by Jean Cocteau
Would not this seem like the extension of faculties that allow us to fly in dreams?
It is with reference to these that Mme J.-M. Sert (most of whose words deserve to be quoted) used to say that in Faust one is in love and that in Tristan one makes love.
This ideal line retraces for us the lives of great men. It accompanies their actions and threads them together. It is, without doubt, the only certainty able to withstand the false perspective of history. It leaps to the eyes of the soul before memory interferes.
Not to mention Shakespeare, an Alexandre Dumas always makes use of it. He wraps it round with his fiction and strikes us with a truth more rigid than that of a broken stick in the waters of time.
It is this line too that the graphologist is able to extract from hand-writing, whatever artifices disguise it. The more it is disguised, the clearer it becomes. For the depositions of artifice augment the exhibits in the case.
Whatever a certain kindly woman bookseller may think—she accuses me of hoisting the flag and letting others take the risks—my line is one of shocks and of risks. The lady would see, with a little thought, that her military metaphor is, to say the least, suspect. If one does not attack, how can one hoist the flag? It is precisely the fear of becoming less able to charge in this way that might make me decide to shut up shop. Even so it would be impossible for me, so long as my legs are sound, not to run towards the outposts and hang around to see what is happening.
By and large, a line of combat runs through my works. If I have ever captured the enemy’s weapons, I have made them mine in battle. They are judged by the outcome. He should put them to better use.
From hopscotch to posters, I recognize nearly all the themes Picasso adopts in the various districts he inhabits. For him they play the part of a landscape-painter’s motif, but he takes them home, shuffles them about and raises them to the dignity of service.
When cubism was at its height, the Montparnasse painters shut themselves in for fear Picasso should pilfer some precious seed and make it bloom on his own soil. Once in 1916, when he took me to see them, I was party to an interminable confabulation on the doorstep. We had to wait until they had first hidden away their latest canvases, under lock and key. They equally mistrusted one and all.
This state of siege nourished the silences of the Rotonde and the Dôme. I remember one week when everyone there was whispering, wondering who had stolen from Rivera his trick of painting trees in dots of black and green.
The cubists did not realize, intoxicated as they were with their little discoveries, that they owed these to Picasso or to Braque who, in orchestrating them, would be merely taking back what was their own. Besides, they need not have bothered their heads, since our line does not easily assimilate a foreign form and repels what would buckle it, as one says of a wheel.
And when I speak of my borrowing weapons, I am not speaking of my writing, but of skirmishes during which a sudden volte-face enables me to turn against the enemy the weapons that he was aiming at me.
I therefore advise young people to adopt the practice of beautiful women and to care for their line, to prefer the lean to the fat. And not to look at themselves in a mirror, but simply to look at themselves.
ON A DRAMA IN MIME
OUR MACHINE DISRUPTS ITSELF A LITTLE MORE each day and each morning man wakes with a new impediment. I recognize this. I used to sleep right through the night. Now I wake up. This sickens me. I get up. I start working. It is the only means that makes it possible for me to forget my blemishes and acquire beauty at my table. This ‘writing-face’ being, when all is said and done, my true face. The other, a fading shadow. Quickly now, let me construct my features in ink to replace those that are leaving me.
This is the face that I am trying to establish and to embellish with the spectacle of a ballet, presented last night, the 25th of June 1946, at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. I felt myself beautiful, thanks to the dancers, to the sets, to the music, and as this result entails a deal of artifice exceeding the creator’s approval, I propose to study it.
I have long been trying to make use, otherwise than in films, of the mystery of accidental synchronization. For music finds its response not only in each individual, but also in any plastic work with which it is confronted, if this work is of the same calibre. Not only is this synchronization a kind of family affair, embracing the action as a whole, but further what is more—and herein lies the mystery—it underlines its details to the great surprise of those who considered its use sacrilegious.
I already knew of this peculiarity through the experience of films, in which any music of quality integrates the gestures and emotions of the characters. It remained to prove that a dance, set to rhythms suiting the choreographer, could do without them and gain strength in a new musical climate.
