משתמש:Eranb/ארגז חול 4

דיוקן של ז'ן קוקטו שצייר אמדאו מודליאני

ז'ן מוריס יוג'ין קלמנט קוקטו (צרפתית: Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau ‏5 ביולי 1889 - 11 באוקטובר 1963) משורר, מחזאי, מעצב, אמרגן אגרוף ויוצר קולנוע צרפתי.

novelist, dramatist, designer, boxing manager, playwright and filmmaker. Along with other Surrealists of his generation (Jean Anouilh and René Char for example) Cocteau grappled with the "algebra" of verbal codes old and new, mise en scene language and technologies of modernism to create a paradox: a classical avant-garde. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Édith Piaf, who he cast in one of his one act plays entitled Le Bel Indifferent in 1940, and Raymond Radiguet. Like Victor Hugo, he intended his artistic work to serve a dual purpose -- to be entertaining and political. The results played out in the theatrical world of the Grands Theatres, the Boulevards and beyond during the Parisian epoque he both lived through and helped define and create. His versatile, unconventional approach and enormous output brought him international acclaim.

Early years

קוקטו נולד ב-Maisons-Laffitte, עיירה קטנה לא הרחק מפריז. אביו, Georges Cocteau, היה עורך דין וצייר חובב, שהתאבד כשקוקטו היה בן תשע. אמו, Eugénie Lecomte, בת למשפחה פריזאית ידועה. בגיל 15 עזב קוקטו את ביתו. למרות הישגיו בכל תחומי הכתיבה והאומנות, קוקטו התעקש שהוא בראש ובראשונה משורר ושכל יצירותיו הן שירה. הוא פרסם את ספר שיריו הראשון, Aladdin's Lamp, בגיל 19. קוקטו נודע בקרב חוג בוהמת האומנות כ"הנסיך הבליין" The Frivolous Prince - כותרת ספר השירה שפרסם בגיל 21. אדית וורטון תארה אותו כאדם "אשר עבורו כל שורה של שירה היתה זריחה, כל שקיעה הבסיס לעיר השמימית...".

בשנות העשרים שלו, קוקטו התחבר עם מרסל פרוסט, André Gide ו-Maurice Barrès. מנהל הבאלט הרוסי סרגיי דיאגילב Sergei Diaghilev קרא תיגר את קוקטו לכתוב עבור הבאלט. התוצאה היתה "תהלוכה" Parade, אותה הפיק דיאגילב, אשר התפאורה שלה עוצבה על ידי פבלו פיקאסו והמוזיקה שלה הולחנה על ידי אריק סאטי בשנת 1917. קוקטו היה פרשן חשוב של הסוריאליזם והיתה לו השפעה רבה על יצירתם של אחרים, בהם קבוצה של חברים מלחינים במונפרנאס שנודעה בשם Les Six. קוקטו דחה את הטענה שהוא סוריאליסט בעצמו.

Friendship with Raymond Radiguet

In 1918 he met the 15-year-old poet Raymond Radiguet. The two collaborated extensively, socialized, and undertook many journeys and vacations together. Cocteau also got the youth exempted from military service. In admiration of Radiguet's great literary talent, Cocteau promoted his friend's works in his artistic circle and also arranged for the publication by Grasset of Le Diable au corps (a largely autobiographical story of an adulterous relationship between a married woman and a younger man), exerting his influence to garner the "Nouveau Monde" literary prize for the novel.

There is disagreement over Cocteau's reaction to Radiguet's sudden death in 1923, with some claiming that it left him stunned, despondent and prey to opium addiction. Opponents of that interpretation point out that he did not attend the funeral (he generally did not attend funerals) and immediately left Paris with Diaghilev for a performance of Les Noces by the Ballets Russes at Monte Carlo. Cocteau himself much later characterised his reaction as one of "stupor and disgust". His opium addiction at the time, Cocteau said, was only coincidental, due to a chance meeting with Louis Laloy, the administrator of the Monte Carlo Opera. Cocteau's opium use and his efforts to stop profoundly changed his literary style. His most notable book, Les Enfants Terribles, was written in a week during a strenuous opium weaning.

It has been suggested that Cocteau's friendship with Radiguet was also an intense and often stormy love affair, but there is no documented evidence that this is true. See Historical pederastic relationships.

