Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête)APPROACHES TO FILM Main Page / Course Syllabus / Discussion Forum / Film Pages / Exams & Grades
Beauty and the Beast (La Belle et la Bête)Beauty and the Beast is a memorable and enduring film based on Madam LePrince de Beaumont's folk tale. From the first frame to the last, the film is director Jean Cocteau's fantasy, a visual masterpiece both overwhelming and enduring. In 1995, composer Philip Glass wrote a complete opera synchronized to Cocteau's film.
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Scenes for study (require RealPlayer, available as a free download from www.real.com):
La Belle et la Bete (Beauty and the Beast), claimed by some to be Cocteau's best, takes the traditional children's story and gives it a decidedly adult viewpoint. As in the traditional story, the key roles are Beauty, her father, the beast, Beauty's suitor (Avenant), and later the Prince. Cocteau also includes Beauty's brother and her two sisters.
In this story, the family is rather dysfunctional. The father (Marcel Andre) is a businessman who is waiting for a shipment of goods to arrive by boat. The family's future is resting on the shipment. In the beginning of the film, Beauty (Josette Day) is seen serving the family. She does all the cooking and cleaning while the rest of the family goes about its business of leisure. Avenant (Jean Marais) expresses concern that Beauty should not be serving her family and asks her to marry him. She refuses. Beauty's brother then enters and a fight begins between the two men.
In the next scene, the father leaves the
family to greet one of the ships. As he leaves, he asks each of the three daughters what
gifts they want when he receives his profits from the shipment. The two sisters demand
clothes, jewelry, and pets. However, Beauty replies that she simply desires a single rose.
In town, the father discovers that the creditors have absconded with his profits and no
money remained. The disappointed father wonders what he will tell the family. Upon his
return from out-of-town business, he gets lost in the woods and stumbles upon a castle.
The castle appears enchanted. As he walks through the door, candelabra light, revealing
that the candle holders are human arms and hands. Following a series of candelabra
extended down a hallway, the father is led into a dining hall. A pair of sculptured faces
are part of the fireplace. These sculptures take on life and the human like eyes watch the
old man. Another candelabrum is on the table. It appears to let go of the candles, pour a
glass of wine for the father, and return to its former position. In amazement, the father
lifts the tablecloth and looks under the table searching for the source of the arm. He
presumably sees nothing. The father falls asleep as the fireplace faces look on.
Later, the father is awakened by a roar. He grabs his hat and gloves and
runs to find the source of the noise. After extensively searching the grounds, the father
sees a rose on a vine and picks it. Suddenly the Beast (Jean Marais) appears. The beast
explains that as a result of picking the rose the father must die. The two enter into an
agreement whereby the father may leave provided he returns within three days or sends a
daughter as a replacement. 
In order for the father to find his way
home he is given a horse by the Beast.
Arriving home, the father tells his family about his encounter with the Beast. The sisters blame Beauty for their father's dilemma. Beauty offers to take her father's place. During an argument Beauty notices that her father seems ill. When her father is taken to his bedroom, Beauty sneaks out, takes the Beast's horse back to the castle, and takes her father's place. When Beauty gets to the castle, she explores the area and is about to leave when she encounters the Beast. She faints. The Beast carries her to her bedroom and places her on the bed. When she awakes, the Beast explains to her that the castle and everything in it is hers to command and use. The Beast also says that each night at 7:00 he will meet her in the dining hall for dinner. That night when she goes to the dining hall, he proposes marriage. He also states that each night, he will make the same request. She replies that each night she will respond with the same answer of "no".
One night Beauty is awakened by strange noises. She goes out into the hall and there, from behind a statue, she watches as the Beast with smoking fingers returns from a hunting expedition. At this point, she realizes he is truly an animal who has to hunt to stay alive. However, as time passes, Beauty's attitude toward the Beast begins to mellow. They go for walks together. She has closer contact with him to the extent of giving him water from her hands. The Beast again proposes marriage. She again turns him down. He questions whether another had already proposed. She replies yes.
After running off into the woods and returning the Beast finds Beauty to be ill. She explains that she knows her father is dying and she would like to be allowed to visit him for a week. Showing her the temple of Diana and explaining that the temple contains all his riches, he gives her the key to the temple. He warns that if she doesn't return within the week, he will die. The Beast gives her his "magic" glove to transport her back to her father's house.
In the meantime, the family has had to cook and clean for themselves. When
Beauty returns, the sisters are jealous of Beauty's "good fortune" and her
father is revived simply by he
r presence. The sisters, the brother, and Avenant plot to kill the
Beast and gather all his wealth. The sisters manage to steal the key to the temple and
give it to Avenant. The Beast's horse returns with the "magic" mirror. The
sisters take the mirror and eventually give it to Beauty. The two men take the horse to
find the castle. Beauty, seeing the Beast in the mirror, realizes he is calling for her
return. Using the glove, she is at the castle only to realize that the key to Diana's
temple is back at her father's house. She returns to her father's house via the glove, but
cannot find the key. The mirror breaks. She returns to the castle where she finds the
Beast on the ground in the garden. He is dying.
