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Singha Song

9Feb12

I just rewatched Orpheus, such a remarkable movie. I must watch more of his.

diego_vargas

24Oct11

“A film is a petrified fountain of thought.” — Jean Cocteau

Sancar Seckiner

20Sep11

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cocteau

“Les Parents Terribles” (1948) by Jean Cocteau “Terrible Parents” is about parents in a much wider sense than just literally about somebody’s mother, father or elder relative. Cocteau’s film addresses our cultural psychological legacy, Western culture’s parental function – what our culture offers us and how it makes us what we are. Cocteau shows us a young guy Michel (Jean Marais) who is as naïve, simpleminded and credulous as Franz Biberkopf in Fassbinder’s “Berlin Alexander Platz” (1980) or the young samurais in Kurosawa’s “Sanjuro” (1962). Michel in his twenty-two is as pure soul as only an eight year old boy can be – he perceives his parents’ actions and moralizations as so many Americans today the pronouncements of their conservative leaders and politicians. Michel implies that their position towards him and the world in general is unconditionally benevolent and that their will is beyond the fall – the incarnation of Goodness. But Cocteau is here to demonstrate to Michel and the viewers that parents, parental figures and the elder generation in general developed a nasty proclivity for manipulating the younger people according to their psychological and material interests. This is the most difficult point of the film to agree with, and pedagogically the most important – to help us to stop to feel that our parents and the social authorities (parental figures in the public realm) “exist for us” (to neglect the hardness of their experiences in the world and the fact that they were once like we and were lied to and misled about the reality and truth, and this made them bitter, hard, vengeful and very often cruel, and that they are morally not too attractive in spite of their virtuous posturing). Through analyzing parents’ behavior with children, Cocteau opens to us their emotionally unbearable past life. Jean Marais, as we see, was a very serious actor already in his young age. In “Les Parents” Cocteau puts him in front of an almost impossible task to play an attractive innocent soul while simultaneously emphasizing the pathological aspects of innocence if it is not balanced by the person’s intellectual bent. Marais plays the psychological incompatibility between these two poles of human soul (infantile and analytical) with an impressive virtuosity. Two elder actresses (Gabrielle Dorziat – the aunt) and Yvonne de Bray (mother) by the creative power of their acting open to the viewers the tormenting past of the characters they play through gentle cues of emotional genuineness, and force the audience into empathy and compassion. This private drama of interior encounter between several human destinies is about human society’s proneness to psychologically exploit and sacrifice its young (the next generations). Please, visit: www.actingoutpolitics.com to read essays (with analyses of shots) about films by Bergman, Godard, Bunuel, Bresson, Kurosawa, Resnais, Pasolini, Cavani, Antonioni, Alain Tanner, Fassbinder, Bertolucci and Moshe Mizrahi. By Victor Enyutin