The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d’un poete). Jean Cocteau, 1930.
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Edition screened: Criterion DVD #67, included in Criterion set #66 The Orphic Trilogy, released 2000. French language with English subtitles. Runtime approximately 50 minutes.
Summary: No particular depictions of violence toward animals.
In his introductory comments to Ernst Lubitsch’s Trouble in Paradise, Peter Bogdanovich notes the comparative sophistication of film audiences of the early 1930s, and the disheartening distance we have fallen since then. Bogdanovich is speaking of an audience’s sense of wit and a willingness to observe irony and comedic subtlety, long since shown the door in favor of juvenile wisecracks and crotch kicking. Equally, original audiences for The Blood of a Poet were able to follow a narrative that deviated from conflict/resolution structure, and were willing to empathize with mythic and symbolic content that allow an artful filmmaker to work with the language of dreams and classicism, rather than the outbursts of music videos and narcissism.
The Blood of a Poet stands with Buñuel’s L'Age d'Or among early films that reveled in the artistic potentials of a new cinematic medium. But while Buñuel’s acerbic intellect and antiestablishment politics gave his early films wild sharp edges, Cocteau’s gentle poeticism provides sweeping washes of painterly beauty.