Kafka’s The Trial meets, oh, I don’t know (some kind of playful but much more gentle version of Buñuel). The film operates on a semi-engaging narrative/poetic level but also on an auto-biographical level which certainly does anticipate Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1974), maybe, a bit. Okay that all said, the overall cinematic excitement (to me, personally), is that of any such hybrid. And yet, I do and will always maintain a high degree of admiration for Cocteau, for what he has attempted—to say—on poetry, and on the artistic process. I share a personal affinity for the dilemma he reveals, caught between worlds, “condemned to live.” Finally, Cocteau makes frequent references, bordering on obsession even, to the classics—as inspiration and/or ongoing dialogue between old and new creation. Does this not anticipate Godard’s similar, if not dissimilar, blending of the same material in Contempt (1963) (ancient classics, buildings way to big for the little figures walking around in them, big name stars—Jean Marais, autobiography—if you accept Contempt as somewhat autobiographical for Godard—which it was, the process of creation—filmmaking or poetry).

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