La Belle et la Bête. Journal d’un film
*La Belle et la Bête. Journal d’un film* is one of Cocteau’s most appealing hybrid books, poised between literature, cinema, and self-documentation. It is not a novelisation of the film, but the diary of its making, a text in which Cocteau records the creation of his work step by step. The reader is thus granted access to the workshop behind one of the most celebrated French films of the twentieth century. Published in 1946 by J. B. Janin, in immediate proximity to the film itself, the volume still carries the urgency of production, exhaustion, and wonder. The photographic plates after scenes from the film make it both a visual and a literary document. For the bibliophile, its attraction lies in the combination of cinematic importance and Cocteau’s personal voice. This copy gains further distinction through an inscription to Julien Cornilleau, with the names Jean Marais and Josette Day also appearing below in blue ink. It thus becomes not only an original edition linked to the film, but a tangible trace of the circle that brought it into being.
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Cocteau, Jean
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
ILLUSTRATORS
La Belle et la Bête. Journal d’un film
1946 | Paris | J. B. Janin
A unique cinematic history document, signed by Cocteau and the entire legendary cast.
*La Belle et la Bête. Journal d’un film* is one of Cocteau’s most appealing hybrid books, poised between literature, cinema, and self-documentation. It is not a novelisation of the film, but the diary of its making, a text in which Cocteau records the creation of his work step by step. The reader is thus granted access to the workshop behind one of the most celebrated French films of the twentieth century. Published in 1946 by J. B. Janin, in immediate proximity to the film itself, the volume still carries the urgency of production, exhaustion, and wonder. The photographic plates after scenes from the film make it both a visual and a literary document. For the bibliophile, its attraction lies in the combination of cinematic importance and Cocteau’s personal voice. This copy gains further distinction through an inscription to Julien Cornilleau, with the names Jean Marais and Josette Day also appearing below in blue ink. It thus becomes not only an original edition linked to the film, but a tangible trace of the circle that brought it into being.
€950
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Format
In-12 (Duodecimo) approx. 17 × 22 cm
Edition Particulars
With autograph inscription to Julien Cornilleau and signed by Jean Marais and Josette Day.
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Product DETAIL
At the centre of this book lies the making of Cocteau’s film *La Belle et la Bête*. In diary form, he records during the shoot and post-production the practical difficulties, artistic decisions, physical exhaustion, and moments of exhilaration that accompanied the project. The reader follows no fictional plot, but the concrete unfolding of a cinematic creation, through sets, lighting, actors, décor, and technical obstacles. Jean Marais, Josette Day, and the film crew appear throughout, directly or by implication. Cocteau shows how weather, illness, shortages, and invention constantly interact. The result is a vivid account of a work that is at once artisanal and visionary. The text documents not only a famous film, but Cocteau’s own understanding of cinema as a poetic machine. It is therefore at once a shooting diary, an artist’s testimony, and a meditation on creation under pressure.
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L’esprit contre la raison is a brief, vehement text from the heart of French Surrealism. René Crevel writes here not as a systematic philosopher, but as a polemicist intent on disturbing the order of reason, morality and bourgeois clarity. The book was published in 1927 by Les Cahiers du Sud, a review and publishing circle receptive to literary experiment beyond the Parisian centre. Pavel Tchelitchew’s frontispiece portrait gives the volume a strong visual presence and links Crevel’s voice to the cosmopolitan artistic world of the 1920s. In its original wrappers, the copy preserves the sober, nervous materiality of a text that reads more like an assault than a treatise. Its status as a review copy also marks it as a book meant to move through the literary networks of its moment.
