Tag: Jean Cocteau

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Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Cyborg
A Documentary

Director – Carey Born – 2023 – Germany, Spain, UK – Cert. 12a – 87m

***1/2

Cyborg artist Neil Harbisson, unable to see in colour, has had an antenna implanted in his head to hear colours instead – out in UK cinemas on Friday, September 20th

This opens with a title sequence of weird, psychedelic images of what appears to be moving coloured liquids forming strange, never to be repeated natural patterns. If that implies a striking visual sensibility, that’s deceptive, since this documentary follows a fairly straightforward structure of following people around with cameras and talking to them as it introduces us to cyber artist Neil Harbisson and his artist partner Moon Ribas.

Neil stands out from other people because he has an antenna protruding from the back of his head to dangle in front of his forehead. He was born with the unusual condition of achromatism, which means that he sees not in colour but in monochrome. (Less severe, more common forms of colour blindness include the inability to differentiate between green and red.) This came to light in his childhood when the family got a new colour TV, and he and his sister would watch cartoons. At this point, the film throws in a clip of the children’s sci-fi cartoon series Robotrix (John Gibbs, Terry Lennon, 1985).… Read the rest

Categories
Features Live Action Movies

Orphée

Director – Jean Cocteau – 1950 – France – Cert. PG – 112m

*****

Acquitted by mirrors! Rereleased two thirds of a century on, Cocteau’s reimagining of the Greek legend of Orpheus remains as magical as ever – out in the UK on Friday, October 19th, 2018

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was a self-styled ‘poet’, a versatile, avant-garde French artist who worked across a number of different media – novels, visual art, design, theatre, cinema as well as poetry. 1950’s Orphée is one of his most celebrated films. And rightly so.

Famed poet Orphée (Jean Marais) is going through a bad creative patch when newcomer rival Cégeste (Edouard Dermithe) is killed by two speeding, leather-clad motorcycle riders. Orphée becomes obsessed with messages transmitted over the radio of the car belonging to Cégeste’s patron the Princess (Maria Casarès) which seem to him better than any lines he’s written recently.

So obsessed with these broadcasts does Orphée become that he fails to pay enough attention to his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) who becomes increasingly restless. Every night as he sleeps, the Princess – who a voiceover (read by Jean Cocteau himself) informs us is actually Orphée’s death – visits his room through his wardrobe mirror to watch over him.… Read the rest

Categories
Documentary Features Live Action Movies

Orchestrator
Of Storms:
The Fantastique World
Of Jean Rollin

Directors – Dima Ballin, Kat Ellinger – 2022 – UK – 112m

***

The story of one of Europe’s most idiosyncratic and overlooked directors – on the Arrow Video Channel from Tuesday, February 14th

In the early 1960s when the French New Wave was taking off, the idea was to go out and make movies on the streets, an approach intended to inject them with freshness. That movement is present in the backdrop of this film, because while it was achieving a huge international profile, fledgling French film maker Jean Rollin who similarly wanted to go out and shoot movies without all the old formal constraints was being largely ignored by industry, critics and audiences.

Finance was always a struggle, and he soon found himself making features within European sexploitation cinema, where directors had a great degree of freedom provided they incorporated a certain amount of nudity and sex.

There were lean periods too where he worked directing softcore and hardcore porn to survive; aside from chronicling when these happened in his career, this documentary doesn’t go into them at any length. Overall, it takes a chronological approach to Jean Rollin to give some idea of his life, career and filmography.… Read the rest

Categories
Live Action Movies Shorts

Ladies
Of The Forest
(San-na-mul
Cheo-nyeo,
산나물처녀)

Director – Kim Cho-hee – 2016 – South Korea – 29m

*****

A woman descends from the heavens in search of a mate, but lands in a forest where the pickings are slim – part of a strand of films celebrating actress Youn Yuh-jung at LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival which runs in cinemas from Thursday, November 4th to Friday, November 19th

The source of this plot is a folk tale known as The Fairy And The Woodcutter or The Heavenly Maiden And The Woodcutter. There seem to be a number of variants of the story – a good, much longer summation can be found here – but, broadly speaking, it concerns a woodcutter so poor that no woman will marry him. He lives alone with his mother. One day, he hides a deer from a hunter and in return, the deer offers to grant him a wish. He wishes to be married. The deer tells him of a pool to which beautiful maidens descend from the heavens to bathe. If he steals the clothes of one, she’ll be unable to return and he’ll be able to make her his wife. He must not, however, return her clothes until she has birthed three children, otherwise she will use her clothes to fly back to the heavens.… Read the rest