Ever since the dawn of cinema there have been magicians. When Lumière resolutely took the path of realism in those first five-minute films, showing us undeniable trains, veritable fire-engines and disasters and humiliations only too recognisably from daily life, Melies had already chosen, quite as resolutely, to send a man to the moon, to present fairy coaches travelling through sleeping woods, to give us in short marvels instead of documentaries.

Two of the greatest magicians the cinema has ever known have been much in the news of late. Cocteau because in October he astonished us once again, as all those years ago he had done in obedience to Diaghilev’s command, dying this time in fact instead of with that hallucinatory backwards fall in Testament d’Orphee, when he commented gravely that since poets on occasion gave the impression of dying then their friends might permit themselves the appearance of weeping. And Orson Welles—so long a film-maker and still only middle- aged—because he has attempted perhaps the most impossible task of his never cautious career in bringing Kafka’s Trial to the screen, which reached London a good six months after it opened in Paris.

Cocteau always insisted that all the work he did, in any medium, was the work of a poet. Certainly none but a poet could have made his films, the first of which he even called Sang d’un Poete. Even in films which he did not actually direct himself, such as J.-P. Melville’s version of his play, Les Enjants Terribles, his influence was as immediately visible as those stars so invariably a part of his signature. Of those he did direct, there are some which more brilliantly exemplify bis power to bind an audience in a potent visual spell than others. First, L’Eternel Retour, his version of the Tristan story in modem idiom, which reached us after VE day; one will never forget the extraordinary richness—an almost overpowering richness—of the experience after all our years of cinematic austerity.