Watch This: A Message from Jean Cocteau To Future Humans

In 1962, the great writer, artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau filmed this at times rambling, at times brilliant message to future viewers – well, technically the past now, since he addressed it to the year 2000. It’s like wise advice from a slightly crazy uncle.

“I don’t know what’s going on in your time but I suspect that the youth of your times isn’t, like ours, straddling contradictions… We remain apprentice robots. I certainly hope that you have not become robots.”

“I already told you that poetry is a kind of superior mathematics, a supreme language, but at the moment we are experiencing something very dangerous: collective genius. Science is made of collective genius… I hope wholeheartedly that by now genius hasn’t become something like a shameful and contagious disease against which you wish to be immunized.”

And so on, in this vein. By the way, look for the newly restored version of Cocteau’s 1946 BEAUTY & THE BEAST on our screen this summer.