteau’s pioneering contributions is his use of the “cinématographe” – as he liked to refer to it – as a tool for a poet to convey the mechanics of his mind to something tangible. He often said (e.g. watch the fascinating documentary Jean Cocteau: Autoportrait d'un inconnu (1985) on the Criterion edition of Le Sang d’un Poète, a must-see to truly understand Cocteau’s cinema) that the poet does not control what he thinks, what he imagines, etc.: he is merely a conduit between some immaterial but powerful source (call it God, the gods or whatever) and his fellow mortals. Cocteau was the first recognized published poet to use cinema successfully and creatively to express poetry from the privileged and original point of view of a poet. His most achieved work in this respect was La Belle et la Bête, but the Orphée “trilogy” is a close contender for that matter. Furthermore, unlike other surrealists and fellow artists of his era (such a brilliant one, with so many luminaries from times the likes of which we will never see again – ours is a whole different universe) whose output was mainly through painting and literature exclusively, Cocteau’s poetic films are not only still among us, but through the contribution of scholars or simply cinema lovers, still resonate to this day and enjoy a second or third life thanks to the democratizing effect of digital technology. And this is where his effect and influence on us is at its most vivid and significant.

One can rightly argue that Cocteau’s cinematographic book of tricks gets rapidly limited as we watch his films, and that his gimmickry may appear a little bit naive, especially to 21st-century eyes. However, one must be reminded that what we witness by viewing his films is the vision of a poet, and this is where the viewer must try to put him (her)self, i.e. to discard our unforgiving, CGI-saturated view of film images, and concentrate on the symbolism of Cocteau’s universe.

This is why one should not watch Le Testament d’Orphée before the better rounded up works, especially La Belle et la Bête, which is a true masterpiece. And as with all masterpieces, everything else, including one artist’s other works, pales in comparison. But at least, Cocteau’s language becomes better articulated and more understandable once we have been exposed to the most seamless of his poems.