Lawbolisted Powerful

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

jadavix A theme throughout the short film is transformation. Works of art come alive, and then allow the artist to transform his hands, and then bring life to statues. Mirrors become portals, and through the portals, the laws of physics no longer seem to apply.Snow turns, fatally, to marble when it is thrown by one student at another. Marble is, of course, the material that artists make statues out of.The scene of the death of the student is also transformed when a crowd of theatre-goers look over it, transforming it into art, as though it was staged for their appreciation. A card game is played over the boy's body, where we have another death, this time of the losing player, and another transformation, as the female player turns into the statue we witnessed at the movie's beginning.An obvious point to all this transformation is to make us regard the objects involved differently. I think it is quite hard to look at a statue the same way after we have seen it come to life on screen. The same goes, possibly, for mirrors. Both of these objects are fertile ground for surrealism as they are inherently strange. A strikingly lifelike statue already makes you question where art ends and real-life begins. The transformation of a statue into a living being is therefore not so bizarre; it's a universal fantasy played out on screen. The mirror is also ripe for surrealist implication as we have all doubted what it shows us. Entering a mirror and discovering a bizarre world on the other side is a demonstration of this experience. There are also simplistic readings of some of the images on screen. When the artist acquires the mouth in his palm, the visual metaphor is obvious: as an artist, his hands do the communicating, therefore they have a mouth. Eyes, also, are often made prominent; there is at least one shot of a person wearing a mask which hides their whole face, except for the eyes. When the artist is looking through keyholes, one of the keyholes shows him an eye looking out at him. Again, the face of the person on the other side of the door is invisible, only the eye remains. Thus the eye is the most important part of the face, it's what we see with, and much of the film involves seeing, and people in positions where they can't do anything else - eg. the artist peering through keyholes, and the theatre-goers watching the card game.This focus on eyes is one obvious point of comparison between "The Blood of a Poet" and "The Andalusian Dog". Everybody is familiar with the eye-slicing scene from that movie, which involves an extreme close-up of an eye, not unlike the eye the artist sees through the keyhole. Further, that movie features title cards with phrases like "once upon a time", "eight years later", "about three in the morning". These title cards seem satirical in that they add information that in another movie might be useful. Since the movie has no real story or timeline, however, the information seems mocking in that it doesn't help you to understand what is going on on-screen - in fact, it does the opposite. I felt the same way about the narration in "The Blood of a Poet", which I don't think really adds anything that might help you understand the movie, except perhaps for hinting that you are not necessarily supposed to understand it.However, one interesting difference between "The Andalusian Dog" and Cocteau's movie is that the eye-slicing scene in the former is, even after all these years, distressingly realistic; "Blood of a Poet" has a shockingly violent scene of its own, but the shocking aspect is not its realism, but its lack thereof. I am thinking of the scene where a voice from off-screen tells the artist to shoot himself, and he complies. There is a lot of blood, which I imagine would have been controversial in 1930. However, the artist does not seem hurt.Famously, Bunuel brought stones with him to the first screening of "Andalusian Dog", expecting a reaction so hostile that he would need ammunition to retaliate against the audience. I would be surprised if Cocteau expected a similar reaction. His movie is bizarre, also, but I feel it has more of a message than Bunuel and Dali, and less of a direct attempt to upset the audience.

