The Cinema of Jean Cocteau: Essays on His Films and Their Coctelian Sources by C. D. E. Tolton (review)

99? Reviews Enlightenment philosophy. Michel Delon muses upon the role of luxurious objects in libertinage, conducting a fine socio-cultural analysis of the sumptuous settings of erotic writing, from Histoire dejuliette to Histoire d'O. Diana Holmes reads a corpus of female-authored fin de siecle eroticism against contemporary medical discourses on women's sexuality, showing how the work of Marcelle Tinayre, for example, of? fers a more liberating model of female sexual desire. The continuing hegemony of medical discourses on sexuality is highlighted by Ross Chambers in an illuminating discussion of Aids eroticism in Pascal de Duve's Cargo Vie. Mireille Rosello's highly original reading of Colette's Duo, informed inter alia by Derridean notions of reader response, focuses on the psychological risks run by the reader exposed to the 'absences ' of the erotic text. Michael Worton draws on film and psychoanalytic theory to demonstrate the innovative character of contemporary erotic fiction, whose transgressions are as much textual as sexual. The critical scope of these commentaries on individual writers and texts is complemented by two broader thematic articles: Peter Cryle provides a fascinating exploration of the thematic history of the aphrodisiac in nineteenth-century French fiction, and Frederic Canovas looks closely at the chemical interaction of text and reader, identifying eroticism and its subversive potential in the plurality of readings to which it gives rise, rather than in any fixed definitions of what constitutes an erotic text. Mainil reiterates this expansive and relatively unorthodox notion of eroticism as a 'reading effect' in the final paragraph of his introduction, at the point where his own reader is about to engage with the essays that follow: Terotisme, c'est moins une ecriture qu'un effetde lecture [. . .] En lisant, on se revele plus encore, a soi-meme, et aux autres' (p. xi, orginal emphasis). Indeed, and though Mainil does not say so, reading about erotic writing in this stimulating recueil may prove as revealing or as unsettling or as rewarding as reading the erotic text itself. University of North London John Phillips The Cinema ofJean Cocteau: Essays on his Films and their Coctelian Sources. Ed. by C. D. E. Tolton. (LEGAS Series: Language, Media and Education Studies, 5) New York, Ottawa, and Toronto: LEGAS. 1999. vi + 200 pp. This is potentially a landmark collection, being the firstof its kind in English devoted entirely to Cocteau's cinema. C. D. E. Tolton provides a compact and highly informative introduction to Cocteau's work in film,and there follow eleven chapters on the established oeuvre in essentially chronological order: a chapter each on Le Sang d'un poete, L'Eternel retour (directed by Jean Delannoy), and La Belle et la Bete, two welltwinned chapters on L'Aigle d deux tetes,two on Les Parents terribles,two on Orphee, one on Les Enfants terribles(directed by Jean-Pierre Melville), and the last on Le Testament d'Orphee. In critical terms, the collection is noteworthy for offeringthe first fully fledged Lacanian account of a Cocteau film,Jacob D. Kruger's probing study of Les Parents terribles,which unravels the film's intricate Oedipal webs and deceits and poses finallythe question of the identification of the viewer's own Imaginary with the principal subject, Michel, although this theme is not developed. While none of the other chapters can really be said to advance Cocteau studies in new productive ways, two do stand out fortheir rigourand seriousness: Tanya d'Anger's 'Coctelian Neoplatonism : The Role ofthe Orphic Poet in Le Sang d'un poete' (pp. 23-42), which offers an impressively rich and clear account ofthe key modalities of Cocteau's film-making (such as realism, verism, poetry,and autobiography), and Rebecca Conolly's powerful feminist study of Orphee (pp. 145-62), 'Servicing Orpheus: Death, Love and Female Subjectivity in the Film Orphee'. Taken as a whole, however, this volume, which MLR, 97.4, 2002 991 grew out of a graduate seminar taught forone term at the University of Toronto, is of extremely variable quality. Too many of the chapters have a limited, predictable, and even pedestrian quality to them, verging on the descriptive and over-schematic. This is not helped by some sloppy editing, including inconsistencies...

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