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Le Baron fantôme (1943)
Character: Le baron Julius Carol - le baron fantôme
Elfy, Countess of Saint-Hélié's daughter, was brought up with her foster sister Anne, in an old dilapidated castle whose landlord, Baron Julius Carol, disappeared mysteriously some day. The two girls had a playmate, Hervé, the son of the gamekeeper. Now that they are adult, Anne is in love with Hervé while Elfy thinks she loves the young man. One day, the baron's mummified body is found in an oubliette and the secret of the estate is revealed...
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C'est arrivé à 36 chandelles (1957)
Character: Self (uncredited)
Rejecting the union of her daughter Brigitte with a modest worker, Madame Magnin invents an adultery for the lover, then introduces Brigitte to a good-looking man working on the famous RTF entertainment show 36 Chandelles. The show ultimately seals the reunion of the two estranged young lovers. The story features a parade of music-hall stars from the era: Charles Trenet, Charles Aznavour, Georges Guétary, Juliette Gréco, Roger Pierre and Jean-Marc Thibault, Fernand Raynaud, Georges Ulmer and many more.
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Ce siècle a cinquante ans (1950)
Character: Self
As the title of this French documentary indicates, Ce Siecle a 50 Ans examines the 20th Century at its halfway point. Utilizing the archives of several European film reserves, director Denise Tua offers a fascinating mosaic of the people and events that shaped the years 1900 to 1950. Complementing the vintage film clips are three dramatized sketches, delineating the romantic customs of three different points in time. These sketches are inadequately performed, and can easily be ignored. Ce Siecle a 50 Ans both preserved and provided celluloid material for scores of future documentaries.
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Désordre (1950)
Character: Self
Variations on the cultural and intellectual explosion in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district in 1946.
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Jean Cocteau, mensonges et vérités (1997)
Character: Self (archive footage)
This documentary consists mainly of archive interviews of Jean Cocteau, and it features interesting contributions by Jean Marais and especially Jean-Luc Godard, who discusses Cocteau's foray into cinema. The film documents all the artistic media explored by a man who defined himself, first and foremost, as a poet.
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L'Amitié noire (1946)
Character: Narrator
The commentary recalls that Radio Brazzaville was, from June 18, 1943, the contact of the French settlements and the metropolis, bush stations participate in the organization of the resistance.
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Art of Style: Jean Cocteau (2018)
Character: Self (archive footage)
French artist Jean Cocteau's multifaceted work across poetry, plays, paintings and film made him one of the leading creative figures of the Parisian avant-garde movement. Featuring Cocteau's own writings read by actor Timothée Chalamet, explore the dream-like quality of Cocteau's one of a kind oeuvre.
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Musée Grévin (1958)
Character: Self, a director
A man dreams he is in a wax museum after it is closed for the night.The statues come to life and behave in mysterious ways.
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Great Writers: Jean Cocteau (1996)
Character: Self
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963), was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, and filmmaker, whose versatility, unconventionality, and enormous output brought him international acclaim. As a leading member of the surrealist movement, he had a great influence on the work of others.
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Dans ce jardin atroce (1964)
Character: Narrator (voice)
This short documentary film is conceived as a stroll through the valley of Thebes and the temple of Karnak.
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ایران درودی، نقاش لحظههای اثیری (2009)
Character: Self (archive footage)
A look at the life and art of Ms. Iran Darroudi, one of the most important contemporary Iranian painters, who has divided her time between Tehran and Paris for the past fifty years. The film describes the various influences in her life and how she came to cultivate a style that merges the western surrealism with eastern mysticism
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Beyond the Riviera (1960)
Character: N/A
Travelogue exploring the coastline, towns and surrounding mountains of the French Riviera.
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Jean Cocteau (2024)
Character: Self
We film buffs grew up worshiping Jean Cocteau—particularly his BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, ORPHEUS and BLOOD OF A POET—but in recent years he has perhaps ebbed from our consciousness.
