French director Jean Cocteau did not necessarily look at himself as a film director, but more a poet, painter, sculpture and a surrealist who wrote plays and novels. Cocteau directed his first film titled Blood of a Poet, which was considered the first of his Orphic Trilogy in 1930. This surrealistic film was produced by the Viscount de Noailles, who financed Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel’s scandalous film L’Age d’Or (1929) in the same year, when both their films were condemned by the Vatican. In 1940 Cocteau written a enormously successful play for and starring Edith Piaf. He also worked with Pablo Picasso on several projects and was a friend of most of the European art community. Cocteau’s greatest cinematic achievement was his 1946 film adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which many film scholars and critics today consider to be one of the greatest fantasy films of all time. Cocteau adapted the classic fable at a time shortly after the suffering of World War II, when people wanted to escape from the bleak horror’s of reality. This was not a ‘children’s movie,’ rather a surrealistic poem, as Cocteau used bold and haunting images along with striking Freudian and flamboyant themes that delved into the darker repressed emotions of its characters. Cocteau’s next masterpiece was his adaptation of the enchanting tale of Orpheus (1950), which tells the story of a musician who has to descend down to the underworld and reclaim his dead wife. Jean Cocteau’s surrealistic version of that story is quite different, as Cocteau changes the musician into a poet and sets the classic story in modern 1950’s Paris. Before the days of CGI and digital effects, Cocteau remarkably brought to the screen his brilliant use of astonishing practical effects and devised trickery with the camera. There are extraordinary exquisite moments of wonder and awe involving mirrors of illusion that transform into pools of water, invisible gliding forces pushing characters through massive corridors and portals, reverse camera shots springing characters back from the dead, and magical gloves that could immediately transport a character wherever they so wish.  His final film, The Testament of Orpheus (1960), featured appearances by Picasso and matador Luis Miguel Dominguín, along with Yul Brynner, who also helped finance the film. Cocteau’s films, most of which he both wrote and directed, were particularly important in introducing the avant-garde into French cinema at the time, and influenced to a certain degree the upcoming French New Wave genre. Cocteau died of a heart attack on 11 October 1963 at the age of 74. His friend the French singer Edith Piaf died the day before but that was announced on the morning of Cocteau’s day of death; it has been said that his heart failed upon hearing of Piaf’s death.