The focus of this thesis is the work of the French artist Jean Cocteau, in which he addresses and transforms the myth of Orpheus. This body of work, developed over more than thirty years, includes the play titled Orphée and a film trilogy consisting of Le Sang d’un poète, Orphée, and Le Testament d'Orphée. In the first part of the thesis, I briefly introduce the author's life and work, as these works are distinctly autobiographical. This is followed by a section that situates Cocteau's art within its time, as it incorporates characteristics and elements from a wide range of movements and styles at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century. I place Cocteau's work in its temporal and social context, as he helped create an era marked by the golden years of Parisian ballet with the group Les ballets russes de Serge Diaghilev, Apollinaire's esprit nouveau, Picasso and Braque's Cubism, jazz, années folles, the group of musicians »Les Six«, Breton's Surrealism, and the music of Satie and Wagner, as well as two world wars. Due to Cocteau's protean nature and the impossibility of classifying his art – which included poetry, prose, drama, painting, opera, directing, and more – the chapter on »Cocteau's Aesthetics« is dedicated to examining his individual and unconventional art. I discuss the divergence of his art from Surrealism, a movement with which he is often associated, his perception of art as poésie, his philosophy of invisibility and magic, and more specifically his drama and cinematography, poésie de théâtre and poésie cinématographique. The fourth part is devoted to Cocteau's relationship with myth, his creation of cinepoetry in his poetry and later through films, where the key role is that of the poet who keeps the myth eternal. Before analyzing the author's works, where the main character is the poet Orpheus, I recount the classical myth of Orpheus as written by the Roman poet Ovid. Cocteau reshapes the myth of Orpheus according to the principles of his own mentality and philosophy of poetry, which includes the poet's fate, poetic inspiration, the unconscious, death, and rebirth, leading to immortality. The myth of Orpheus becomes the foundation on which the author builds his personal myth and being, as he identifies with the symbol and fate of the poet more than any other modern poet. The final chapter defines Orpheus as a symbol of the poet in the 20th century, focusing on the symbol as defined by Cocteau in his artistic oeuvre.
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