Ciné-Concert La Belle & la Bête

Philharmonic Orchestra of Radio France.

This new universe troubles me, disturbs me, captivates me. I had unconsciously created a music and the waves of the orchestra contradict it. Gradually Auric triumphs over my absurd discomfort. My music gives way to his.

This music embraces the film, impregnates it, exalts it, completes it. Jean Cocteau. Without a doubt, Beauty and the Beast is one of the greatest masterpieces of French cinema from the Liberation period.

Directed by Jean Cocteau, himself assisted by René Clément, shot in August 1945, this film brings together the principal talents of the moment.

When adapting Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont's fairy tale, Jean Cocteau simultaneously thinks through the screenplay and direction, which he wishes to inscribe in a very precise visual universe.

Both a tribute to the great masters of 17th-century Dutch painting, such as Pieter de Hooch and Johannes Vermeer who then discovered the use of the camera obscura, Beauty and the Beast also borrows from 19th-century engraving art, with Gustave Doré.

And it is the directional light of these engravings that guides the eye of Henri Alekan, director of photography, when he shines his projectors on the sets of Christian Bérard.

Carried by Josette Day (Beauty), Marcel André (the Father), Michel Auclair (Ludovic), and Jean Marais (the Beast, the Prince and Avenant), the costumes by Georges Escoffier are magnified by the extraordinary makeup work of Hagop Arakélian, who requires Jean Marais to spend three to four hours each day just to make up his face alone.

A work both popular and demanding, Beauty and the Beast is a fantastic, serious and moving film that questions both love and death.

Georges Auric's score is no accident in this matter: a politically engaged composer of the Popular Front, affiliated with the Six group, joined the Resistance under Vichy and Occupation, Georges Auric has been a companion to Jean Cocteau for nearly thirty years.

In counterpoint to the narrator's voice, embodied by Jean Cocteau read