Cocteau l'Italien: atti del Convegno internazionale in onore di Pierre Caizergues, Napoli, 4–5 maggio 2007 (review)

This volume, which might more accurately have been called Cocteau et l'Italie, contains fifteen contributions (six in Italian), arising from a conference devoted to Cocteau in Naples in 2007. We are used nowadays to conference collections where all contributions have been transformed to follow the conventions of published articles; this is not one of these. The level of revision to the original papers is variable: many still contain conversational pleasantries relating to the conference; whilst some have the usual number of footnotes, others have none; lengths vary from just over three pages to almost seventy (including some thirty pages of illustrations); and not all are the scholarly articles we would expect in such a collection: Rome Deguergue provides a prose poem, Stefano Di Lauro writes as an author influenced by Cocteau, and Claude Séférian's 'Cocteau et quelques cinéastes italiens', the shortest piece, is a 'survol' that barely gets off the ground. The order of texts is sometimes puzzling: the penultimate text, Carolina Diglio's 'Perché Jean Cocteau', an enthusiastic homage to Cocteau setting out his links with Italy, would work best as an introduction to the volume, which instead opens with Pierre Brunel's 'Cocteau et l'opéra italien', a piece that makes interesting points but, in truth, struggles to form a link with Italy. And the last piece, Sergio Zoppi's 'Cocteau e Savinio', which looks at the Frenchman's appearances in the writings of the Italian, seems more interested in the latter, and presents a somewhat negative image of the former; though of interest, this is an odd way to end a volume that has on the whole demonstrated an enthusiastic response to Cocteau. The influence on Cocteau of Italian artists is dealt with by David Gullentops (Uccello) and Jean Touzot (da Vinci and Michelangelo); light is shed on his friendships and professional relationships with Italians by Elena Fermi (Fabrizio Clerici and Vanni Scheiwiller) and Roberto Zemignan (Luciano Emmer); and various expeditions to Italy are analysed by Jean-Luc Steinmetz (the early visit to Venice, during which Cocteau's friend Raymond Laurent committed suicide), Giovanni Dotoli (Rome and Naples with Picasso, Massine, and Diaghilev during the composition of Parade), and Enrico Castronovo (Sicily); Carlo Vecce and Stefano Di Lauro both look at Cocteau and the Orpheus myth, and Colomba La Ragione provides a lengthy analysis of La Belle et la Bête. Is the presence of Loïc Füller (p. 21), Alfred Jorry (p. 155), and a character from L'Aigle à deux têtes called Stanislav (p. 206) simply to be attributed to careless proofreading in a volume that contains a number of misprints? This is an uneven collection, but the best articles will be of value to anyone with an interest in Cocteau.