Beauty and the Beast: Diary of a Film

Absolutely fasinating. So many of my French teacher colleagues show this movie. They would find this "making of" so interesting. It is not a record of how he created the special effects, though he does discuss a few (the dvd shows many more), but rather all the trials the entire crew endured to create this seemingly effortless masterpiece.

The book provides insights into the making of Cocteau's classic film. The incredible film obviously stands alone, but knowledge of the period and the various aspects and difficulties in making it adds to one's appreciation.

Some have found Cocteau's litany of illnesses that he and others suffered while filming "Beauty and the Beast" tedious and skipped over them as seemingly irrelevant. Unfortunately, those who do so may miss the entire point of Cocteau's masochistic esthetic, namely, the necessity for the artist to suffer and triumph over all adversity for the sake of his art. That suffering is part and parcel of his art, suffering is art, just as "Beauty and the Beast" suffered during the filming and triumphed as a lasting work of art. Cocteau's suffering at the time mirrored the enormous technical difficulties encountered while making the film. The entire surreal struggle of Cocteau and of others involved in the film is wonderfully captured in his journal and any serious student of either Cocteau or the film will profit by reading it.

A wonderful book. "Diary..." details Cocteau's seemingly insurmountable obstacles in creating one of the greatest-ever fantasy films. Includes plenty of on-set photos. Compulsively wonderful reading, and highly recommended for the price.

Jean Cocteau was a genius. A genius who created works that enchant you when you witness them and confound you when you attempt to understand how they were executed. They give the appearance of such straight foward fluidity of thought and motion that they conceal all of Cocteau's struggle to create them. But beneath that glaze of facility is an infinite clockwork of tedious difficulty and boundless determination. This diary is the biography of one such clockwork.