Cultural resonances of Cocteau’s Orphée: some new perspectives on its production and reception history

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ABSTRACT Seen as a masterpiece of postwar filmmaking, Orphée (1950) is best known for the cinematic devices Cocteau used, some borrowed from La Belle et le bête (1946) and some reflecting the French experience during the German Occupation and in the post-Liberation period. Transposing the ancient story of Orpheus to the contemporary era, Cocteau sought to externalize France’s painful recent history and at the same time to express his own grievances resulting from the indignities he suffered as a suspected collaborationist. Less noted in the scholarship on Orphée, however, are those elements that reflect Cocteau’s exposure to the political and ideological currents of the 1920s and 1930s – fascist or proto-fascist by their own identification – and his affinity for aspects of the Occupation, sinister in nature, that were to pass into the larger postwar culture. More specifically, the homoerotic images and subtexts in Orphée would re-emerge full-blown in what has been called the ‘dark rider’ phenomenon in motorcycle culture, especially in North America. This article assays these connections and argues that, just as Orphée represents a psychogram of France’s political and cultural history in the first half of the twentieth century, its resonances continue in the twenty-first.