Fanny Van Exaerde

Conversations beyond script… and behind the camera with Jean Cocteau

Université de Lille, France

As a tribute to assistant director Claude Pinoteau’s Behind the camera with Jean
Cocteau (2003, 2023), this paper intends to explore how publications of interviews, memory
accounts and diaries written during film productions enhance both screenplays and films, and
how the conversational flow around these recording projects contributes to the writing process,
the screenplay still being amended on the shooting set.

In Cocteau’s case, I will investigate writer and journalist Paul Guth’s About Les Dames
du Bois de Boulogne, film diary (1945, about R. Bresson’s film, with Cocteau as a dialoguist),
Cocteau’s The Beauty and the Beast, film diary (published in 1958), radio journalist Roger
Pillaudin’s interview with Cocteau intitled Jean Cocteau is filming is last film: The Testament
of Orpheus diary (1960); Lucien Clergue photography book, Phenixology, The Testament of
Orpheus by Cocteau (2003), and both Pinoteau’s books.

Each of these publications works as a log: the reader is invited to follow either the
narrative structure of the film or the chronological order of the production schedule. As a reader,
we attend to the day-to-day of the filmic process and witness how and why text alterations are
made – most of the times, conversations are the main reason: Cocteau exchanging with actors
or noticing during rehearsing that this line or this exclamation is too long, too short, not explicit
enough. Text revisions can thus be read and dated thanks to these published accounts, reflection
of the genuine collaboration on set.

This corpus is thoroughly polymedial: all of these publications combine recollections,
live interactions transmuted into written form, photographs, and sometimes: drawings, letters,
screenplays excerpts… Consequently, they are also polyphonic: they capture work-related
discussions and display interviews with specific screenwriters, actors or technicians.
Meanwhile, screenplay fragments are intertwined with the text, scattered throughout the pages:
the characters share the same space as the film crew itself.

This paper will show that these texts expand the script by giving voice to the backstage
of the shooting, bringing the time of production to life at the same time as the time of the film
as well as the time of reading: each appear to be a temporal-overlapping, polyphonic
publication.

Fanny Van Exaerde works at the Catholic University of Lille as a research engineer while being a
research associate at Alithila at the University of Lille.
Defended in 2023 at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and the University of Lille, her PhD thesis focuses
on Jean Cocteau’s screenplays in the light of a historical recontextualization and an approach that is both genetic and intermedial. Her research interests include Jean Cocteau’s work, twentieth-century literature, textual genetics, archives, screenplays, intermediality, iconotextuality, cinema and, more recently, ordinary writings.
She recently wrote the text presenting the Jean Cocteau retrospective held at the Cinémathèque française (nov. 2023). As a co-ordinator of the “Cinema” section, she takes part in the editing process for the Cocteau Dictionary project (Champion, 2027).