The Blood of a Poet (1930)
A film by Jean Cocteau
'Ladies and Gentlemen. The feature production we are about to present has the outstanding virtue of unparalleled novelty. There never has been a picture like this one before. There may never be another one like it.
It is the product of an internationally acknowledged genius - some say a thoroughly mad genius. The product of the "cleverest man alive".
It is the first attempt of a poet to write on the hearts of his audience with motion picture tools instead of with the conventional pen.
Parisian and London audiences have rioted in the frenzy of their attempted explanations of what the picture means.
As the poet discloses his amazing thoughts to the accompaniment of an equally amazing musical score will you not, then, bear in mind a quotation which may provide a much needed solace -- either to you or to the "internationally acknowledged genius"; it may lay the ghosts of confusion.
The quotation runs something like this: "When an expression of art collides with the brain of a layman and produces an empty sound - it is yet a question as to which of the two is at fault".'
The words above are the introduction to Jean Cocteau's 1930 film The Blood of a Poet; and like Buņuel's Un Chien Andalou, you can imagine the response of some of the audiences of that era when first seeing this film, it must have seemed quite extraordinary to them. The film's release was actually delayed for two years at the time, because it was financed by Vicomte de Noailles, who also financed Buņuel's "sacrilegious" 1930 film, L'Age D'Or.
Cocteau described the film as poetic images - words and thoughts from a poet's mind that are usually written on paper, but in this case transferred into moving images on a screen. But watching the film you can't help but get the feeling that the film is surreal. The film is comprised of four episodes: The Wounded Hand, Do the Walls Have Ears?, The Snowball Fight and The Profanation of the Host.
After the initial introduction there are another few verses of text: "All poetry is a coat-of-arms. It is necessary to decipher it. What blood, what tears, in exchange, for these hatchets, for these griffons, for these unicorns, for these torches, for these towers, for these martlets, for these seed-plots of stars, and for these fields of blue?
Free to choose the visages, the forms, the gestures, the tones, the acts, the places which please him, he composes with them a realistic document of unreal events. The musicians will underline the noise - and the silences.
The author dedicates this group of allegories to the memory of Pisanello, of Paolo Uccello, of Pierre della Francesca, of Andrea del Castagno, painters of blazons and enigmas."
We are shown a chimney that starts to fall, and the first episode begins. A man draws a face, and the mouth of the drawing begins to move. The man rubs the mouth from the drawing with his hand, but the mouth attaches itself to the palm of his hand. The following morning the man places the palm of his hand over a statue's mouth, and the statue awakens.
In the second episode the statue asks the man to enter a mirror, which he does, and falls through it and finds himself banished into the halls of the 'Hotel of Dramatic Follies'.
The third episode and the man is now a snow statue, but not for long. Young boys make snowballs from him and soon the statue is gone. A boy is bullied. He throws a (metal) snowball at the bully and injures him.
The final episode has a man and a woman playing cards at a table, and a coloured guardian angel arriving. The man shoots himself in the head, and a gallery of spectators overlooking on balconies applaud. The woman is now statue-like. She gets up and accompanies a cow to her destination: mortal tedium of immortality. The chimney collapses. The End.
