Into the Night – Jean Cocteau

Free entrance

When i make a film, it is a sleep in which i am dreaming. Only the people and places of the dream matter.

I have always liked the no man’s land of twilight where mysteries thrive.

The closer you get to a mystery, the more important it is to be realistic.
(Jean Cocteau)

With the last chapter of the film marathon Into the Night, organized in the frame of the exhibition Tatiana Trouvé. Il Grande Ritratto, Kunsthaus Graz invites to a particular séance of cinematic hypnosis: a masterpiece of surreal cinema - „The Orphic Trilogy“ by the legendary filmmaker/artist/writer, Jean Cocteau – a unique exploration of the inner worlds, an anatomy of mystery and secret.

The Blood of a Poet (1930, 55 min, French with eng. subtitles) is a visual poem, whose disturbing series of voyeuristic tableaux were described by Cocteau as "a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body“. This is one of cinema’s greatest experiments, which stretches the medium to its limits in an effort to capture the poet’s obsession with the struggle between the forces of life and death.

The centerpiece of Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, Orpheus (1950, 95 min, French with German subtitles), featuring Jean Marais, Maria Casares and Juliette Greco is a variation on the successive deaths, immortality and mirrors: seeking inspiration, the poet follows the princess from the world of the living to the land of deceased through Cocteau’s trademark „mirrored portal“.

In his last film, Testament of Orpheus (1959, 77 min, French with English subtitles), with an eclectic cast which includes Pablo Picasso, Jean Marais, Jean-Pierre Leaud, Charles Aznavour and Francois Sagan, Cocteau portrays an 18th-century poet who travels through time on a quest for divine wisdom. "It is the unique power of the cinema to allow a great many people to dream the same dream together and to present illusion to us as if it were strict reality. It is, in short, an admirable vehicle for poetry." Jean Cocteau, at age 70, thus ruminates on the life and purpose of the creative artist in a poetic essay. Cocteau himself stars as a time-traveling poet bopping helplessly through the ages until an experimental scientist grounds him in a kind of never-never land where he defends himself to the judges of Orpheus, dies, and is resurrected to complete his sentence: "condemned to live."