The Story Behind Jean Cocteau’s Mysterious Horsemen

A cinematic self-portrait by an artist who relished in muddying the lines between poetry, painting, theatre and film, in Jean Cocteau’s own words, his final feature, Testament of Orpheus (1960), “is nothing other than a striptease act, gradually peeling away my body to reveal my naked soul.” Throughout the film appear the enigmatic horsemen, heavily stylised figures in equine costumes – like walking chess pieces – designed by Janine Janet.

Born in Réunion, Janet spent her childhood immersed in the lush tropics – an upbringing that instilled in her a deep love of the elemental and the animal. She went on to become an artist and set designer, celebrated for the fantastical, immersive window displays and sculptures she created for fashion houses including Balenciaga, Hermès, Dior, and Givenchy. She worked closely with Cocteau throughout the 1950s, creating some of her most memorable costumes for Testament of Orpheus.

Cocteau’s horsemen are potent and ambiguous figures, associated with the pursuit of inspiration. Looking back at his earlier work, in his 1946 film Beauty and the Beast, the Beast offers Beauty a horse as one of his magical gifts – here, a symbol of power. In Cocteau’s writings, the animal could be seen to signify freedom, transformation, and the poetic imagination. In Testament of Orpheus, the mystical horsemen deliver cryptic messages that spark the poet’s descent into obsession. Through the film, Cocteau binds the image of the horse not just to inspiration but also danger and sacrifice.

Recurring symbols rather than defined characters, these therianthropes form part of the dreamlike landscape Cocteau conjures as he looks back on his creative life. Their presence, often connected with ritual, adds to the film’s atmosphere of mystery and introspection. Drifting in and out of scenes like apparitions, they become emblematic of Cocteau’s lifelong fascination with transcendence – the porous membrane between reality and fantasy.

Testament of Orpheus is the third and final instalment of Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy, following The Blood of a Poet (1930) and Orphée (1950). In this last chapter, Cocteau appears as an 18th-century poet navigating a phantasmagorical landscape populated by figures from art, mythology, and his own previous work. Cameos from the likes of Pablo Picasso, Yul Brynner and Jean Marais reinforce the self-referential nature of the film.

Throughout the production, Lucien Clergue, a close friend and celebrated photographer, accompanied Cocteau. Over the years, the duo heavily inspired one another, well documented in their written correspondence. The collaborators shared a fascination with the relationship between man and beast. Horses, which appear in Clergue’s work on multiple occasions, are central to a collection of black-and-white images taken in the Camargue, depicting the animals moving through stark landscapes – scenes that wouldn’t look out of place in Cocteau’s filmic universe.

Cocteau encouraged Clergue to work with complete freedom when capturing behind-the-scenes moments from Testament of Orpheus. An iconic record of the poet in his final cinematic dreamscape, the images of Cocteau with the horsemen leave behind an imprint of an artist who existed between worlds.



Feature image: Lucien Clergue, on the set of Jean Cocteau’s The Testament of Orpheus, 1959. © Lucien Clergue