Cocteau's use of things from the war, like the rubble and the radio transmission, is a brilliant way to represent this chaos because the war was chaotic, and many things from war don't make sense to most people. Seeing and hearing things that would remind the audience of the war would bring up emotions they experienced at the time, adding to the overall effect of the movie. I think it's sad that some of the movie is lost to later generations who can't appreciate all the effects of the movie because they don't have a personal connection to it.
At the beginning of the movie, I thought it was bit like film noir because Orpheus is a hero with a flaw who meets this mysterious lady who (literally) takes him into another world. Although I wouldn't call this film noir, there's something in this I want to address, bear with me, I'll try to make sense. The article mentioned that in some versions of this myth Orpheus preferred male company before his wife died. I started to think about the relationships btwn Orpheus and men and women, and now I think that Death (the woman) isn't who sucked Orpheus into the other world. She took him to another world in a literal sense, but the "world" he lives in for the majority of the movie isn't in no man's land but in his car listening for poetry. Because of this, I think the male poet on the radio is what really pulls him in and gets him hooked. After his return home, he stays in his car and prefers sitting in the car to his wife's company, and spends most of his time with Hurtubise--in this instance he prefers men to his wife (who just happens to be pregnant, making her more feminine than other women in the film).
One thing I found interesting but not really important to the overall picture (please feel free to enlighten me if it is significant, I'd really like to know) is that the otherworld is a dreamlike place, but dreams are open to all kinds of interpretation, but there is no room for any interpretation or anything other than straight fact in the actual place. For example, they wanted Orpheus' exact occupation, and were not able to recognize the subtleties between being a writer and a poet, but it was very important that they had the right information. Now that I think about it, the scene before the judges is like the opposite of a dream inside a place that seems to be made of dreams: the room is nothing special, it looks nothing like where they had just come from and seems like it could be from the real world, and the basic interaction during the scene was very serious and not dreamlike at all.
I think that this is interesting and original (though I wish you had brought the reading in a bit more precisely). Your argument that it's almost more his obession/rivalry with Cegeste's poetry than his relationship with Death that motivates Orpheus is interesting. I wouldn't say that what's really going on is homosexual relationships, per se. Orpheus and Heurtebise hanging out in the car doesn't make them gay, it just makes them guys. The connection the reading is making is between ideas of who and what poets are, and who and what homosexuals are supposed to be--both were supposedly attuned to aesthetics, and both perceive codes nobody else can. There's other stuff too, but you need to approach it a bit sideways for it to make sense.
ReplyDeleteI like your description of how realistic this movie is, for all the surrealistic dimensions, and how much informed by the war wreckage it is.