''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…

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…

Decadence is the charge that dogged Jean Cocteau, that dabbler, that celebrity, artist of the ruling class, even in Vichy, the man who made The Blood Of A Poet at age 40 because a gay viscount in his social circle wanted to finance a film, or more accurately, finance the man behind it. In the end, the patron had twins, Buñuel’s L’âge d’or and Cocteau’s The Blood Of A Poet. But where Buñuel’s urgency was political, Cocteau’s was psychological. His surrealist stream of fantasy and memory is one of the earliest known features not just about homosexuality but made by someone on the inside, a portrait of the artist as a gay man.

It’s bookended by a smokestack collapsing in…

The Blood of a Poet

{100%} 💯

                                #376TH Film Of 2020

14/99 films - Filmmaker Exploration Challenge

At the birth of surrealist cinema, arose many great masters and Cocteau was amongst them, in less than 60 minutes he managed to create a (more) bizarre version of 8 1/2, of course this film preceded Fellini’s masterpiece by over 3 decades and I find it quite likely that this was a key influence on him. This film doesn’t deal with filmmaking however, it deals with art of other forms, but nonetheless a very similar effect is created. 

Astonishing visual effects, accompanied with a fascinating and hugely…

Philistine alert.

I know nothing about art, I am a fraud, and I will never learn. I can admit I struggle with older films; they really have to be engaging to grab me, because we've evolved so far past this. It's influence is not lost upon me, but I wish it was either more didactic, more conventional in it's narrative, or even more surreal. It exists in a middle ground that was probably due to constraints of the time, budgetary, or not yet having the knowledge of the tools/capabilities, of cinema. It's frankly boring. I was falling asleep through a lot of the third part (I made it through, and maybe missed a minute total, but just, oof). I am…

A arte ganhando vida é talvez o maior deleite e pesadelo de seu criador, que entra em processo mnemônico em contato com suas musas. As imagens criadas por Jean Cocteau aqui são exemplos de como a arte pode se expressar, seja ela através da pintura, da escultura, da música, do teatro. O que surge através das imagens do poeta e diretor francês são exemplos de como o momento artístico se manifesta no homem.

O processo de criação artística vai muito mais longe que apenas entrar em êxtase no contato com as musas, filhas de Mnemosine. É um trabalho árduo, onde o poeta deve atravessar espelhos e conhecer outros mundos. E é a morte do poeta, esse constante acontecimento, que é…

With his debut, Cocteau proves that he’s a formidable adversary to Buñuel’s surrealist cinema throne. While he doesn’t quite bring Buñuel’s frenzied, unrelenting energy, Cocteau’s ideas and iconography are just as boundary-pushing and head-spinning. His commentary on the artistic process is funny and incredibly intelligent. I love that Cocteau isn’t afraid to explore what he can do with the camera; the film features early examples of jump cuts, color inversion, and a rack focus (those sideways sets are pretty cool too).

The film did lose me a couple times, and I think Cocteau’s ideas stretch a bit too far in some places. Surrealist cinema is most compelling when it creates the illusion of a story, even though one isn’t intentionally…