I love his Beauty and the Beast, but his is a mind blowing masterpiece.
You know what's REALLY surreal? Writing, in an age where cgi calls the shots, of a surrealist movie of sixty plus years ago and trying to see what seems today to be crude special effects as the poetic magic it must have seemed to its original audience.
I enjoy the enthusiasm from user reviewer Dave G ("One of the truly great masterpieces of cinema", Dave G from Sheffield, England, 25 January 2000). Also, from peterehoward ("The closest cinema has come to poetry", peterehoward, United Kingdom, 13 November 2005).
"The legend of Orpheus is well-known. In Greek mythology, Orpheus was a troubadour from Thrace.
In 1950 'Opticals' aka as 'trick photography' were I their infancy and chi wasn't even a gleam in Pixar's eye so if nothing else Cocteau is to be applauded for a visually stunning movie if nothing else. But there is, of course, something else, and lots of it.
Orphee is a poet who becomes obsessed with Death (the Princess). They fall in love.
Man can love death, but death cannot love man; it is as unnatural as man disconnecting himself from life in the pursuit of art and beauty. Man must fear death, just as man must fear losing himself to his aesthetic desires – to create and partake in art.
From its explosive opening where a brawl occurs at a café for poets that's "the nerve-centre of the world" to traveling through the afterlife to the very end, Orphée's mania never stops. It's an incredibly gripping and bizarre film which immediately evolves into a bad dream.
The second of Jean Cocteau's Orpheus trilogy employs impressive special effects to tell a contemporary version of the legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, but fails to engage on an emotional level. The intellectual remoteness of his artistic vision has invited - and received - a broad range of analytical interpretation, none of which has adequately deciphered whatever meaning he might have wished - or claimed - to impart.