Michael_Elliott Blood of a Poet, The (1930) *** (out of 4) The first film in director Jean Cocteau's "Orphic" trilogy is clearly a very personal film, which means that the director knows what it's about while the viewer simply has to guess what it means. There's not any "plot" to speak of but instead we're treated to just over 50-minutes worth of images ranging from snow ball fights to a man shooting himself to countless other images, which are supposed to be taking part during the time it takes for a chimney to fall to the ground. There's no question that this film is full of surreal images and many people are going to watch this film and see nothing more than a lot of images thrown together without any rhyme or reason as to why they're being shown. I'm sure some people would like to unlock the mysteries behind the stories and will rack their brains trying to figure out what the director meant by each frame in the picture. I personally never put too much into a film like this where it's clear the director doesn't want to viewer to know what's going on. I'm sure Cocteau could explain each second of this film in full detail but as a viewer I really wasn't trying to figure out what was going on but instead just sit back and enjoy what I was seeing. I thought the first forty-minutes of this movie was extremely entertaining with many of the images really jumping out of me. My favorite sequence was the one where a man is ordered to put a gun to his temple and pull the trigger. What happens next is something I won't spoil in detail but the aftermath of the gunshot was quite creative. Another nice scene is when an artist goes "into" a mirror only to splash into some water instead. Many of these early images are shown in a wide range of ways and this really adds to the surreal nature of the picture. The final ten-minutes or so is where I started to get bored as the final act didn't strike me as being nearly as well-made or interesting. I wouldn't rank this film as a masterpiece and I wouldn't rank it up against the work of Luis Bunuel but on its own it's still a rather impressive little film but, again, I wouldn't try figuring it out.

rooprect Let me preface this by saying Jean Cocteau was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. Let me also say that his 1950 film ORPHEE is probably the best French movie I've ever seen. Furthermore, let me say that Surrealism is my favourite genre of cinema.Now let's get to the nasty part. The 20s and 30s--the beginning of the modern Surrealism movement--were just that: the beginning. The artistic style was in its infancy, much like a 15-year-old kid playing with her first super 8 camera. There was a lot of experimentation, a lot of self-indulgence and a lot of "wow, what does this button do?" Films made during this period (such as Sang d'un poète, l'Age d'or, etc) are best enjoyed as historical documents. Cocteau would go on to create more lucid masterpieces like ORPHEE and BELLE ET LA BETE. Buñuel would also refine his art and give us TRISATANA, etc. But the early stuff? wtf.A lot of you may be fuming at my irreverent perspective, but let me remind you that in the 1970s Buñuel himself said he wished he could burn all of his old works. I'm not sure if Cocteau took such a harsh stance, but I'm sure that even he felt that SANG was just a frolic compared to his later achievements.With Cocteau (as with Buñuel), I advise you to start from the end of their careers and then work your way back in time. I'd hate for this to be anyone's first Cocteau film, because it might end up being the last! So what can you expect in this film? First the good stuff: You'll see a lot of highly innovative techniques. In particular, you'll see Cocteau playing with magnificent illusions such as "walking on the walls" which he would perfect 20 years later (see ORPHEE). You'll see his obsession with mirrors and the symbolism they conjure (again, see ORPHEE). And finally you'll see some nice reverse-filming techniques which would become the trademark of his masterpiece (take a guess... ORPHEE). In fact, this film is almost like a reel of outtakes from ORPHEE.Aside from that, you won't get much of literary value, which is ironic because Cocteau was such a great writer. What I mean is that you won't get any plot, any coherence, any cohesiveness, or anything you can say to someone who asks you "what was the film about?" This is the kind of film you might see playing in the background of some uber hip nightclub, because it certainly has a lot of mood. But as far as sitting on the couch and watching it... I dunno. I kinda wish I had the last 50 minutes of my life back.

raypaquin This is a truly unique masterpiece. It is almost impossible to interpret and apparently impossible to connect to any sort of reality *unless* you are one of the very few who know the *true* story of the *very* early Christian Church. Those who have read the Pistis Sophia and some of the manuscripts that have been discovered at Nag Hamadi in upper Nile in Egypt, will know what I mean. The Nag Hamadi codices were discovered in 1945 and yet this film was made in 1930. One wonders whence Jean Cocteau got his ideas. The Vicomte de Noailles, who produced and financed this film, was a pretender to the mysterious Sangraal (Sang Royal) dynasty in France, dating from the Merovingian kings. A persistent rumour connects this royal line to Mary Magdalene, who is said to have founded a church near Marseille in France after the crucifixion of Jesus.