Day 66: The Blood of a Poet (1930)

Jean Cocteau’s “The Blood of a Poet” is the first film of his famous “Orphic Trilogy” and a pioneering experiment into film surrealism before the genre had even fully come into its own. A film without care for a linear style plot, Cocteau dives into the inner workings of a poet’s mind and tries to decipher how an artist thinks upon the work he is creating and brings it into fruition.

In place of a coherent story, Cocteau instead separates his film into four distinct sections. In the first, an artist sketches a face onto a canvas and is amazed when the mouth he drew comes to life and begins moving. Unsure of what to do, he rubs out the mouth with his hand, but finds it has now embedded onto his palm. Trying once again to get rid of it, he puts the mouth on the face of female statue and, to his surprise, she comes to life.

In the second segment, the statue tempts him to pass through a mirror and, when he does, he finds himself inside a hotel where rooms are occupied by all sorts of people, including an Mexican bandit and a hermaphrodite. Suddenly, the artist is handed a gun and told by an ominous voice to shoot himself in the head. When he does pull the trigger, the bullet fires but he does not die and, now tired of what he has seen, the artist jumps back through the mirror and smashes the talking statue with a mallet.

In the last two sections, Cocteau presents two more stories, both loosely connected, but even less so than the first two. In these, the director explores an artist’s mind through a tale about children battling one another in a snowball fight, which ends with fatal consequences, and then a story about two individuals playing cards for their lives in front of a theater of onlookers.

As you can see, “The Blood of a Poet” isn’t exactly an easy film to summarize and that may just be Cocteau’s point. Wanting to expand film to something more felt than seen, this French cinema visionary gives a filmed representation of how we try and respond to modern art. We stare, we watch, we gaze, and then the feeling we receive from the experience effects us deeply, though possibly in a completely different way than even the person standing next to us.

And with this way of experiencing, Cocteau was intentional about not even giving us possible hints on how to think about the piece. Cocteau once said, “”The Blood of a Poet” draws nothing from either dreams or symbols. As far as the former are concerned, it initiates their mechanism, and by letting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets memories entwine, move and express themselves freely. As for the latter, it rejects them, and substitutes acts, or allegories of these acts, that the spectator can make symbols of if he wishes.”

A film like none that had come before it, Jean Cocteau’s “The Blood of a Poet” is a work that doesn’t ask for interpretation, but demands enough of our attention that we must decide for ourselves what we are seeing and what to take from it. It is truly an experience in film.

To learn more about “The Blood of a Poet,” check out Criterion’s page here.

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