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Eine Melodie - vier Maler (1955)
Character: Self
Each portrayed painter produced an experimental animated short film to be featured in this film. A short film by Herbert Seggelke.
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Jean Cocteau fait du cinéma (1925)
Character: N/A
A short film about a famous writer who loses control of his hand and begins to write letters and articles denouncing himself.
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La Malibran (1944)
Character: Alfred de Musset
On the death of the famous singer Maria Malibran, Countess Merlin retraces the main lines of the unusual destiny of this young woman entirely devoted to her art.
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Callas Assoluta (2007)
Character: Self (archive footage)
This revealing documentary from director Philippe Kohly examines the storied life of renowned soprano Maria Callas, from her troubled childhood in New York City to her scandal-laden but triumphant international career in opera. Featuring archival interviews with Callas herself and footage of contemporaries such as her lover Aristotle Onassis, this celebration of "La Divina" pays tribute to her enduring legacy some three decades after her death.
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De Jeanne d'Arc à Philippe Pétain (1944)
Character: Reciter (voice)
Sitting at his desk, Guitry gives us a lecture on French history from Joan of Arc to the Occupation, with some focus on a number of its great writers and musicians.
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Steel Cathedrals (1985)
Character: Self (voice) (archive footage)
20 minute music documentary shot in two days of November 1984 in, and around the outskirts of, Tokyo, Japan. A large part of the music was completed during that same month and recorded over a period of three days.
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La Belle et la Bête (1946)
Character: The Voice of Magic (uncredited)
The story of a gentle-hearted beast in love with a simple and beautiful girl. She is drawn to the repellent but strangely fascinating Beast, who tests her fidelity by giving her a key, telling her that if she doesn't return it to him by a specific time, he will die of grief. She is unable to return the key on time, but it is revealed that the Beast is the genuinely handsome one. A simple tale of tragic love that turns into a surreal vision of death, desire, and beauty.
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Cocteau - Al Brown: le poète et le boxeur (2020)
Character: Self (archive footage)
Portrait of Panama Al Brown, a great boxer in the 30's, and its story with France, with a focus on its relationship with Jean Cocteau, surrealist, poet, director, artist.
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8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements (1957)
Character: N/A
8 x 8: A Chess-Sonata in 8 Movements is an American experimental film directed by Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Cocteau. Described by Richter as "part Freud, part Lewis Carroll" and filmed partially on the lawn of Duchamp's summer house in Southbury, Connecticut.
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Orphée (1950)
Character: Narrator (voice) (uncredited)
A poet in love with Death follows his unhappy wife into the underworld.
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Le Testament d'Orphée (1960)
Character: The Poet
Outside time and reality, the experiences of a poet. The judgement of the young poet by Heurtebise and the Princess, the Gypsies, the palace of Pallas Athena, the spear of the Goddess which pierces the poet's heart, the temptation of the Sphinx, the flight of Oedipus and the final Assumption.
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Daedalus (2024)
Character: Sampled Interview (voice) (uncredited)
"Fly too high and you will burn, go too low and you won't breathe." Daedalus weaves a tale of ambition and caution through an ancient myth, set in a nation below sea level. Shot in just seven consecutive days during the summer of 2023, it concludes the first volume of Bliss, a playlist of sounds and shapes. As the master craftsman gifts his son wings and wisdom, the film delves into the perilous dance between striving for greatness and the suffocating pull of stagnancy. This chaotic exploration bridges the warnings and epiphanic thoughts of 20th-century thinkers with the responses of today's dreamers.
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Une nuit à l'Opéra (2020)
Character: Self (archive footage)
A documentary view of the galas of Paris’s Palais Garnier in the 1950s and ’60s.
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L'Amérique insolite (1960)
Character: Narrator (Afterword)
At the end of the 1950s, French documentarian François Reichenbach spent eighteen months traveling the United States, documenting its diverse regions, their inhabitants, and their pastimes. The result is a journey through a multitude of different Americas, filtered through a French sensibility.
