Love, death, and mirrors.
A
modern update on the Greek myth of
Orpheus, retold by a paragon of early French cinema:
Jean Cocteau. Cocteau was one of early cinema’s greatest technological magicians, and all-around one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
He was a definition renaissance man, finding success in several fields of the arts, working as a painter, a poet, a novelist, a playwright, a designer, and a filmmaker. He was a champion of the avant-garde and infused his works with deft symbolism and poetic surrealism.
Mirrors occupy an important space in Cocteau’s films, as sacralized objects. For Cocteau, nothing was more magical than a mirror. He viewed them as portals capable of connecting us to the mystic realms that operate right under our noses during daily life - realms separated from our reality by the thinnest of fabrics - and as objects that reflect our inner desires (our fears and needs), rather than our outer selves.
Remarkably ahead of its time in both technique and story, Orpheus blends the ancient timelessness of myth with the dizzying unpredictability of modernity, where the thread connecting it all is the inescapable forces of love and death, eternally intertwined as twins of light and dark, like two sides of the same mirror.
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