THE BLOOD OF A POET Movie Review

Le Sang d'un Poete

There was a time when the greatest and most innovative of our artists and writers wanted to work in the cinema. It couldn't have been for the money; films like the 1928 Buñuel/Dali Un Chien Andalou and Jean Cocteau's 1930 The Blood of a Poet were not, I feel certain, designed to keep Chaplin or Griffith awake at night worrying about competition at the boxoffice. These were visionaries who understood the potentially revolutionary power of this relatively new art form, and who were anxious to subvert the expectations of an already complacent viewing public by turning the cinema's established story-telling conventions on their head. “I applied myself only to the relief and to the details of the images that came forth from the great darkness of the human body,” Cocteau wrote of the creation of this, his first film,” I adopted them then and there as the documentary scenes of another kingdom.” Indeed, the overwhelming power of The Blood of a Poet stems from that matter-of-fact way in which the impossible is visualized. A series of four episodes that all happen in the fraction of a second that it takes for a chimney to collapse, The Blood of a Poet shows us internal emotional states—not vaguely symbolized, but as if filmed during sleep by a camera focused on our dreams. An artist draws a mouth and tries to erase it—whereupon it comes to life in his hand. His inability to flee from his own creation leads to his confinement in the” Hotel of Dramatic Follies,” where he clambers along the walls of a gravity-defying, dreamlike corridor, peeking into keyholes through which he is forced to witness unspoken human desires. There is much more, and it's all powerful, primal, funny, and frightening—even today. The Blood of a Poet also features the brilliant first film score by the legendary Georges Auric.

NEXT STOP … L'Age d'Or, Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus

1930 55m/B Enrique Rivero, Feral Benga, Jean Desbordes; D: Jean Cocteau; W: Jean Cocteau; C: Georges Perinal; M: Georges Auric. VHS VYY, MRV, HHT