Retrospective: Sang d'un Poete, le (1930)
Dennis Schwartz
Cocteau; cinematographer: Georges Périnal; cast: Enrique Rivero (The
Poet), Pauline Carton (Child's Tutor), Feral Benga (Black Angel), Jean
Desbordes (Louis XV), Lee Miller (Statue), 1930-France)
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
"Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images."
Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)
The information I derived on Jean Cocteau (The Eternal Return/Beauty and
the Beast/Les enfants terribles/Orpheus), French poet, artist, novelist,
playwright, and movie director was gathered from several books, with
Parker Tyler's "Classics of the Foreign Film," in particular, being an
invaluable source.
Cocteau was born in Maisons-Lafitte into a wealthy Parisian family. His
father was a lawyer and amateur painter, who committed suicide when
Cocteau was nine. Cocteau's father had a lasting influence on his son,
but according to psychoanalytical critics this tragic event also created
his desire to put himself in the service of the arts and the mysterious
forces in the universe. In secondary school Cocteau was only a mediocre
student who was unsuccessful after repeated attempts to pass the
graduation examination. His first volume of poems, Aladdin's Lamp,
Cocteau published at the age of 19 and gained fame with his involvement
as writer and supervisor in Parade (1917), a ballet produced by Serge de
Diaghile, with sets by Pablo Picasso and music by Erik Satie.
The idea of a film came about during a house party given by Charles and
Marie-Laure de Noailles at Hyeres in 1929. Georges Auric, Cocteau's
lifelong musical collaborator, said that he wanted to compose the score
for an animated cartoon. Cocteau was asked to provide a scenario. The
Noailles (who also bankrolled Luis Buñuel's l'Age d'or) agreed to give
Cocteau a million francs to make a live-action film with a score by
Auric. This became "The Blood of a Poet," still one of the most widely
viewed of all Cocteau's screenworks.
Cocteau described this first film of his as a disturbing series of
voyeuristic tableaux, as "a descent into oneself, a way of using the
mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often
mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body."
The Blood of a Poet, was based on his own private mythology. Typical for
Cocteau's films was the use of mirrors as a door into another world and
the play between reality and the underworld or the inner world where
poetry is made. The hostility of the surrealists to this project led
Cocteau to make a film that is sometimes in structure a lot closer in
resemblance to neo-Romantic classicism than surrealism (Andre Breton was
"king" of the surrealist group and was afraid Cocteau would dethrone
him).
There has never been a film quite like Le Sang d'un Poete. Cocteau used
all his energy and his diverse talents in a medium that was new to him,
as this film represented an aesthetic milestone in his career.
Was it nonsense or serious filmmaking? In my opinion, a little of both,
though the result of the film is a serious work. This 60 minute film is
ostensibly, a work on the nature of creating art. It shows the artist in
the first part of the film struggling to find his identity, vowing to
free himself from his present confinement by becoming a martyr for his
art. He symbolically kills himself to attain a new relationship to
tradition. In the second part, he dredges up events from his young life
and tries to honestly see himself for the first time without being
conditioned by the world he grew up in. Playing a card game with a lady,
the poet snaps and starts recalling distresses from his childhood, and
again symbolically shoots himself. His opponent turns into his muse, her
long black gloves simulating a statue's absence of arms.
Technically, The Blood of a Poet reflects Cocteau's trials and errors as
a novice filmmaker who had to turn irreversible mistakes to his
advantage and had to constantly improvise. During shooting, he used the
dust raised by studio cleaning men to enhance the mysterious atmosphere
of the final scenes. Special weightless effects were obtained by camera
trickery to show the little girl flying up to the ceiling and the poet
moving painfully along the corridor wall. Once Cocteau discovered that
he could turn shooting disasters into
excellent footage, he was off on a career of making films that carried
his trait of creating trick shots: the miraculous mirror and mercury
scene in Orphee, the live arms holding the candelabra from the walls of
La Belle et la Bete, and the accelerated time sequences of flowers
opening in Le Testament d'Orphee are only a few examples of the trick
shots he used in his later films.
Basically, in The Blood of a Poet, Cocteau shot four episodes in the
life of an artist by trying to get into the artist's head. Cocteau, as
narrator, boldly states, "When an expression of art collides with a
layman's view of things, if the work is not understood, it is a question
of which of the two is at fault." For Cocteau, poetry is a coat-of-arms.
In the first episode, entitled: "The Wounded Hand," the poet (Rivero)
has his thoughts surrealistically swirling in the air and a mouth forms
in his hand begging for air to breath. The following morning the poet
decides that it is not a crazy idea to awaken a statue (Lee), even one
that has been around for thousands of years, as he struggles to bring it
to consciousness.
In the second episode, he enters the mirror and it opens up a reality he
never saw before, as the film's theme revolves around the fears and joys
and obsessions of the artist who has opened himself up for analysis.
In the third episode, the dreams and events in the poet's life come back
to haunt him. Most notable, is the famous scene of the poet as a child
being knocked out when hit by a snowball. The child must learn how to
handle the obstacles in his life, such as the bully in his class.
The fourth episode, entitled: "Stolen Card," a black angel (Feral)
hovers over a dead child he was a guardian of, the poet as a boy. There
is also the boy growing up to be the artist who commits suicide at the
card table. This is perhaps a reminder that Cocteau's father committed
suicide or of Cocteau's artist friends who live an impoverished life and
are forced to make life and death decisions. The film ends with the
message: Mortal tedium of immortality. In the last frame, an industrial
chimney shown in the beginning of the film, finally collapses and all
material things are crushed. Only the poet remains and is considered to
be eternal.
So much of this film is mysterious and vague, undoubtedly
autobiographical in content and motif: Cocteau himself always denied the
presence of hidden symbolism in the film, but word got about that it had
anti-Christian undercurrents. This was really not so, according to
Cocteau, but the false rumor did its damage. It greatly distressed the
Noailles. It caused a scandal and the Viscount was on the verge of being
expelled from the elegant Jockey Club, and was even threatened with
excommunication from the Church. The Noailles forbade Cocteau to allow
public release of "The Blood of a Poet" for over a year. Later on, they
gave the rights of the film to Auric and Cocteau, allowing them to do
whatever they wanted with it.
The life-line of the movie is its imagery, which can be interpreted many
different ways, emphasizing Cocteau's view that art disclaimed the world
of ordinary appearances and projected vision to be a symbolic
representation that must be continually changing, because if it doesn't
it will be dead like classicism is and it will cease to exist. The
director was afraid that the avant-garde movement would die one day like
all other artistic movements have. To continue to be viable, the artist
must break the "natural" laws that govern appearances and these
strategies for breaking down appearances are the very gist of the film.
The avant-garde art must be a kind of "public affront."
Because of its unusual theme and style and unpredictability, this is a
film that deserves the high accolades many film critics have bestowed
upon it. It resolutely shows how the filmmaker communicates into the
spirit world, and he does so without being pretentious.
REVIEWED ON 11/25/99 GRADE: A
Dennis Schwartz: "Ozus' World Movie Reviews"
© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED DENNIS SCHWARTZ