As extolled in the program capsule for Frameline 49’s presentation of Lisa Immordinio Vreeland’s documentary portrait of Jean Cocteau: “Gay poet, novelist, filmmaker, and artist Jean Cocteau was a visionary whose influence shaped the 20th century and continues to resonate today. Through rare archival footage, personal interviews, and clips from his groundbreaking work, Jean Cocteau offers a vivid portrait of an artist who defied convention at every turn.
“Narrated by Josh O’Connor and directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, this compelling documentary traces Cocteau’s fearless creativity across cinema, literature, and the visual arts. A gay icon who lived through two world wars, the Great Depression, and shifting cultural tides, Cocteau authored enduring works like The Human Voice (La voix humaine) and redefined what it meant to be an artist in the modern era. Complicated and unapologetically himself, his art—steeped in beauty, myth, and desire—remains strikingly relevant. This rich and intimate portrait captures the spirit of an avant-garde master whose legacy continues to challenge boundaries and inspire new generations.”
Documentary portraits by author and film director Lisa Immordino Vreeland are always welcome events. Her filmography launched in 2011 with a portrait of her grandmother-in-law Harpers Bazaar fashion editor Diana Vreeland, and continued on through informed and intimate films on such creatives as “art addict” Peggy Guggenheim, photographer, artist and set designer, Cecil Beaton, the relationship between authors Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, photographer and make-up artist François Nars, and—most recently—with the Frameline entry Jean Cocteau (2024), which had its European premiere at the Venice Film Festival, its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, and its California premiere at the Palm Springs International Film Festival. Vreeland had earlier worked with the Cocteau material in a segment for her televised series “Art of Style” (season 3, episode 4), narrated by Timothée Chalame.
One might trace a running theme in Vreeland’s documentaries: an attention and appreciation, if not sheer nostalgic interest, in artistic practices of the past and their practitioners, how artists have survived the upheavals of their time, serving to underscore how much of those collaborative aesthetics are woefully absent or out-of-fashion in current practices, or more relevantly how artists must find collaborative strategies to survive their current moment. Jean Cocteau is true to that form.
While conducting research for Jean Cocteau, Vreeland uncovered televised footage from 1962 in the National Film Archive in Paris wherein Cocteau addressed the young people of the future (which he imagined to be the year 2000). Seated before a tapestry of his own creation in the Villa Santo Sospir in the South of France, Cocteau praised the humanity he presumed present in the youth of the future and encouraged them to be serious, to work, and not to grow cynical. “Don’t give in to pessimism. To conversations that drag you down further,” he cautioned. “Work, believe, and pretend the future does not present a frightening enigma. A mysterious force that expresses itself through us demands such courage from us. I have never done anything other than serve it and be under its order. The crime of not paying attention—of which no one considers themselves guilty—is the worst of the crimes against the mind.”
Using this televised address to frame her documentary, Vreeland braids it with Cocteau’s commentary on his own life narrated by Josh O’Connor and constructed from nearly one thousand letters to his widowed mother Eugénie over the course of four decades, and Vreeland’s own impressionistic overview of Cocteau’s polymathic oeuvre, which she presents in a desultory, oneiric and abstract way, drifting from one project to the other, simulating a dream-like atmosphere, and creating a textured approach to Cocteau’s life through the events and interactions in his life that defined him.
"I always try to entertain people," Vreeland acknowledged in an onstage conversation with Chris Auer after the film screened at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival. "But in this film you don’t laugh, because I felt there was a really important message to tell the youth of today, and I’m following Cocteau’s prompt here, which is to be awake, be alert, and to plant a new seed."
Indeed, there is something generative and propagative in Cocteau transmitting the story of his own creative life to future youth that speaks resoundly to me as I begin wandering in the foothills of my own life towards the horizon. Vreeland captures that forcefully in her portrait of Cocteau.
