1932 ‘Le Sang d'un poète’ Directed by Jean Cocteau
Told in four episodes, an unnamed artist is transported through a mirror into another dimension, where he travels through various bizarre scenarios. This film is the first part of Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, which consists of The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).
Sangue de Um Poeta, A költő vére, Кровь поэта, Il sangue di un poeta, La sang d'un poeta, Das Blut eines Dichters, Krew poety, Кръвта на поета, O Sangue de Um Poeta, La sangre de un poeta, En poets blod
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I am regularly more astounded by even the mildest special effect in Jean Cocteau's work than the most outsized CG spectacle today. This Surrealist vision of an artist's creation process, from narcissism (hilariously rendered as the artist making love to the mouth he painted that came to life) to mythical inspiration, is funny, bewildering and never less than visually overwhelming. A few mixed messages here and there, but it's too enrapturing to matter.
if you ever find yourself feeling useless in any way, just remember that there's such a thing as narration in a surrealist film
''is it not crazy to wake up statues so suddenly from their secular sleep?''
The black angel with a limp.
Living Statues.
Mirrors.
Lips.
Suicide.
Hotel Rooms.
The dead body and the cheater.
Pure aesthetics.
Playful entertainment.
A half-sleeping odyssey through a field of imagery that's self-consciously devoid of deep meaning; the subconscious deliberately suppressed.
Structurally biographical, but stripped of all depth that would tie it exclusively to Cocteau, The Blood of a Poet is a shallow but universal treatise on the creative process.
Focusing exclusively on narrative and beauty, it manages to be more esoteric and truly surreal than anything produced by the major surrealists working within the movement.
And the film so clearly wants to be enjoyable to…
CW- Homophobia
3rd Jean Cocteau (after La Belle et La Bête and Orphée)
When the French New Wave began their systematic destruction of contemporary French cinema circa 1953, they chose to isolate a few figures who they felt were worthy of exclusion from what they considered a stultifying, literary obsessed establishment. Amongst those who they chose to lionise were Abel Gance, fallen master of the Triptych; Robert Bresson, who was making waves with his sparse adaptation of Diary of a Country Priest; Jean Renoir, especially quasi-Socialist Renoir; and Jean Cocteau. Notably, their love only really extended to Orpheé, his modern reimagining of the classic Greek myth. Blood of the Poet? I’ve read a great deal about the New Wave, and…
Eleventh Review for The Collab Weekly Movie Watch
Oh look, someone made a movie based on what I do on every Wednesday?
Jokes aside, this new review as part of the Collab is narratively confusing, but visually splendid. It is so splendid that I would call it revolutionary, with a captivating mis-en-scene that continually improves through the course of the film.
What's even better is not just that the cinematography, production design and direction are all incredible, but with the lack of a coherent and personally uninteresting narrative, this is rewarded with an almost flawless visual narrative. Likewise, the surreal elements add a lot of humor that enhances the viewing experience.
All in all, a dazzling exercise in visual storytelling that finds Jean Cocteau exercising his great talent as a filmmaker of incredible creativity and skill.
TODAY SCHEDULE
The Blood of a Poet
Triple Cross
Diamonds Are Forever
Malignant
a movie about hating your physical form so much that you transcend life, death and the established material universe in order to escape it. very relatable.
This is the first Cocteau film I've ever seen, and it is wonderful. So many strange moments, bizarre transitions, and wondrous angles culminate in darkness and a dreamlike trance.
*no spoilers*
Collab Film Club . 12
There is something oddly ironic about ‘Blood of a Poet.’ It is a film about a painter, and it feels more like a series of paintings strung together than a moving image; that is not to suggest that this is a work in which every frame is visually immaculate (though individual scenes do look stunning), but what I am trying to say is that the surrealism here is more in line with visual artists than filmmakers. What we see here is not a depiction of the world of dreams like the works of Bunuel, but something more conceptual, like the illustrations of Magritte and Dali. This is a bombastic film, visualised metaphors come…
An entropy of divinity and detail - fugue, form and aesthetics espoused in metaphor. Of artist's affliction, an odyssey caught in the dimensions of infirmity, deceit, and immorality; festering on the pale imagery of fascination. An artifact so kitsch in its mercy, the engagement of pretension - in the accomplished exposition of transcending vanity. Each material, process, and procedure, expression in the realm of fractured mind; skirmished in the conflict of ambition and ingenuity. The perpetual torture of thoughts, in bitter gall and liberty, the fabrics of oneiric humanity - all aroused in violent dreaming and plagued fate.
Cocteau is a revolutionary expressionist that does not belong to the surrealism movement as any Buñuel fan would claim. His purposes were merely artistic and his first masterful debut of the bizarre is a passionate tribute to the enigmatic. Dreamlike and seductive, Le Sang d'un Poète is a breathtaking journey into the realm of the type of mind we will never understand unless we take our lives towards another direction.
99/100
"Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered"
Early 20th-century avant-garde converging dream logic with dadaist art that's sporadically intercut with oneiric images, resulting in a movie full of riveting mise en scéne and imagery within that sweet 50 minutes runtime. This very much feels like the work of an artist struggling with their identity and what it means to actually create art, emphasis on the word "feels" since we're talking about surrealism here and shit does not make sense. Renoir self-describing himself as a poet when talking about his body of works is particularly apt since this is a piece that can only come from someone with an acute awareness of both language and the human condition. Count me in as the people who prefer this over Un Chien Andalou any day of the week (love ya Bunuel but we all know that his masterpiece is actually The Discreet Charm).
The Blood of a Poet
“I am rather surprised whenever I hear people chatter on about poetry in cinematography, the fantastic in cinematography and, particularly, ‘escapism’, a fashionable term which implies that the audience is trying to get out of itself, while in fact beauty in all its forms drives us back into ourselves and obliges us to find in our own souls the deep enrichment that frivolous people are determined to seek elsewhere.” Jean Cocteau, The Art of Cinema
Paula Marvelly wrote on Cocteau’s artistry that “[as a] polymath, [he] championed an elegant and ethereal aesthetic through his creative engagement not only through filmmaking and the moving image but also theatre, painting and literature. Indeed, he often referred to…
