Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000
1962 · 25 MIN · IMDB 6.6 · 111 VOTES · DIR. Jean Cocteau
Overview
In August 1963, just a couple of months before his death, Jean Cocteau made one last short film. The film comprises one still and highly sober shot of Cocteau facing the camera head-on to address the youth of the future. Once recorded, this spoken message for the 21st century was sealed and stored with the understanding that it would be opened only in the year 2000. As it turned out, it was discovered and exhumed a few years shy of that date. Where in The Testament of Orpheus Cocteau portrays himself as a living anachronism, a lonesome classical modernist loitering in space-time while lost in the spectral light of his memories, here he acknowledges explicitly the irony of his phantom-like state. By the time the viewer sees this image, he, J. C., our saviour Poet, will long be dead.
Dialogue Timeline — 368 lines
A SAMPLE ACROSS THE RUNTIME — EVERY LINE IS SEARCHABLE
00:00:06 JEAN COCTEAU speaks
00:01:11 or the watch and it's likely that we have misled ourselves
00:02:12 but that I have predicted: by which I mean: anti-gravitation.
00:03:08 a machine which often involves technical accidents
00:04:06 There is the coast and the hinterland. All one speaks about
00:05:06 That's why the young are always being accused
00:06:01 slightly over the road, maybe there are no more
00:06:57 because youth should never be sitting down
00:07:58 and, let's not forget: it's almost always prophetical.
00:09:05 of whom a part of humanity has shame and of whom only heroes
00:09:57 Thus, I am not responsible for what I am about to say to you.
00:10:56 to our death we are a stream of others.
00:12:06 He didn't paint using what is called
00:13:02 People tend to think that I get tired: no, because my hands are
00:13:59 become much more open, that they have opened over time
00:14:58 I already told you that poetry is a kind of superior mathematics
00:16:01 the electronic brain, for example.
00:17:00 of which Cardinal Tisson told me that the sketches still exist
00:18:08 and penicillin save the lives of people that couldn't have been saved
00:19:14 other people look too far ahead and loose all sense of reality.
00:20:22 One day a young man gave him a compliment for his elegance
00:21:35 but who wasn't that at all. To avoid the sublime he gave very
00:22:49 control is a dangerous thing and errors, errors are what is