Poet, playwright, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau’s hugely influential Orphée is a dazzlingly dreamy adaptation of the ancient Greek myth and one of his finest cinematic works. Cocteau’s lover, muse and friend Jean Marais is Orpheus, a famous left-bank poet fallen out of favour and desperate for inspiration suddenly spellbound by a black-clad princess who claims the life of a rival poet and his wife Eurydice. Guided by Heurtebise, a sort of guardian angel, Orpheus must venture through his mirror and into the underworld to save Eurydice from death herself.

Favourited by the likes of Andrei Tarkovsky and Akira Kurosawa (and seemingly a strong influence on Twin Peaks), Jean Cocteau’s central part of his Orphic Trilogy (after Blood of a Poet from 1930, before Testament of Orpheus in 1960) is a hauntingly beautiful work with a thrilling bag of magical cinematic tricks and practical effects. Cocteau transposes the ancient myth via the avante-garde, complicating it with post-war modernisations and playing it out with dream logic, all rendered in stunning noir-like black and white by Nicolas Hayer.