Orpheus

Orpheus (1950), the central panel of Jean Cocteau's loose 'Orphic Trilogy', reimagines the Greek myth in a contemporary Paris of cafés, motorcycles and shortwave radios. It is the most fully realised of Cocteau's films, a poet's meditation on art, mortality and where inspiration comes from, made fifteen years after his debut The Blood of a Poet.

Jean Marais plays the poet Orphée, with María Casares as a coolly elegant Death and François Périer as her chauffeur Heurtebise. Cocteau achieves his celebrated effects in camera: figures pass through mirrors rendered as pools of mercury, and journeys through a ruined Zone are shot in reverse and in slow motion. The underworld he conjures is mythic and also unnervingly modern, a place run by tribunals and paperwork.

The critics who would go on to launch the French New Wave admired it enormously, and its influence runs from Jacques Demy to contemporary music video; the mirror as doorway is one of cinema's most quoted images. Dreamlike, witty and moving, Orpheus is the work in which Cocteau the poet, painter and film-maker most completely fused his gifts, a fantasy that treats the imagination as a country you can actually travel to. Restored and often revived, it is still the way into Cocteau's cinema and a favourite of programmers and poets alike. Marais and Casarès give the myth a haunting modern face, and the idea of death as an elegant bureaucracy has lost none of its strangeness.