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
00:01:06 according to conventional norms like the calendar
00:02:08 and that you may have found something completely different, unknown to me
00:03:05 All of this is very expensive. Right now I'm being filmed with
00:04:01 Here on the côte d'azur
00:05:04 and yet it isn't quite robotic yet.
00:05:58 that there are no more cars and that you are now floating
00:06:54 Maybe you are, I won't say sitting
00:07:55 Poetry is a kind of superior mathematics
00:09:01 us all and of whom almost all grown-ups are ashamed
00:09:53 whom I know very poorly.
00:10:52 I am following him without a guide, which means that from our birth
00:12:02 with a wire and this candle must have dripped on his face.
00:12:56 Generally I need these walls to get some rest.
00:13:55 for my contemporaries and for my compatriots, have for you
00:14:56 The poets have an extraordinary method.
00:15:57 who unite in order to achieve marvels like
00:16:56 the angels, well, religion put a stop to this discovery
00:18:04 we have antibiotics and sometimes antibiotics
00:19:10 Many people think that one can stick to old-fashioned politics
00:20:18 He was a famous English dandy.
00:21:31 He was a very great musician who was thought of as a joker
00:22:44 been expressing himself without control, because, I repeat:
00:23:42 "I'm starting out".