The Blood of a Poet

The Blood of a Poet is surreal, artistic film that moves and breathes like a piece of diegetic poetry and synthesizes mythology. The film builds itself around an artist’s creativity and the myth of Orpheus, chops itself into four chapters, and a series of oneiric images add disorientating flavor. This film may lack the anchor that later Jean Cocteau films like Beauty and the Beast would contain to provide a grounding reason for the hallucinatory and beautiful images, but it’s still a knockout of a debut.

At times it can feel as though the images are a flurry of strangeness that signify nothing so much as mere peculiarities, but that is a surface reaction to the film. Yes, sometimes the images and their connection to the loosely defined narrative are incomprehensible to anyone but Cocteau, but I wouldn’t trade their strange beauty for anything else. Much of The Blood of a Poet is circular in its logic and storytelling devices creating a closed circuit of logic in its feverish ramblings of divine inspiration and madness.

The first section concerns the artist trying to erase a drawing, only to find the mouth he’s erased affixed to his hand. He then transfers this mouth to a statue in his room, and the statue compels him to enter a mirror. Once in the mirror, things go even more topsy-turvy as the crawls across the doorways and peaks in on various odd happenings in different rooms. This underworld compounds an ever escalating series of weird events to increasingly unhinged and dream-like images. Somewhere along the way it all makes an odd sense as you watch, but it’s near incomprehensible to adequately describe to someone else. This is its own type of virtue and beauty.

I gleam the interior struggle to create art and bits and pieces of the Orphic myth, a story that would possess Cocteau enough to create a trilogy around it. This sense of mystery will either wrap around in comfortingly beguiling terms, or keep you at an arm’s length in intellectual frustration. This is a weird film with relatively few straight scenes, and possibly the most avant-garde of his films without a strong tether to a more coherent through line. The Blood of a Poet is deeply unusual, but it’s staggeringly gorgeous and a clear glimpse into Cocteau’s psyche. He paints with off-kilter images, light, and Enrique Rivero’s sensual body and expressive face. It is an imperfect viewing experience, but no less essential for these hindrances.