The Blood of a Poet

Jean Cocteau was a French poet, painter, playwright, actor, as well as film maker, and was a huge part of the artistic community at the time. The Blood of a Poet (to use its English translation), is a very personal piece of avant-garde cinema, that reflects the ideas of the artist, and presented in a disjointed, surreal style, that is an enigma, even on viewing a second time.

The Blood of a Poet has four sections that seem to have no connection at all. We begin with Enrique Rivero as "the poet", who paints a face who's mouth begins to move. After erasing it with his hand, the mouth transfers to him. After pleasuring himself with the mouthed hand, the poet transfers it to a female statue, who orders him to climb through a mirror, where he enters a new realm, one that holds doors into which the poet views some strange scenes. In another sequence a boy is killed in a snow ball fight.

The Blood of a Poet was the first in what became Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, which continued with Orphee (1950) and Le Testament d'Orphee (1960). It's slow, poetic movements through some very beautiful imagery, are in themselves interesting at times. The film is practically silent, except that there is a partial narrative (that incidentally is far too poetically esoteric that we get no indication of what is happening).

The film begins with a title card that states; "Every film is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered." This seems to be its intention, to be such a piece of art that its meaning requires unravelling. Whilst this kind of riddle is often pleasurable, in this cause it seems that you may need to know much about Cocteau himself - I have only read one biography of the man. Although, his film work does improve; the other two in the Orphic trilogy are splendid, along with his incredibly poet, and dreamily beautiful adaptation La Belle et la Bete (1946).

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Excellent example of early surrealism on film. It is like going through a dream in which images come and go unbidden and with little apparent sense. This film is to be viewed in exactly that spirit. Switch off the need within you to make sense of it, to make it fit a linear state of mind and you will get the most out of it, and be a lot closer to what the director intended. Let the images wash over you, respond to them as images, not as tidy stories with beginnings, middles and endings that we are used to seeing in films. Like a dream it has it's haunting, almost familiar parts that we can know and recognize as well as the parts of our unconscious that we do not see as clearly but still we dream of them. Too bad surrealism in film never took off more than it did. Here we see a hint of the possibilities that still lie before us. Recommended highly.

This film could very well have been made in collaboration with Luis Bunuel (Un Chien Andalou '29, L'Age D'Or '30), but it is less experimental and I don't think Cocteau takes full advantage of the screen time: the pace is low and there are no really shocking elements. I have to admit it could be a little shorter (despite it's only 60 minutes). That's not because Cocteau really needs much time, but because it's just slow. But then again, aren't most of his films and does it matter? The cinematography in by Georges Perinal (Le Million, The Fallen Idol) and the music sufficiently contribute to the fabulous imagery. See this film.

There is a similar snowball-throwing scene in this film which was used also in 'Les Enfants Terrible' (Melville, 1950) which was also written by Cocteau as you can see from the title sequence, and was created by Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai, Un Flic) with the famous Cocteau-atmosphere.

10 points out of 10 :-)

Surrealist cinema was at the height of its powers between the mid 1920's to the mid 1930's. For obvious reasons, the silent era had been particularly well suited to visually strong films. Like Luis Buñuel's L'âge d'or, The Blood of a Poet is one of the later films from this period. And both incorporate limited sound. In the case of this movie it is mainly music, with a little synchronised dialogue. It's a film that gives the impression of having an overall purpose and meaning but I have to admit, I really have no idea what it was. I found it baffling but interesting enough in a strange dream-like way. And at 50 minutes it hardly overstays its welcome. It's consistently well photographed and there are memorable sequences such as the hotel of strange rooms and the falling into a mirror moment. So, mainly, the film was of interest to me as an example of creative surrealism. But as to what it means? Ah, well, your own your own there I'm afraid

Cocteau's first feature certainly reflects the early idealism of cinema, that "we can do it!" spirit that made early artists truly believe in the potential of cinema as a medium to trump all other arts. Thematically similar to the more famous surrealist work "Un chien Andalou," "Le sang d'un poete" is a chroma-key free-for all, with talking hands, statues that come to life, and banal bourgeoise cardgames transpiring on children's corpses. It's hard to watch at times, made even harder by what I think is a terribly distracting score (to the point where I just turned the sound off and enjoyed the film as a silent with subtitles.) However, by the end one realises Cocteau's heartfelt audacity, and the true spirit of the early cinema artists who wanted to do things with film that nobody has the cojones to try today.

A seminal work in experimentalist cinema; why does it seem like we've fallen way behind?