Nothing is more contrary to the play of art than a redundancy of movements representing notes.
Counterpoint, the skilled unbalance from which changes are born, cannot be produced when perfect balance engenders inertia.
It is from a delicate arrangement of unbalance that balance draws its charm. A perfect face proves this when one divides it and remakes it of its two left sides. It becomes grotesque. Architects knew this long ago and in Greece, at Versailles, in Venice, in Amsterdam, one may see how the asymmetric lines make for the beauty of their buildings. The plumb-line kills this almost human beauty. One knows the flatness, the deadly boredom of our blocks of flats to which man has resigned himself.
About a month ago, at a luncheon with Christian Bérard and Boris Kochno, the trustee of Serge de Diaghilev’s methods, I envisaged the possibility of a dance scene in which the dancers would practise to jazz rhythms, such rhythms considered as simple aids to work and being replaced later by some great work of Mozart, Schubert or Bach.*
The next day we set about carrying out this final plan. The scene would serve as a pretext for a dialogue in gestures between Mlle Philippart and M. Babilée, in whom I find much of the resilience of Vaslav Nijinsky. I decided to take a hand only in so far as to describe in detail to the scenic designer, to the costumier, to the choreographer and to the performers what I expected of them. I fixed my choice on Vakhévitch, designer, because he designs film sets and I wanted this high relief from which the cinematograph draws its dreams; on Mme Karinska, the wardrobe mistress, helped by Bérard, because they know stage optics better than anyone else; on Roland Petit, choreographer, because he would listen to me and translate me into that dance-language which I speak fairly well, but of which I lack the syntax.
The set depicts the studio of a most unhappy painter. This studio is in the form of a triangle. One of its sides would be the footlights. The apex closes the set. A post almost in the centre, a little to the right, rises from the floor, forming a gallows supporting a beam that crosses the ceiling from the prompt side to the opposite side. A rope with a slip knot hangs from the gallows, and the iron framework of a lamp, wrapped in an old newspaper, dangles from the beam between the gallows and the wall on the left. Against the right wall, its dirty roughcast starred with the dates of engagements, with drawings done by me, an iron bedstead with a red blanket and sheets trailing on the floor. Against the left wall, a wash-stand of similar style. In the left foreground, a door. Between the door and the footlights a table and straw-bottomed chairs. Other chairs are strewn about. One of them just under the slip knot, near the door. A glazed skylight in the steeply sloping ceiling shows a Paris night sky. The whole thing, due to harsh lighting, long shadows, the splendour, the squalor, the dignity, the indignity, will evoke the world of Baudelaire.
Before the rise of the curtain the orchestra strikes up J. S. Bach’s Passacaglia, orchestrated by Respighi. The curtain rises. The young painter is lying on his bed on his back, one foot raised along the wall. His head and one of his arms are hanging over the red blanket. He is smoking. He is wearing neither a shirt nor socks, but only a wrist watch, old slippers and the kind of boiler-suit known as ‘stokers blues’, o
f a dark blue on which the many coloured stains call to mind Harlequin’s motley.
The first phase (for immobility plays in this solemn fugue as active a part as motion) shows us the anguish of this young painter, his nervous tension, his dejection, the watch he keeps looking at, his pacing to and fro, his pauses under the rope he has knotted to the beam, his ear hesitating between the ticking of the time and the silence of the stairs. Mime which, carried to excess, incites the dance. (One of the motifs being that magnificent, circular and airy movement of a man consulting his wrist watch.)
The door opens. A young girl enters, a brunette, elegant, lithe, without a hat, in a simple pale yellow dress, very short (Gradiva’s shade of yellow) and black gloves. Right from the door, which she closes behind her, she pricks out her ill humour on her points. The young man dashes towards her, she repels him and strides across the room. He follows her. She upsets some chairs. The second phase will be the dance of the painter and this young girl who insults him, knocks him about, shrugs her shoulders, kicks him. The scene works up to the dance, that is to say to the uncoiling of bodies that clinch and unclinch, a cigarette that is spat out and crushed underfoot, a girl who three times running stamps with her heel on a poor kneeling fellow who falls, spins round, collapses, straightens up again with the extreme slowness of heavy smoke, in short of anger’s exploding thunderbolts.