Beauty's brother and Avenant, meanwhile, have found the temple and are trying to enter. As Avenant is being lowered through the skylight into the room a statue of Diana shoots him with an arrow. As Avenant dies, he changes into the beast and the brother drops him. At the same time the Beast is transformed into the prince who looks like Avenant. Beauty is surprised. The Prince asks her if she is happy with his new appearance. She responds that it is something she must get used to. The two rise into the heavens to live a life together while being served by her sisters.
Visually astounding. The whole surrealistic experience dazzles the senses with camerawork that has seldom been equaled. The sets are both awesome and fascinating, the decor of the castle patterned after illustrations by Gustave Dore. Art director Christian Berard took Cocteau's astounding ideas and transformed them into wonderful sets, amazing costumes, and the Beast's marvelous mask, one that made him almost attractive instead of ugly.
Many of the castle's exteriors were shot at the Chateau de Raray outside Senlis, Cocteau taking advantage of the estate's strange animal statuary that dots the landscape, and the exquisite Rochecorbon manor house in Ille-et-Vilaine. The brilliant poet suffered through a production hampered by limited funds, accidents, and even his own severe illness, which caused the company to shut down until he was released from the hospital.
Ground-breaking. Cocteau wrote an extraordinary account about his first film (Beauty and the Beast, Diary of a Film) in which he admits to urging composer Georges Auric to provide a score that broke all the rules: "At my request, Georges Auric has not kept [the musical score] to the rhythm of the film but cut across it so that when film and music come together it seems as though by the grace of God."
Cocteau similarly drove his cinematographer to do the impossible: "People have decided once and for all that fuzziness [soft or out-of-focus shots] is poetic," he wrote. "No, since in my eyes poetry is precision, numbers. I'm pushing Alekan in precisely the opposite direction from what fools think is poetic."
Director Jean Cocteau (1889 - 1963) is a preeminent figure in 20th century French culture. A major contributor to the history of the cinema, he is also noted for his work as a novelist, poet, painter, sculptor and playwright.
Cocteau wrote, directed, narrated, edited and performed in his first film, The Blood of a Poet, shot in 1930. Privately financed by the Vicomte de Noailles, the film's release was delayed for two years due to the scandal that surrounded another 1930 Noailles production, Dali and Buñuel's L'Age d'or, which was denounced as "sacrilegious" when first screened.
Blood of a Poet was certainly influenced by the work of Dali and Buñuel, as well as other surrealist films by Man Ray and René Clair. But in its unprecedented use of sync-sound dialogue, narration and music (by the prolific and accomplished Georges Auric), juxtaposed with free-form episodic imagery, Cocteau's debut marked a watershed in non-narrative, personal filmmaking. Bracketing the beginning and end of the work with a shot of a factory chimney collapsing (to show that the events represented actually take place in an instant of "real time"), Cocteau designed the piece as a series of disparate sections, each centering on the adventures of a young poet/artist condemned to walk the halls of the "Hotel of Dramatic Follies" for his crime of having brought a statue to life.
Perhaps the most famous of the film's striking images is the sequence in which the young man, having created a drawing with a moving mouth, wipes the mouth onto his hand in an effort to erase it from the picture; whereupon the mouth takes on a life of its own, begging for air and later drinking from a bowl of water. Another memorable—and much-imitated—conceit is that of the poet passing through a mirror which turns into a pool of water.
Cocteau worked only intermittently in film
for the next 15 years, one reason being his recurring addiction to opium. His return to
directing in 1945, with Beauty and the Beast, was partly due to the efforts of
his favorite actor and close associate Jean Marais, who played the Beast in the film.
Relentlessly romantic, beautifully mounted (despite the problems attendant on film production in post-war France) and flawlessly acted, Beauty and the Beast marked a triumphant return to the screen for Cocteau. With its linear narrative and familiar mythic structure, the film was less experimental than Blood of a Poet. Yet Marais's unforgettable performance, the beast's (pre-prosthetic) make-up and Cocteau's inspired visual conceits (the beast's fingers smoking after a kill, human hands used as candelabras in his castle), made the film one of the director's most memorable—and most enduringly popular—works.
Cocteau directed two films adapted from his own plays, The Eagle with Two Heads
(1948) and The Storm Within (1948). In 1950 Cocteau made the film for which he is
perhaps best known, Orpheus, again starring Marais, this time as a young poet
beset by artistic and romantic rivals. Over the next ten years Cocteau worked on several
projects, providing dialogue and/or off-screen narration for a number of features by other
directors and contributing to several short films. His one-act, one-person play The
Human Voice was made into an excellent short film (L'Amore, 1948) by Roberto
Rossellini and also provided the inspiration for Pedro Almadovar's farce, Women on the
Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988). 
Cocteau also adapted his novel Les Enfants Terribles
into the screenplay for Jean-Pierre Mélville's 1950 film of the same name. Like Jean
Delannoy's L'Eternel Retour (1943), the work bears Cocteau's stamp far more than
that of its nominal director.
In 1959, with private financing (part of it coming from François Truffaut), Cocteau made his last film as a director, The Testament of Orpheus. A rather elaborate home movie starring its director, the work features cameos from numerous celebrities including Pablo Picasso, Yul Brynner and Jean-Pierre Léaud. A nostalgic return to the legend of Orpheus in the manner and style of The Blood of a Poet, the film lacks the earlier work's imagination and intensity.
Links:
Composer
features- Philip Glass, Beauty and the Beast: Take an old black and white
film, strip its sound and replace it with an opera