Fantastic, dreamlike, a film-poem, an attempt to capture the invisible in which he explores in sequence shots the human deviations – and his own – through a descent into metaphorical hell.

 

Jean Cocteau directed his first feature film, The Blood of a Poet, commissioned and produced by his patron, Viscount Charles de Noailles. Initially envisioned as an animated film, the project proved too difficult to make, from a technical point of view. Cocteau, who admitted to “knowing nothing about the art of cinema,” chose to make a film in real images “as free as a cartoon,” in which he could unfold his poetic-fantasy universe. Cinema, for him, would be a tool for exploring the unconscious, a new sensory experience, and in his words, “an opportunity to create visual-art poetry.”

 

The Blood of a Poet is a key work in Jean Cocteau's filmography. It already contains his entire personal mythology, with figures and scenes that would become the leitmotifs of his subsequent films: the crossing of the mirror, the elasticity of time, the desire to fly, the statue that comes to life, the snowball fight, the obsession with wounds and blood, the poet's suicide. It can be understood as a self-portrait of Cocteau, at the crossroads of all his fantasies.

La Cinémathèque Française