The Blood of a Poet (1932) - Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau is one of the most multifaceted and versatile artistic personalities of the late nineteenth century, and much of the twentieth century as well, excelling in a good number of artistic expressions. Considered as a young prodigy of poetry, his creative range expanded, besides poetry, to novel, drama, painting, and what concerns us, cinema. Actually, enters to cinema at a relatively mature age, having already taken several steps in the other disciplines of art he practiced, and the tape being discussed in this article was his debut, his debut film. Cocteau debut brandishing the artistic manifesto in vogue at the time, the Surrealist manifesto, written by his friend André Breton, and followed by the French poets of those years. As such, the film is thus a surreal parade, a flurry, a frenzy of images and oneiric sequences, of robust symbolic content, where rationality and objective loose strenght versus dream figures, oneirism, a child charge; and, in general, all the principles pursued and defended by the then current and strengthened surrealism artistic movement. Divides Cocteau his story, what some would call length film, in four segments, four tales that seem to poke around in the back of the mind of the artist, the creative artist and the recesses of his mind, the human mind therefore, exploring fears, obsessions, showing death, bourgeoisie, bizarre beings, setting the picture which marks the beginning of his triptych known as the Orphic Trilogy.

                 

The film begins with the first segment, "wounded hand or poet's scar", where an individual, the poet (Enrique Rivero) is making a painting, a portrait, but after being interrupted in his work, he erases the mouth with his hand. To his surprise, the talking mouth is in that hand now, and then go on to a statue. The second section begins, "walls have ears?", the poet seems to be locked in the room, the statue indicates that the loophole is the mirror. The poet enters the mirror, to a strange space where gaskets-doors arranged give visual access to rooms where he sees, among other things, a man to be almost shot, some hand shadows, some unique kinds of flying lessons, and a hermaphrodite; after that, the man finds a gun, he shots himself in the head following indications of the statue, which destroys afterwards. Then the third short story begins, the shortest one, "fight snowballs", some children are playing throwing snowballs, an allegory is stated of those balls with Spanish, deadly daggers, and one of the infants actually dies upon impact. The final and fourth segment begins, "the desecration of the host," in which a man and a woman are playing cards on the body of the child, and where some bourgeois witness everything as if it were an opera; a dark angel takes the body, and after finishing the game, the gentleman loses and commits suicide, to get welcome and applause from the spectators.

It should be emphasized especially the picture as what it is, the work of an artist son of surrealism, which performed in the days of Dadaism, a film that does not conform to conventional standards, but quite the contrary, it exalts the forefront, where the symbolism prevails, where the subjective and the children-charged concepts are of paramount importance. This relevance implies that there are no per se correct or wrong readings, means that the picture should not be in order to be understood, as to works like this, everyone can make his or her own interpretation, which has actually happened over the decades. The filmmaker, a close friend of Picasso and Stravinsky (something that already starts diagramming us his personality as a human being and as a creative artist), starts his movie with an individual with his face painted and tunics, raising his cloak before presenting the four segments. The first segment is the most significant in my view, the artist in the creative process, in front of his easel, suddenly testifies how the work, his creation, surpasses and comes alive, speaks in the shape of the mouth -transmitter and enouncer symbol-; first abandons the canvas, it moved to its creator, the artist, and then land on the always significant figure of the statue, played by Elizabeth Lee Miller. The beauty of classical and unpolluted marble is the reservoir from which the artistic work speaks directly to the creator, and in the second chapter, suggests the output of the cloister. Art flows through the artist, he "manipulates" it. In that sense, we get plotted the enclosure, the cloister you want to escape from, and from which that art, in the double figure of the statue and the talking mouth, slides the escape: the mirror, eternal powerful symbolic figure.

It has been also pointed out the suggestive clothing of the poet, his pants and wig are likely allegory to the elegance of the bourgeoisie of past centuries, and of course, the closure, the airtight closure from where escape is sought, and the own creation, the sublime art, provides it. Crossing the mirror, in that dense world, in the corridor of a hotel, a man dressed with some Mexican-like clothes is almost shot, an infant takes particular flight lessons in a bedroom, the sleep eternal human desire to fly. And also, it appears the extravagant figure of a hermaphrodite, half reality, half figuration, in the hypnotic universe where, amid the despair of that being almost spooky, everything will appear to bits, and where the female is synonymous with death danger, a danger that will get embodied. The figure of suicide is portrayed, with instructions given by the statue and what it represents, then the poet smashes the statue; death, infinity, linked sex and death, Thanatos-erotic relationship is also present in the surreal world of Cocteau, female sex is pointed as a synonym for mortal risk, to take into account, considering Cocteau's homosexuality. The film is an attempt to explore what drives an artist, to explore the blood of the poet, the sap, the elan, the vital impulse that serves as engine, perhaps a path to self-knowledge, to self-discovery, and offers these readings, darkness, death, art, sexuality, duality, anxiety, despair, fear (destroys the statue, perhaps the findings of that self-discovery are not exactly pleasant).

White and black seem to get everything hermetic in the third segment, where infant innocence merges with fatality, where silence isolates even more what happens, and where one of the "fighters", one of the children dies when receiving the symbolic snowball. We enter the fourth segment, the child's guardian angel (hieratic presence played by Feral Benga) takes his protege, absorbing him, being significant to be a black man (like the arms that finally appear to the statue) who incarnates the heavenly presence that pales by absorbing the child. The black color bursts at key moments, as if even in the figure of an angel could not be a pristine being, but the opposite; the black angel takes the secret playing card that the cheater uses to win, and in the end, after literally having his heart pouncing, loses and commits suicide. The film was funded by the patron Charles, Viscount of Noailles, who with his wife was part of the bourgeois who attend the bizarre opera at the end of the picture -Cocteau filmed them in parallel with the final scene, they applaud without knowing what applaud, and once seen the final product and that applaudedsequence, forced the filmmaker to rectify and modify that part-, and who incidentally also funded another referential surreal film, the Golden Age (1930) by skillfull Buñuel. The picture was labeled anti-Christian and that got its release delayed a bit, but finally the movie saw the light and set the start of the Orphic triptych by Cocteau. Personally not raise the versatile French to the rank of master of cinema, but set a very interesting finding himself impulse as an artist, makes Orpheus his alter ego, perhaps the reason why some regard him as arrogant, he speaks of mortal tedium of immortality, he flirts with the idea of immortality through his art. For those interested in this type of film, will be an exquisite work, I particularly, at such a multifaceted personality like Cocteau, although consider appreciable his films, I do not consider them as egregious art.