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For all the joyful abandon that Cocteau wishes for the youth of the future, his own life was riddled with sad pressures and restraints. Cocteau described himself as being the most invisible of artists, but the most visible of men, with the man drawing fire. This was nowhere more evident than how he was treated by Andre Breton and the Surrealists who delivered death threats and homophobic insults. “But the artist,” Cocteau maintained, “is never hit.”
Breton and the Surrealists were jealous of Cocteau’s success and “radiated” hostility towards him at his poetry readings, despite Cocteau offering them friendship with both hands. They felt he was “insufficiently serious”; a euphemism—if ever I’ve heard one—of homophobia. Breton, in turn—as described by surrealist co-founder Philippe Soupault—had a psychological complex where he loved whatever he had destroyed and a compulsion to destroy whatever he loved. His hatred towards Cocteau was violent. He and the Surrealists phoned Cocteau’s mother and read obscene poetry to her. They told Picasso and other friends that he had committed suicide. Breton banned Cocteau’s poetry from a journal he edited while all the time inviting Cocteau’s friends to contribute. Their malice was unbridled.
One such instance was in how Breton elevated then fourteen-year-old Raymond Radiguet above the others in their circle. He fashioned himself to be Radiguet’s protector, though Radiguet soon tired of him and turned, instead, to Cocteau for inspiration and guidance. This, of course, infuriated Breton. Radiguet influenced Cocteau to allow the subconscious to direct his poetry. Radiguet’s premature death at 20 from typhoid fever devastated Cocteau who described the experience as “an operation without chloroform.” In his grief, Cocteau turned to opium which simulated an oblivious experience that had no concern for life or death. “Addiction,” he later wrote, “is a revolt.” Cocteau wrestled with addiction for the rest of his life.
As if to provide context to this struggle, Cocteau said: “One always has the craving to believe that one is passing through a crisis. What crisis? That’s all there is. Without a crisis there would be nothing.” Elsewhere, he opined: “Control is very dangerous, and mistakes are the true expression of the individual.” In his later years when he was lavishly fêted with honors and awards, Cocteau summarized: “It is the originality of an existence which—in the long run—arouses the attention of the judges who award these honors. But the originality of an existence is always made up of what the official world condemns.”
Skirting condemnations of his lifestyle and creative tenor, no less from the aimed attacks of Breton and the Surrealists, Cocteau courted and found many beloved friends. “The journey we make between life and death would be insufferable to me without the warmth of friendship,” he said, even as he qualified, “I have a feeling of friendship for too many people. I am sure that my inclination to please, to bend to the whims of those around me, makes me invisible and takes away from my originality in the eyes of others.” Criticized for some of his political stances during World War II, Cocteau defended himself by stating, “My only politics have been friendships. It is a form of love without possessiveness. The happiness of a friend delights us. It adds to us. Certain people—I should say, the vibrations certain people throw out—stimulate us. In conversations, if I am in good form, I forget myself, so greatly do words intoxicate me.”
His friendship and admiration of Pablo Picasso was well-known, even if it was notoriously asymmetric. Cocteau described Picasso as “a bullfighter with an eye that pierces through you” and added that, “He became this storm capable of twisting iron and shaping the void.” Their collaboration on the ballet “Parade” (1917) made cultural history.
Ever in command of his wit, Cocteau invited Coco Chanel to design the costumes for his 1922 production of “Antigone” because he “didn’t imagine the daughter of Oedipus badly dressed.”
Against the backdrop of Cocteau’s illustrations and stagecraft, Vreeland achieves an appreciation of Cocteau’s many talents, even as it circumambulates around the ageold criticism aimed at every polymath for a lack of committed focus to any one medium and a puer’s addiction to diversity.
“lncapable of following a trail,” Cocteau explained, “I proceed by impulses. All my life I’ve hunted in this manner.” Advocating his calling, he also stated: “People separate mystery from reality; but, reality is mystery. Those who know this are poets.” In that poetic vein, he offered, “In the end, everything is resolved. Except for the difficulty of being, which is never resolved.”
