SOURCE: Levitt, Annette Shandler. “Breasts, Couples, Children and Other Clichés: Visual/Verbal Imagery in Surrealist Drama.” Word & Image 4, no. 1 (January-March 1988): 292-96.

In the following essay, Levitt examines the relationship between art and reality in Cocteau's Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel.

In the first moments of Les Mystères de l'amour (1924), his only play labelled “drame surréaliste,” Roger Vitrac uses visual imagery to initiate a radical shift from conventional staging. The play opens with a Prologue in which the protagonist is seen “tracing sinuous lines in the mud with a stick.” He is, he tells a policeman, “finishing off [the] hair” of a female portrait painted on the wall of a house. According to the stage directions, “He leaves, tracing a sinuous line. The curtain slowly falls” (p. 229)¹. In this brief Prologue the protagonist by his tracing both adds to (and partially relocates) the set...