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 5th, 2025, 6PM– 11PM.
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.
SACRED MONSTER Celebrates Jean Cocteau’s 136th Birthday Party Saturday, July 5th, 2025
6PM – 11PM Tickets available here
This very special celebration is a fundraiser for a new, improved projector for PRS’s auditorium.
