Orphée
Cocteau reworks the Orpheus myth in postwar Paris, with Death as a woman in a black car and mirrors as the door between worlds.
This imaginative take on the enduring Western myth of Orpheus (the archetypal creative artist) can be enjoyed as a technically inventive piece of pre-CGI film-making, a love-letter from director Jean Cocteau to his former partner Jean Marais (who stars), a vivid depiction of the perennial tension between Eros and Thanatos, or even a morality tale about professional boundary violation (when Death steps out of line).
Jean Marais plays the poet who follows his own fame and then his own loss through the glass. The invention is entirely pre digital and still startling, and the film holds together as myth, as a study of the artist's traffic with death, and as a story about someone in a position of power who breaks her own rules.
Details
- 1950
- France
- French
- Film
Why it is on this list
Guild Film Club, 23 September 2026, proposed by Laurie Slade, who reads it four ways at once: technical inventiveness, a love letter from Cocteau to Jean Marais, the tension between Eros and Thanatos, and a morality tale about boundary violation when Death steps out of line.
Where to find it
for therapists and clients