Ciné-Concert La Belle & la Bête

Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France.

This new world unsettles me, disturbs me, captivates me. I had composed a music for myself without realising it, and the orchestra's waves contradict it. Little by little, Auric triumphs over my absurd discomfort. My music gives way to his.

This music embraces the film, saturates it, exalts it, completes it. Jean Cocteau, Without a doubt, La Belle et la Bête is one of the greatest masterpieces of French cinema of the Liberation.

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

When he adapts the tale by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Jean Cocteau conceives the screenplay and the direction simultaneously, which he wishes to inscribe within a very precise visual universe.

At once a tribute to the great masters of seventeenth-century Dutch painting, such as Pieter de Hooch or Johannes Vermeer, who were then discovering the use of the camera obscura, La Belle et la Bête also draws on the art of nineteenth-century engraving, with Gustave Doré.

And it is the directional light of these engravings that guides the eye of Henri Alekan, the cinematographer, when he trains his spotlights on the sets of Christian Bérard.

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

A work both popular and demanding, La Belle et la Bête is a fantastical, sombre and moving film, which questions love just as much as death.

Georges Auric's score is no small part of this affair: a committed composer of the Popular Front, affiliated with the Les Six group, who joined the Resistance under Vichy and the Occupation, Georges Auric has been a fellow traveller of Jean Cocteau for nearly thirty years.