The 19th-century French poet Charles Baudelaire once stated his primitive passion was to "glorify the cult of images." For me, poetry is the most profound and primitive feeling of images. Words and the music of words are merely an image’s medium. The first poem in history was that spot of cells on a living thing that were stimulated by light. And then, in the Cambrian period there was the great “Light Switch.” Thousands of eyes came on and evolved into more and more poetry.

In 1946, the French poet Jean Cocteau made a movie based on a fairy tale by the 17th-century novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont. The film is called Beauty and the Beast. It is a work that not only enchants the eyes but also has some of the most desperate and penetrating eyes you can ever see on a movie screen.

These eyes are trapped in the fur-thick head of the Beast (Jean Marais). They burn with the life inside of the tormented monster—a monster that is trying to seduce a young woman, Beauty (Josette Day), who found his appearance so ugly that she fainted at the first sight of it. Her glowing face, his blazing eyes, the magical mirror in the palace, the rose in the garden—the brilliance of these images reach and stir the deepest and most animal parts of our soul. recommended