At stake in such viewing are the processes of orientation, or learning to see, to re-vision, to train and entrain perception and our engagement with objects differently. Moreover, Cocteau wants us to engage with our own moviemaking, our own multimodal composing:

 

An art in which young people cannot freely take part is condemned from the outset. It is vital that the camera should become a pen and that everyone should be able to express himself through this visual medium. It is vital for everyone to learn editing, shooting, montage and sound, not to become specialized in one branch of this very difficult trade, in short, not to be a single cog in one of the machines in the factory, but a free body which can leap into the water and find out how to swim by itself. (66)

 

The cogs and factories resonate with the images of dancers as buildings in Parade, the commercializing of expression and the deployment of aesthetic experience in the generation of profit. Cocteau wants an “art” that continually reorients our engagement with objects of expression so that we ourselves do not become objectified in systems and structures that orient us toward someone else’s vision. As such, the pedagogical directive takes force:

 

Wander around anywhere and don’t play at being filmmakers; leave the uniform behind. Remain free in a world where freedom is hounded down, alone in a world where individuals abandon their individuality to the group, alert in an inattentive world, fearless in a world driven by fear. (71)

 

Cocteau wants our composing, our multimodal poeticizing, to be disruptive, even to

disorient—perhaps, in a word, to queer. Such reorientation is inevitably about paying attention to the world around us—how it always (re)orients us, and we it.