Beauty and the Beast
There is something inherently supernatural about cinema. It is a unique art form, and it has a particular magical and transcendent power that is unmatched by any other forms, be it literature, painting, sculpture, or poetry. In fact, in its embryonic stage, cinema was just that: a magic trick. Cinema as we know it today evolved from an illusion performed at circuses and funfairs, known as the Magic Lantern, that projected pictures on sheets of glass using a lens and a bright light source. It is an art form that has always been associated with the illusory and the supernatural, particularly in its ability to seemingly raise the dead by projecting ghostly apparitions of a time long passed.
One of legendary French director Jean Cocteau’s greatest magic tricks was his telling of the most famous case of Stockholm syndrome in the history of fiction: Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête). You know the story by now, it has been adapted countless times, most famously by Disney — twice. The beautiful daughter of a merchant — Belle played by Josette Day — takes her father’s place as the prisoner of a mysterious bestial man (common Cocteau collaborator, Jean Marais), who proposes marriage to her on a nightly basis, slowly falling under his charm, and in turn, transforming him. But what Cocteau brings to his woozy adaptation is an atmosphere that hums of magic and mystery.
“When I make a film, it is a sleep in which I am dreaming,” wrote Cocteau. It is this dream logic — a career-long obsession and pursuit — that he applies to the fairytale world of the film. The set design is something to be marvelled at; the display of a total cinematic universe in creation. A lavish baroque backdrop radiates that state of innocence in which fairytales are read and which we hold in our memory. But that innocent facade is too often perverted. Unlike the Disney adaptations that many of us have grown up with, and many children will continue to grow up with, this is not a film for children despite its obvious magical fairytale trappings. Rather, Cocteau’s gently disquieting world employs the mechanics of a dream, using striking Freudian imagery to suggest that the spatiality of a fairytale is a mere reflection of the artists’s, the character’s, and our own subconscious.
Roger Ebert aptly described the Beast’s dwelling as “Xanadu crossed with Dali”. It has all the decadent candelabras and statues of a stately pleasure-dome, yet those images are fused with the surreal — the candelabra is held by living human arms that extend from the walls and the statues appear to be alive, gazing upon the film’s events. The setting is alive and organic as the people that inhabit it, breaking down the barrier between the interior mind and exterior world. In a way this is the essence of Cocteau’s own brand of surrealism. Things and images taken from our waking lives are imbued with a sense of magic and mystery that lurks in the deepest pits of our minds. Entering the mysterious castle is like falling into a vidid dream. It is an experience outside spatial and temporal laws, as Belle appears to glide around the castle, her feet unmoved, as if pulled along by some unknown magnetism. Beauty and the Beast is a film that reminds us of the age-old link between cinema and our dreams, and in turn, how the magic of our dreams has always influenced stories and fairytales.
It is a film that hopes to break the fourth wall, planting subtle images into our dreams. Indeed, the role of the filmmaker within his own creation is stressed. Rather unexpectedly for a cinematic adaptation of a timeless fairytale, the film opens with Cocteau writing the opening credits on a blackboard. Cocteau then breaks the fourth wall with a written preamble, following by the cry of “action!” and the clap of the clapperboard. He does not want us to forget that this is a film, a story, a “once upon a time…” Not only is this a film fascinated with the power of stories, but also with the power of their images.
Cocteau’s true artistry — and his greatest magic trick of them all — is his ability to imbue these images with seemingly supernatural power, producing a surreal masterpiece, with a fluid, gleaming surface with only limited tools at his disposal. The director could not afford the kind of expensive optical and special effects that Hollywood took for granted. He had to invent his own effects in order to bring his phantasmagorical fairytale to the screen. For the surrealist filmmaker, special effects were crucial in order to anaesthetise the audience into this waking dream, and the film’s greatest charm is its ability to employ simple special effects that only go to serve the atmosphere. Take for instance the effect of the candles lighting themselves as the merchant passes them. This was achieved by blowing them out and then running the film in reverse as he walked backward past them. It is the simplest effect really, but this one long take looks entirely believable and beautifully embedded within the dreamy atmosphere of the film. Budget and tools were limited, even to the point that the stream that the Beast drinks from was supposedly just a sewage runoff behind the studio dressed up in the Gustave Doré influenced decor of the film. Before the days of lifelike composite computer effects and Cronenbergian plastic realities that give substance to even the most outlandish and grotesque instances of body horror, here is a fantasy film brought to life by Jean Marais dressed up in animal hair, in turn, bringing to life the tragedy of a lonely and misunderstood man, treated like an animal.
It is this that grounds this hypnotic dream of a film in an idea of reality. At its heart there is a very human tragedy. Though perhaps not quite as cerebral as some of Cocteau’s other surrealist pursuits — particularly The Orphic Trilogy, consisting of The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orphée (1950), and Testament of Orpheus (1959) — it does definitely share one quality with them. That being Cocteau’s obsession with mirrors and the power that they hold. Mirrors are of course thematically central to his Orphic Trilogy, brought to life as doorways into dreamscapes and underworlds by another of Cocteau’s most memorable special effects, quick cutting between a mirror and a highly reflective basin of mercury. Cocteau wrote about how “we watch ourselves grow old in mirrors. They bring us closer to death.” This much is as true for his Orphic Trilogy as it is for Beauty and the Beast. In the film, Cocteau once again uses special effects as a narrative tool, for the mirrors do not show reflections so much as they show the characters’ dreams and fantasies, visions and apparitions that destabilise time and space. They are once again employed as Freudian tools. One of the film’s central conceits is of course the Beast’s self-deprecating despair at his own appearance, and an obvious and understandable aversion to mirrors. But not only do Cocteau’s mirrors present us with our own reflection, and in turn our own destruction, but — like for Orpheus — they also become doorways into exterior dreamworlds as well as exterior magical worlds.
Cocteau weaves a delicate fabric that billows like the castle’s curtains blowing suggestively in the wind: at once tactile and torsional. Special effects provide a tangibility — a cinematic physicality — to Cocteau’s elegant visual metaphors. Like a dream, the wildest fantasies are rooted in ambiguous meaning. Beauty and the Beast is a truly cinematic fairytale. It is told in such a way that can only be told through the magic of a cinematic light and sound show. 71 year later, Jean Cocteau’s masterpiece still reminds us of the magical transcendent power of cinema. Despite its dark, shadowy expressionism and uncanny black-and-white trappings, it is a magic lantern bursting with light.
