silver nitrate notes

Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and Henri Alekan's Sleep

8 feb 2022

Jean Cocteau (1889-1963) was, primarily, a poet and a dramatist. His film work was occasional. La Belle et la Bête (1946) was his second feature, made immediately after the Liberation of France in conditions that combined post-war shortage with the freedom that came with the end of German censorship. The cinematographer was Henri Alekan (1909-2001), whom most viewers will know later from Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire (1987). La Belle et la Bête was Alekan's first major credit.

What Cocteau and Alekan made is a fairy-tale film whose visual register is closer to Vermeer than to anything else in 1940s European cinema. Belle's farm, where the first act takes place, is photographed in flat naturalistic light, almost documentary in feel. The Beast's castle, where most of the rest of the film occurs, is photographed in a different visual register entirely. Alekan used a low-key lighting design dominated by candle and torch sources, with characters frequently lit from below in ways that produced expressive shadows on the walls. The castle's living arms holding torches, its disembodied arms extending from walls to serve dinner, its statues whose eyes follow the viewer, are all photographed straight, without trick effects beyond the practical mechanics of operating the props on cue.

The famous shot is Belle's first walk down the hallway of the castle, in slow motion, gowns trailing behind her, the camera dollying with her at her own pace. Alekan rigged the dolly on a track laid through the centre of the corridor and lit the sequence with the practical torches alone. The slow motion was achieved in camera by overcranking. Belle floats. The hallway breathes. The shot lasts about a minute.

Cocteau's Beast (Jean Marais) wears a makeup that took five hours to apply each morning. Marais lived in the makeup throughout the production. He could only eat through a straw. He suffered facial breakouts that delayed the shoot. The performance under the makeup is one of the great romantic-leading performances in French cinema.

The film opened in 1946 to immediate critical recognition. Cocteau would make three more features as director (Orphée, The Eagle Has Two Heads, Testament of Orpheus) and would return repeatedly to the visual world he and Alekan had built in the castle. Alekan would photograph Roman Holiday for Wyler in 1953 and would work into the 1990s.

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sources
[1] Cocteau, Jean. Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film. Dover, 1972.
[2] Steegmuller, Francis. Cocteau: A Biography. Little, Brown, 1970.
[3] Williams, James S. Jean Cocteau. Manchester UP, 2006.
[4] Alekan, Henri. Des lumières et des ombres. Le Sycomore, 1979.