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Les Noces De Sable (1949)
Character: Narrator (voice)
This Moroccan romance is a kind of Arab Tristan and Isolde: the heroine kills herself when she is convinced no one cares for her, the young nobleman she thought would love her is killed by a madwoman.
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Le Livre d'image (2018)
Character: (archive footage)
In Le Livre d’Image, Jean-Luc Godard recycles existing images (films, documentaries, paintings, television archives, etc.), quotes excerpts from books, uses fragments of music. The driving force is poetic rhyme, the association or opposition of ideas, the aesthetic spark through editing, the keystone. The author performs the work of a sculptor. The hand, for this, is essential. He praises it at the start. “There are the five fingers. The five senses. The five parts of the world (…). The true condition of man is to think with his hands. Jean-Luc Godard composes a dazzling syncopation of sequences, the surge of which evokes the violence of the flows of our contemporary screens, taken to a level of incandescence rarely achieved. Crowned at Cannes, the last Godard is a shock film, with twilight beauty.
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La Villa Santo-Sospir (1952)
Character: Self
Cocteau takes the viewer on a tour of a friend's villa on the French coast (a major location used in Testament of Orpheus). The house itself is heavily decorated, mostly by Cocteau (and a bit by Picasso), and we are given an extensive tour of the artwork. Cocteau also shows us several dozen paintings as well. Most cover mythological themes, of course. He also proudly shows paintings by Edouard Dermithe and Jean Marais and plays around his own home in Villefranche.
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Les Parents terribles (1948)
Character: Narrator (voice) (uncredited)
Young Michel is in love with the attractive Madeleine, so he decides to tell his parents of his intention to marry her. He thinks his announcement is innocent enough; his engagement, however, threatens to reveal dark secrets lurking within his family's home. Yvonne, Michel's overbearing mother, concocts an elaborate scheme to drive Madeleine away, thus keeping uncomfortable household truths from being exposed.
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Toute la vérité, rien que la vérité : Jean Cocteau (1959)
Character: Himself
In 1959, Jean Cocteau looked back on his artistic journey for the Télé Monte-Carlo television show Tout la vérité, rien que la vérité. The program ends with a tasty anecdote about television that Cocteau describes as a “box of tricks”. A few weeks later, in the same Victorine studios, Cocteau directed most of the sequences for his last opus: The Testament of Orpheus (1959).
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Les Enfants terribles (1950)
Character: Narrator (voice)
Elisabeth and her brother Paul live isolated from much of the world after Paul is injured in a snowball fight. As a coping mechanism, the two conjure up a hermetic dream of their own making. Their relationship, however, isn't exactly wholesome. Jealousy and a malevolent undercurrent intrude on their fantasy when Elisabeth invites the strange Agathe to stay with them -- and Paul is immediately attracted to her.
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Jean Cocteau s'adresse... à l'an 2000 (1962)
Character: Self
In August 1963, just a couple of months before his death, Jean Cocteau made one last short film. The film comprises one still and highly sober shot of Cocteau facing the camera head-on to address the youth of the future. Once recorded, this spoken message for the 21st century was sealed and stored with the understanding that it would be opened only in the year 2000. As it turned out, it was discovered and exhumed a few years shy of that date. Where in The Testament of Orpheus Cocteau portrays himself as a living anachronism, a lonesome classical modernist loitering in space-time while lost in the spectral light of his memories, here he acknowledges explicitly the irony of his phantom-like state. By the time the viewer sees this image, he, J. C., our saviour Poet, will long be dead.
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Traité de bave et d'éternité (1952)
Character: Self
In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.
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Le Sang d'un poète (1932)
Character: Bit Part (uncredited)
Told in four episodes, an unnamed artist is transported through a mirror into another dimension, where he travels through various bizarre scenarios.
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