Blog 1. Cocteau

Jean Cocteau dedicated himself to the aesthetic implications of the surrealist movement rather than using its characteristics to evaluate and challenge the status quo. In Le Sang d'un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1930), Cocteau uses certain special effects to create an expressionistic and dislocated commentary on the plight of an artist. Cocteau finds his inspiration from the tale of Orpheus- and uses fragmented dream like images to illustrate (rather than narrate) the sacrifices that the artist makes in the service of art.

In Le sang d’un poete, Cocteau takes the poet/spectator through a cryptic and discontinuous series of dream sequences and images that encapsulated his own poetic conditions and expression. Cocteau does not follow the concept of a coherent subjective narrative cinema and hence mimics the characteristics and absurd logistics of dreams.

Le sang d’un poete “draws nothing from either dreams or symbols. As far as the former are concerned, it initiates their mechanism, and by letting the mind relax, as in sleep, it lets memories entwine, move and express themselves freely. As for the latter, it rejects them, and substitutes acts, or allegories of these acts, that the spectator can make symbols of if he wishes."- Jean Cocteau



There is no specific allegorical reading- rather; Cocteau presents the audience with a sequence of images and fragmented surrealistic representations that are open to individual interpretation. There is no set story or setting- something of ourselves is needed to draw on an allegorical reading. The film encourages us to read it metaphorically. As Cocteau states himself, "The collective hypnosis into which the cinema audience is plunged by light and shade is very like a spiritualist séance. Then, the film expresses something other than what it is, something that no one can predict." (Speech at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, September 9, 1946, quoted in Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 25)

He suggests that both viewer and viewed as well as the creator all participate together "thorugh a kind of hypnosis"- the film is no longer something which is simply viewed- but there is a need for interaction. Unlike literary texts- where the image is mental (created in the mind of the viewer) and hence the viewer plays a part in the overall creative process, films present images visually- meaning that the viewer is simply required to 'view'. However, the lack of narrative structure and the various structural and filmic dislocations of Cocteau's film mean that the viewer is required and prompted to 'think'.


“The audience’s role is huge and has to be relearned.”

Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin
Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 41

The incredibly original succession and play of sequences and events in Cocteau's film mimics the absurdity of individual dream sequences. Dreams being tied to the individual who is experiencing them are themselves overtly original.



Through Cocteau's definition of the dream as a "succession of real events that follow on from one another with...magnificent absurdity" the parallel between dreams and the disjointed fragmented and 'anti-narrative' nature of his film becomes apparent. Because dreams are indeed exclusive to the individuals having them, the spectators of Cocteau's film would not have since linked the various sequences together in the same way that Cocteau has. Rather the viewer is forced to "experience them (sequences) in their seats as they might experience, in their beds, strange adventures for which they are not responsible"… Cocteau, Jean The Art of Cinema, trans. Robin Buss. London and New York: Marion Boyars, 2001, p. 40.

An interesting link from the Criterion Collection website with an essay by Jean Cocteau on Le sang d'un poete:
http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=67&eid=21&section=essay