Next up on the essays shelf:
The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)
This 1949 “Talk of the Town” piece by Geoffrey Hellman features a visit with French “poet, novelist, artist, playwright, actor, critic, scenario writer and motion-picture director” Jean Cocteau, in town for the premiere of The Eagle with Two Heads.
The piece is hilarious. Hellman meets up with Cocteau and a bunch of interpreters at the hotel where Cocteau is staying. Hellman knows a little bit of French, Cocteau knows a bit of English, but better safe than sorry, the hovering protective interpreters (more than one) are there. Hellman will ask a question. Cocteau will respond in French (and Hellman, more or less, understands what he is saying). The interpreters then give completely different interpretations of what was said, not so much opposite, but expanding on what Cocteau said, acting like his press agents. Cocteau will say something about the studio system in Hollywood and how nothing like that exists in France. The interpreters will interpret that as, “He works with his hands.” This goes on forever. It’s very funny. I love that Hellman chose to keep that as part of the “Talk of the Town” piece, because they really are supposed to be little slices-of-life, the more absurd the better. Because life is absurd. And beautiful. Hellman describes each interpreter, and then boils them down in later references, ie: “The Hat” and “The Sweater”
Beautiful.
In the midst of all of this Lost in Translation stuff, we get a great picture of Cocteau the artist, what he thinks about art, his movies, America, France.
Here’s an excerpt.
The Fun of It: Stories from The Talk of the Town (Modern Library Paperbacks)
With some valuable help from the interpreter, Cocteau went on to tell us that France is like a large village and that he feels like a peasant bringing his films to New York. “America has always given me courage,” he said, in reference to this country’s reception of such past pictures of his as “Blood of a Poet” and “Beauty and the Beast”. “Hollywood needs a laboratory. An experimenter is hampered there today, because it’s closed to risk. But it’s the risk that pays off.” “His films never lose money,” said the Hat. Cocteau made “The Eagle with Two Heads” and “Les Parents Terribles”, another picture (based on a play he wrote in 1938) that he has just finished, for a French company. He has formed his own company for his next film, which will deal with Orpheus and Eurydice. He lives alone in a small house in the country, near Fontainebleau. “All the young creative people in Paris are interested in the cinema,” he told us. “Here I don’t think they are. The cinema is a great art, but in America they have made an industry out of it.” “It is the modern art,” declared the Hat. “It is very young,” said Cocteau. “What is fifty years in the life of a Muse?” This Muse’s name, he said, is Cinema.
The lady in the sweater returned to the room. Cocteau observed that Cinema often keeps him busy from six in the morning till midnight, that forty of his drawings are being shown at the Hugo Gallery here, and that he lately completed a ten-by-twelve-foot sketch for a Gobelin tapestry of the same size. His subject was Judith bearing the head of Holofernes. It will take three years to weave the tapestry and it will go to the Louvre. “I deliberately chose an old-fashioned Beaux -Arts-Pris de Rome theme,” he said, “but my execution was not academic.” “Mr. Cocteau is exceptional,” said the Sweater. The object of her admiration and ours, a delicately featured man of fifty-seven with long, thin fingers, paced about the room as he talked, gesturing with his hands and occasionally coming to rest on a chair, over one arm of which he threw a leg. He wore a brown silk tie with his initials woven on it in cream-colored letters. “Everyone in America seems so youthful,” he said. “They all drink milk, as though they were still their mothers. No Frenchman drinks milk.”
