FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 2025
SACRED MONSTER Celebrates Jean Cocteau’s 136th Birthday Party at the Philosophical Research Society
Chloë Cassens honors the avant-garde icon with a celebration, screening of Testament of Orpheus (1960)
and fundraiser for the PRS theater
Testament of Orpheus, dir. Jean Cocteau, France, 1960
Los Angeles, CA – Chloë Cassens’ SACRED MONSTER presents the 136th birthday of avant-garde icon Jean Cocteau with a celebration, film screening and fundraiser event at the Philosophical Research Society (PRS) on Saturday, July 5, 2025, 6:00 – 11:00 PM.
One of the most important and multifaceted artists of the 20th Century, Jean Cocteau’s legacy in art and culture is unparalleled, influencing everything from filmmaking and music to modern symbolism and queer representation. As the representative of the Severin Wunderman Collection, which is the largest collection in the world of works by Cocteau, Chloë Cassens founded SACRED MONSTER to engage the public with interdisciplinary projects that illuminate Cocteau’s place in the canon of avant-garde and queer art as well as his continued influence on contemporary culture at-large from celebrity personas to reality television.
For his 136th birthday, Cassens will host a party at the Philosophical Research Society followed by a screening of Testament of Orpheus (1960), the last film in Cocteau’s groundbreaking Orphic Trilogy. In the film, Cocteau stars as a poet wandering surreal wastelands and encountering a cast of characters—including the likes of Pablo Picasso, Jean-Pierre Leáud, Jean Marais and Yul Brynner—who usher in cycles of death and resurrection. The film serves as a metafilmic reflection with Cocteau inserting himself into the story, blurring the lines between creator and creation and influencing later movements of “total art” and cross-disciplinary experimentations.
“I am beyond excited to celebrate Jean Cocteau’s birthday in the manner he would have loved most: a raging party! PRS has been so good to me and to Cocteau’s work, this venue is one of my favorites in Los Angeles, and if Cocteau had had the opportunity, I am sure he would have loved being amongst this community of curious, intelligent, and gorgeous Angelenos.” – Chloë Cassens
Cassens will also launch the release of SACRED MONSTER Volume 1, a new zine gathering several of her essays on Jean Cocteau, Vanderpump Rules and its Surrealist roots, Kanye West, the erotic prose poem which shocked 1920s Paris, and more.
Surrealist-inspired dress code strongly recommended.
Event Details
Saturday, July 5, 2025
6:00 – 11:00 PM
Chloë Cassens. Photo: Studio Lazareff @studiolazareff
ABOUT CHLOË CASSENS
Chloë Cassens is the representative of the Severin Wunderman Collection, the largest in the world of works by iconoclastic French artist Jean Cocteau. It makes up the entirety of the contents of the Musée Jean Cocteau-collection Severin Wunderman in Menton, France. She is a longtime scholar of Cocteau with a unique perspective, as she is Wunderman’s granddaughter. Based in Los Angeles, she was raised between LA, Switzerland and France before receiving her BA in Comparative Literature from Barnard College. She is the author of SACRED MONSTER, a biweekly essay project dedicated to celebrating Cocteau and the Collection. As the Collection’s representative, she works to educate others about Wunderman’s legacy and popularize Cocteau’s work around the globe.
Instagram: @chloecassens
Website: chloecassens.com
Sacred Monster website: https://www.sacred-monster.com/
ABOUT dama
Amanda Maciel Antunes (aka dama) is a Brazilian artist based in Los Angeles. Her auto-didactic and transdisciplinary practice merges language and durational performance to create site-specific works. She works in collaboration with public libraries, nature and communal spaces, reflecting on the selective nature of memory, inherent language and anthropological references written by women as points of departure.
Sites of practice have included a former WWII military shelter in East LA, Sæborg historical theatre in a northern fjord, Iceland, The Crowley Theatre in Marfa, TX; a Dessana Tribe territory in Rio Negro, Brazil; the Los Angeles National Forest; and the High Desert of California. She has exhibited her work in the USA, Brazil and Iceland. Recent select exhibitions and solo performances at Galeria Vermelho, Galeria Chão, Wignall Museum, Track16 Gallery, Irrational Exhibits, 18th Street Arts Center, Oregon Contemporary, Brand Art Library, Irvine Fine Arts Center, Philosophical Research Society. Her first book titled Second Birth was published in the Spring of 2023 by HEXENTEXTE. dama is a librarian at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles where she also curates and hosts a monthly Surrealist Study Group focusing on women authors and artists in conversation.
Instagram: @amandamacielantune
Website: amandamacielantunes.net
ABOUT PHILOSOPHICAL RESEARCH SOCIETY
The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles is a nonprofit cultural and educational organization which presents concerts, film screenings, lectures, performance art and theatre events, gallery exhibits and more on the intersection between the creative arts and mythology, mysticism and metaphysics.
Instagram: @philosophical_research_society
Website: https://www.prs.org/