Blood of a Poet (1930)

Synopsis: Jean Cocteau made his first foray into cinema with the haunting collagelike film BLOOD OF A POET. Financed by the philanthropical Vicomte de Noailles, who was also responsible for Luis Buñuel's similarly avant-garde L'AGE D'OR, BLOOD OF A POET shimmers with energy and invention,... Jean Cocteau made his first foray into cinema with the haunting collagelike film BLOOD OF A POET. Financed by the philanthropical Vicomte de Noailles, who was also responsible for Luis Buñuel's similarly avant-garde L'AGE D'OR, BLOOD OF A POET shimmers with energy and invention, inaugurating an style that Cocteau would rework in each of his future films. Borrowing the sexual undertones and dreamlike structure of his plays, novels and paintings, Cocteau presents a sequence of seemingly unrelated events, all depicting the philosophical and metaphysical struggles of the artist. A handsome and shirtless young poet navigates a universe filled with moving statues, mirrors of water, opium smoke, mysterious hotel rooms, and mutating hermaphrodites. Cocteau's unique voice ties the episodic mediation together with various selections culled from his romantic surrealist poetry. Erotically tinged scenes of adolescent misbehavior taken from Cocteau's novel (and future film) LES ENFANTS TERRIBLES mingle with theatrical tableaus, all permeated by a dreamlike tempo and voyeuristic aesthetic in the creation of what the filmmaker would call "a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body." [More]