Le Testament d'Orphée ou ne me Demandez pas Pourquoi | Testament of Orpheus (1960)

Cinema Posters of the 20th Century, Suntory Museum, Osaka, 2001, p. 106.

Jean Cocteau spent most of his life in Paris, where he became part of the artistic avant-garde and was known for his variety of accomplishments. Over a fifty year career, he wrote poetry, novels and plays, created illustrations, paintings and other art objects, and directed influential films, including The Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus. Cocteau designed posters for the Ballets Russe, and in 1917 he was one of the collaborators on the ballet Parade. Cocteau's activities of the 1920s were remarkably varied. In 1930, Cocteau wrote and directed his first motion picture, the silent, surrealistic film Le Sang d'un Poète (The Blood of a Poet). Like many of his signature works, it portrayed a creative artist's encounters with love and death. After a 16-year interval, Cocteau made his most famous film, La Belle et la Bête (The Beauty and the Beast), a retelling of a classic fairy tale. Cocteau went on to write and direct several other films in the 1940s. Cocteau returned to the subject of the solitary artist-poet in his film Orphée, a surreal adaptation of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus. He completed his 'Orpheus trilogy' in 1960 with Le Testament d'Orphée (The Testament of Orpheus), in which he played a poet much like himself. He had rightfully gained a reputation as one of the most versatile and influential creative minds of his era. In 1955, he was inducted into the Academie Française.

This original French poster very rarely surfaces.

Le Testament d'Orphée ou ne me Demandez pas Pourquoi is Jean Cocteau's final film in his Orphic Trilogy, the first of which was released in 1930. The multi-talented Cocteau not only wrote the film, but also directed and starred in it, and to top it off, also designed this original French film poster. There are cameo appearances by Pablo Picasso and Yul Brynne.