This shifts our dancers to the extreme left of the room, whence the unhappy young man indicates the rope with an outstretched arm. And now the young lady cajoles him, leads him to a seat, sets him astride it, climbs onto the chair under the beam, adjusts the slip knot, then comes back and turns his head towards his gallows.
The young man’s revolt, his fit of fury, his chase after the fleeing girl whom he grasps by the hair, the flight of the girl and the door-slam that brings the second phase to an end.
The third phase shows the young man flattened against the door. His dance proceeds from his paroxysm. One after another he whirls the chairs in the air at arm’s length and breaks them against the walls. He tries to drag the table towards the gallows, stumbles, falls, gets up again, knocks the table over with his back. He clutches his breast in pain. Cries of pain issue from his mouth, which we see but do not hear. Pain steers him straight to the gallows. He contemplates the noose. He stretches up to it. He puts it round his neck.
It is at this point that M. Babilée displays an admirable cunning. How does he hang himself? I cannot think. He does hang himself. He hangs. His legs hang. His arms hang. His hair hangs. His shoulders hang. The sight of this sombre poetry, accompanied by the magnificence of Bach’s brass, was so beautiful that the audience broke into applause.
The fourth phase begins. The light changes. The room takes flight, leaving nothing but the triangle of the floor, the furniture, the framework of the gallows, the hanged man and the lamp.
These are now seen against the open night sky, in the midst of a surging sea made up of chimneys, of garrets, of electric signs, of rain-pipes, of roof-tops. In the distance the letters of Citroën light up in turn on the Eiffel Tower.
Across the roofs comes Death. She is a young white-faced woman in a ball-dress, perched on high buskins. A red hood covers her small skeleton’s head. She has on long red gloves, bracelets and a diamond necklace. Her tulle train trails after her onto the stage.
Her right hand, lifted, indicates the void. She advances towards the footlights. She turns away, crosses the stage, pauses on the extreme right and snaps her fingers. Slowly the young man frees his head from the slip knot, slides along the beam and lands on the ground. Death removes her skeleton’s mask and her hood. It is the yellow girl. She puts the mask on the motionless youth. He moves round her, walks a few steps, stops. Then Death holds out her hands. This gesture seems to urge on the young man with the stamp of death on his face. The cortège of the two dancers sets out across the roof-tops.
Yesterday the ballet company had just returned from Switzerland. From morning to night it was a matter of reassembling the scattered properties of our production, of marshalling our dances and the orchestra of sixty-four musicians, of getting the dresses finished at Mme Karinska’s, of persuading Mlle Philippart to walk on high buskins, of fastening straps to them, of painting M. Babilée’s boiler suit, of putting up the set of the room and the roof-tops, of fitting up the electric signs, of fixing the lighting-plot. In short, at seven o’clock in the evening, while the stagehands cleared the stage, we found ourselves faced with the prospect of disaster. The choreography came to a halt with the hanging of the young man. Roland Petit had refused to do anything about the last scene in my absence. The dancers were half dead with exhaustion. I suggested that we should let them sit in the auditorium and mime their parts to them. This we did.
I returned to the Palais-Royal. I dined. At ten o’clock I was back at the theatre, where the crowd was finding no seats left, where the box office, overwhelmed, was turning away people who had booked theirs. Henri Sauguet had just left, furious. He had taken his orchestral score with him. He refused to allow Les Forains to be performed. The auditorium was crammed and in a state of great nervous tension. Le Jeune Homme et la Mort was third on the bill. The set of the rooftops presents a difficulty unusual in a ballet. The stage-hands kept losing their heads. The audience was growing impatient, stamping its feet, booing.
