One of the things that really appeals to me about both Beatuy and Orpheus is Cocteau's unapologetically low tech approach. So in the first you see real grade-school stuff sometimes, but it's so audacious - the necklace dropping to the ground, turning to onions as it falls. Of course, if you actually watch the scene it's a simple substitution, very easily noticed. Or the use of reverse footage, slow-motion and women rolling on unseen wheels; simple, simple, simple. And in Orphée the use of mirrors as a metaphor just took my breath away 35 years ago when I first saw the film.

When I finally got to go to France the first time I made sure to visit the Moulin de Touvoie where all of the exteriors for Belle's home were filmed. Imagine my surprise to discover that the place is really very nearly as whimsical as the movie was! There are tons of little details like really old gargoyles peering at you from door knockers, etc., and the owner was incredibly patitent with me, an American tourist (although the fact that I can at least speak understandibly in French despite my errors helped). At Rochecorbon people just take it for granted, but everybody knows where it is - you can ask anybody and they'll direct you to it, but I had a friend from Rochecorbon who arranged to have his brother take me there; I was totally unannounced but the woman who owns it was just wonderful about showing me around. Well, getting off topic - I got here by thinking about how Cocteau was able to use found objects so well in his films and the Mill is a great example. And creating a "set" out of sheets...and what a great set it is, too. There are just so many great images in that film, where do you start?

Orphée is not nearly the film Belle is IMO, but it is still quite a movie and face it, how many movies can stand that kind of comparison? I don't think of either film as horror films at all and I doubt that Cocteau had any such thought even though he was certainly aware of the tropes he was using; above all, Cocteau was concerned with creating poetry and being seen as a poet; it's one of his strengths and a simultaneous weakness, especially if you read any of the commments Igor Stravinsky made about him in later years, but give him credit for those two films. I've never had really strong responses to any of the other Cocteau films I've seen, but none of them seem to have the fantastic element these two do - they are often more concerened with near-Dadaist expressionism or just kind of, well, what the French call intello - pretentiously intellectual.