I LOVED Orpheus and Beauty and the Beast--both Jean Cocteau masterpieces. However, this "movie" doesn't really appear to be a movie at all, but looks like a lot of little skits Cocteau created to amuse his friends--sort of like performance art, not cinema. There is absolutely no coherence whatsoever or theme. And this is NOT just because he adored surrealism. You can have surrealism in a movie provided it's not just bits and pieces of celluloid pasted together--which is what this is.
Maybe this film would have best been shown at some gallery where they have "new wave" art. I could see people looking at jars of placentas, cow excrement statues, a yodeling woman standing in a bucket of Jello and this film being played all at the same time. That's the sort of reason I could see for making the movie.
Many of the segments in the film were just camera tricks Cocteau was working on as an experiment. With MOST directors, the tricks and home movies they make do not make it to the cinema--but for some odd reason this did. They are sometimes COOL camera tricks, but that's all--I certainly would NOT want to pay to rent or to go see his little experiments. The only good from this mess I can see is that some of the tricks he used later appeared in much more polished form in Orpheus--such as running the film backwards or building rooms that were upside down or sideways. Cool tricks, but that's all. Watching this film is like staring at rough drawings that will be used for set designs or matte paintings--interesting but only a tiny piece of a whole movie.
So, it's pretty much a waste of time to see this, though I guess it is interesting to see a few statues come to life, the man wipe the smile from the painting and it becomes ALIVE and stuck on his hand, AND you get to see a couple people blow their brains out--complete with copious amounts of blood! If this ain't performance art, I don't know what is!
Plot summary
A young artist draws a face at a canvas on his easel. Suddenly the mouth on the drawing comes into life and starts talking. The artist tries to wipe it away with his hand, but when he looks into the hand he finds the living mouth on his palm. He tries to wipe it off on the mouth of an unfinished statue of a young woman. The statue comes into life and tells him that the only way out of the studio is through the looking glass. The artist jumps into the mirror and comes to the Hotel of Dramatic Lunacies. He peeps through the keyholes of a series of hotel rooms. In the last room he sees desperate meetings of hermaphrodites. One of them has a signboard saying "Mortal danger". Back in the studio the artist crushes the statue with a sledgehammer. Because of this he himself becomes a statue, located at the side of a square. Some schoolboys start a snowball fight around the statue. One of the boys is killed by a snowball. A fashionable couple start playing cards at a table beside the corpse. The woman tells the man that unless he holds the ace of hearts he is doomed. The man takes the ace of hearts from the dead boy. The child's guardian, a black angel, appears and takes away the corpse as well as the card. Losing the ace of hearts the man shoots himself. The woman is transformed into the unfinished statue from the studio, and walks away.
Uploaded by: FREEMAN
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
720p.BLU 1080p.BLUMovie Reviews
looks like a home movie made with an 8mm camera!
Far below Bunuel's work in a similar vein at the same time
I watched "Blood Of A Poet" right after Bunuel's (and Dali's) "Un Chien Andalou" and "L'Age D'Or"; it comes a distant third. It is totally inaccessible (whereas Bunuel's films are equally bizarre but I felt like I was connecting some dots - if perhaps not in the ways that he would have wanted me to!),and pompously self-important (whereas the others are generally playful). It is also blatantly homoerotic - fixated on two strapping, muscular, bare-chested men, one white, one black (not saying that's a good or a bad thing, but it's definitely there). Some impressive photographic tricks cannot sustain even 50 minutes. I didn't understand this film, it didn't make me feel anything, and it didn't entertain me; I gave it a second try, and I liked it even less! But hey, art is subjective, maybe others will get something out of it that I missed (twice). ** out of 4.
"A realistic documentary of unreal events!"
In film, Jean Cocteau found the perfect medium to portray his own personal mythology
Though his involvement in cinema was uneven, spasmodic and largely undertaken during later life, his fantastic images, well-meaning amateurism and continuous self-preoccupation were inspirational to the avant-garde and underground
By 1930, when Cocteau made his first film, he was already an established poet, novelist, dramatist and artist
"Le Sang d'un poète" (The Blood of a Poet) was a characteristically romantic portrait of the artist structured as a surreal succession of images centered on a private mythology: desiring immortality, the poet, martyr to creativity, must first pass through a mirror into a deathly private dream-world
Financed, like "L'Age d'Or," by the Vicomte de Noailles, its indulgent celebration of artists in general (and, therefore, Cocteau in particular) makes it inferior to Buñuel's film, but its strong, bizarre symbolism is often alarming