While the stage-hands went on with their work, Boris ordered the house lights to be put out. The orchestra struck up. From the very first chords of the Bach, we had the feeling that an extraordinary calm was pervading the whole place. The semi-darkness of the wings, full of running feet, of shouted orders, of feverish dressers (for Death had to be dressed in one minute) was less chaotic than one would have dared hope. Suddenly I saw Boris, looking distraught. He whispered to me: ‘There’s not enough music.’ That was the danger of our experiment. We called to the dancers to quicken the pace. They were no longer with us.
The miracle is that Boris was wrong, that the music was long enough and that our dancers left the stage on the last chords.
I had advised them not to acknowledge the applause at the curtain call but to continue on their sleep-walkers’ course.
They only came down from the roof-tops at the third curtain. And it was at the fourth that we realized that the audience was emerging from a hypnotic trance. I came to my senses on the stage, dragged forward by my dancers, facing that suddenly awakened audience, which was waking us by its uproar.
I must emphasize the fact that if I tell of this success, it is not a question of any satisfaction I derive from it, but a question of that image which every poet, young or old, beautiful or ugly, tries to substitute for his own, and to which he gives the task of embellishing it.
Let me add that one minute of contact between an audience and a work momentarily abolishes the space that separates us from other people. This phenomenon, which can centralize the most opposed electric currents at the end of some point, enables us to live in a world where the ritual of courtesy alone gives us respite from the sickening loneliness of the human being.
A ballet possesses, moreover, the privilege of speaking all languages and of lifting the barrier between ourselves and those who speak in tongues unknown to us.
This evening they are taking me from my country retreat to the wings from which I shall watch the second performance. When I get back, I propose to write whether the contact is broken or still holds.
I have just come back from the Theatre des Champs-Elysées. Our ballet was given the same reception. Perhaps our dancers had less fire, but they performed their dances with a greater precision. In any case, whatever goes amiss, the beauty of the performance leaps the footlights, and the general atmosphere is an image of me, of my table, of my myths, an involuntary paraphrase of Le Sang d’un Poète.
Only from being invisible this atmosphere has become visible. This is what happens with La Belle et la Bête. Doubtless I am less clumsy with my guns, less hasty on the trigger. At any rate with this I reap a harvest that
I failed to do in the old days with works more worthy of rousing emotion. I suppose these works fructify in silence and make the audience, without realizing it, better able to understand their content.
Thus quite a few people in 1946 thought that I had altered certain passages in Les Parents Terribles, whereas the play is the same as in 1939; it is they themselves who have changed, but they attribute this change to an alteration of the text.
Tonight the orchestra was ahead. It therefore came in on different movements. The synchronization worked faultlessly. The room was late in taking flight, leaving M. Babilée hanging from his beam. This produced a new beauty as a result of which the entry of Death was even more startling.
Is Le Jeune Homme et la Mort a ballet? No. It is a drama in mime, in which mime broadens its style to that of the dance. It is a dumb show in which I endeavour to endow gestures with the high relief of the cry and the spoken word. It is speech translated into the language of the body. It consists of monologues and dialogues that use the same vocabulary as painting, sculpture and music.
When shall I cease to read, with reference to this work or any other, praises of my lucidity? What do our critics imagine? There is my workshop. Work goes on there at night, when all the lights are out. I simply grope about and manage as best I can. That they should mistake this obsession with work, this being haunted by work, that is to say by a work no longer concerned for a moment with what it is manufacturing, for lucidity, for the supervision of this workshop, where nothing is overlooked, is evidence of a basic misapprehension, a very serious divorce between the critic and the poet.
For nothing but aridity would be born of this master’s eye. Whence would come the drama? Whence the dream? Whence the shadow they believe to be magic?
There is neither magic nor master’s eye. Only a great deal of love and a great deal of work. On this intervention of the soul they trip up, accustomed as they are on the one hand to Voltaire’s metronome, on the other to Rousseau’s hazel switch. The precarious balance between these two extremes is perhaps the winning over of the modern trend, but for that critics must explore the zone, visit its mines and let in the unknown.
