🧿🍑🌞

prints | tutorials

“I do not seek to please or conform to any standards” Cocteau once said in reference to his critics, “but I do request that I be understood”. In this sense, most of Cocteau’s frustrations grew out of his feeling of artistic persecution. Just as his homosexuality prevented him from being accepted in traditional French society, his unwillingness to subsume his idiosyncratic personality into either the surrealist or poetic realist camps meant that he was also discredited by the critical elite. (…) [Belle] desires an adult relationship, one where she can claim her own sense of agency and will not be encumbered by the expectations of paternalistic male figures. (…) Cocteau’s implication is that the castle represents Belle’s fantasies: a lush score is introduced, she is decorated in lavish gowns, the landscapes are rendered in soft focus, she is unperturbed by her meddlesome sisters, and (most importantly) she is given the opportunity for romantic liberation. The Beast gains her affection through respecting and listening to her concerns, and by not being an imposition on her freedom. Within the castle landscape, Cocteau merges these master/servant dynamics with his interest in thematic dualities: the blending of two separate identities into one.

(…) Belle and The Beast, despite the boundaries of class and appearance are bound by the similar creed of the outsider. The castle defies rational logic, and therefore is conceived as separate from Belle’s “waking life” of complacency and regulation. The world of the castle represents escape: a shared experience of dreaming that is akin to the “conscious hallucinations” of the surrealist aesthetic. It is also a tone that Cocteau uses to represent love: in this illusory space, divisive signifiers cease to be of much significance. 

(Nunoda, Erin (2012) “La belle et la bête: Stylistic Convergence and the Subversive Imagination of Jean Cocteau, “Kino: The Western Undergraduate Journal of Film Studies: Vol. 3: Iss. 1, Article 9.)