COCTEAU Jean (1889-1963) Lot n° 367

Rires du public, autograph manuscript signed, [ July 1943] ; 9 pages in-4 in ink with a few erasures and corrections. Beautiful text on the cinematograph for Comoedia, where it will be published under the title Secrets de beauté ; it will be collected in 1947 in Le Foyer des artistes. In his Diary (July 1943), Cocteau will note that it is an "article on the inopportune laughter of the film audience and the different phases of teamwork in the cinematograph". "The cinematograph is the poets' weapon". But writing hardly counts: "style exists only through the sequence of images". Cocteau tries to understand the reason for the inopportune laughter during certain screenings: "Laughter is the first defensive reflex of a cinematograph room. It uses it against the poetry that disturbs its habits and that the screen throws at it with such force that it finds itself caught between the impossibility of ignoring it and the revolt of having received the shock of it. Cocteau first cites as an example Serge de Poligny's The Phantom Baron, for which he wrote the screenplay; but he deletes this passage (strikethrough, but perfectly legible); he then devotes a long development to Robert Bresson and Jean Giraudoux's film, The Angels of Sin, which is greeted at Paramount with laughter from an audience for whom poetry seems an insult. Cocteau then sets out to show the importance of cutting, and the extraordinary teamwork involved in creating a film, in eight successive waves, from the author's and director's cutting work to the editing and mixing... And he concludes: "I advise filmmakers to go beyond that, to invent daring techniques and to brave laughter. Because an invented technique will remain fresh and a technique subjected to technical progress will go out of fashion, insofar as progress dethrones progress.