"Style is a simple way of saying complicated things"
About this Quote
Cocteau’s line flatters style while quietly demoting it: not a perfume you spray on meaning, but a delivery system for it. “Simple” here isn’t the bland minimalism of good taste; it’s compression, the art of making complexity legible without sanding off its strangeness. He’s arguing that style is the shortcut that doesn’t cheat, a kind of elegant smuggling operation: you move difficult ideas across the border of attention by dressing them in rhythm, image, gesture.
The subtext is defensive and ambitious. In modern art, “style” gets accused of being mere surface, a way to hide that you have nothing to say. Cocteau flips the charge. If you have something complicated to say, style becomes your proof of seriousness, because it shows you can translate the knot of experience into a form others can actually hold. The simplicity is earned, not default.
As a director in the early 20th-century avant-garde, Cocteau lived in a culture obsessed with new forms - cinema, ballet, surrealism - where audiences were being asked to accept unfamiliar logic. Film in particular is Cocteau’s perfect lab for this claim: montage, lighting, and framing can turn metaphysics into a glance, a cut, a door that opens onto the impossible. His own work (Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus) makes mythology feel modern by making it look effortless. That’s the trick he’s naming: style as clarity with a pulse, a way of making the complicated feel inevitable.
The subtext is defensive and ambitious. In modern art, “style” gets accused of being mere surface, a way to hide that you have nothing to say. Cocteau flips the charge. If you have something complicated to say, style becomes your proof of seriousness, because it shows you can translate the knot of experience into a form others can actually hold. The simplicity is earned, not default.
As a director in the early 20th-century avant-garde, Cocteau lived in a culture obsessed with new forms - cinema, ballet, surrealism - where audiences were being asked to accept unfamiliar logic. Film in particular is Cocteau’s perfect lab for this claim: montage, lighting, and framing can turn metaphysics into a glance, a cut, a door that opens onto the impossible. His own work (Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus) makes mythology feel modern by making it look effortless. That’s the trick he’s naming: style as clarity with a pulse, a way of making the complicated feel inevitable.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Jean Cocteau — "Style is a simple way of saying complicated things." (attributed). See Wikiquote: Jean Cocteau. |
More Quotes by Jean
Add to List