The Human Voice

Cocteau's experiments with the human voice peaked with his play La Voix Humaine. The story involves one woman on stage speaking on the telephone with her (invisible and inaudible) departing lover, who is leaving her to marry another woman. The invention by Alexander Graham Bell in 1875 grew out of the teacher of the deaf's long-time desire to develop a "harmonic telegraph" and the newer idea of a telephone. Leading up to the 1929/1930 theatrical production, Bell had won the prestigious Volta prize along with 50,000 francs from the Academie Française in Paris in 1880 and the first transatlantic radiotelephone service had been laid in 1924. The telephone proved to be the perfect prop for Cocteau to explore his ideas, feelings, and "algebra" concerning human needs and realities in communication.

Cocteau acknowledged in the introduction to the script that the play was motivated, in part, by complaints from his actresses that his works were too writer/director-dominated and gave the players little opportunity to show off their full range of talents. La Voix Humaine was written, in effect, as an extravagant aria for Madame Berthe Bovy. Before came Orphée, later turned into one of his more successful films; after came La Machine Infernale, arguably his most fully realized work of art. La Voix Humaine is deceptively simple -- a woman alone on stage for almost one hour of non-stop theatre speaking on the telephone with her departing lover. It is, in fact, full of theatrical codes harking back to the Dadaists' Vox Humana experiments after World War One, Alphonse de Lamartine's "La Voix Humaine", part of his larger work Harmonies Poetiques et Religieuses and the effect of the creation of the Vox Humana (Voix Humaine), an organ stop of the Regal Class by Church organ masters (late 1500s) that attempted to imitate the human voice but never succeeded in doing better than the sound of a male chorus at a distance.

Reviews varied at the time and since but whatever the critique, the play, in a nutshell, represents Cocteau's state of mind and feelings towards his actors at the time: on the one hand, he desired to spoil and please them; on the other, he was fed up by their diva antics and was ready for revenge. It is also true that none of Cocteau's works has inspired as much imitation: Francis Poulenc's opera of the same name, Gian Carlo Menotti's "opera bouffa" Le Telephone and Roberto Rosselini's film version in Italian with Anna Magnani L'Amore (segment: "Il Miracolo") (1948), to name the high point. There has also been a long line of interpreters including Simone Signoret, Ingrid Bergman and Liv Ullmann (in the play) and Julia Migenes (in the opera).

There are various theories about how Cocteau was inspired to write La Voix Humaine, one of the more intriguing ones being that he was experimenting with an idea by fellow French playwright Henri Bernstein. "When, in 1930, the Comedie-Française produced his La Voix Humaine...Cocteau disavowed both literary right and literary left, as if to say, "I'm standing as far right as Bernstein, in his very place, but it is an optical illusion:the avant-garde is spheroid and I've gone farther left than anyone else."

Maturity

In the 1930s, Cocteau had an unlikely affair with Princess Natalie Paley, the beautiful daughter of a Romanov grand duke and herself a fashion-plate, sometimes actress, model, and former wife of couturier Lucien Lelong. She became pregnant. To Cocteau's distress and Paley's life-long regret, the fetus was aborted. Cocteau's longest-lasting relationships were with the French actors Jean Marais, whom he cast in The Eternal Return (1943), Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus (1949), and Ruy Blas, and Edouard Dermit, whom Cocteau formally adopted.

In 1940, Le Bel Indifférent, Cocteau's play written for and starring Édith Piaf, was enormously successful. He also worked with Pablo Picasso on several projects and was friends with most of the European art community. He struggled with an opium addiction for most of his adult life and was openly gay, though he had a few brief and complicated affairs with women (including, some say, Piaf). He published a considerable amount of work criticising homophobia.

Cocteau's films, the bulk of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing Surrealism into French cinema and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre.

Cocteau is best known for his 1929 play Les enfants terribles, the 1948 film Les parents terribles, and the films Beauty and the Beast, (1946) and Orpheus (1949).

Cocteau died of a heart attack at his chateau in Milly-la-Foret, France, on 11 October 1963 at the age of 74, only hours after hearing of the death of his friend, the French singer Édith Piaf. He is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint Blaise Des Simples in Milly La Foret, Essonne, France. The epitaph on his gravestone set in the floor of the chapel reads: "I stay among you."

Awards and recognitions

In 1955 Cocteau was made a member of the Académie française and The Royal Academy of Belgium.

During his life Cocteau was commander of the Legion of Honor, Member of the Mallarmé Academy, German Academy (Berlin), American Academy, Mark Twain (U.S.A) Academy, Honorary President of the Cannes film festival, Honorary President of the France-Hungary Association and President of the jazz Academy and of the Academy of the Disc.