i watched this movie today, and i really liked it (especially the imagery, the tricks cocteau used, etc), but im not sure what it means... i thought that it was a metaphor for the artists connection with his work, but that doesnt seem to make sense towards the end. anyone wanna help?
shareit shows how the artist suffers and uses the suffering for beauty. an example is the girl who is whipped by her mother but in the process learns to fly. the "blood of the poet" is the artist using the pain in his work (similar to the phrase "blood, sweat and tears.")
shareThe mother/girl episode is just one in several, I don't think it encapsulates the whole movie's point. What about the artist's statue coming to life? Think about what that says on the artist/work relationship.
To me it's wrong looking for a straightforward understanding of this movie. It's a work to felt, it's a surrealist piece and shouldn't make complete sense. I accept it as a fascinating piece of early experimentalism in cinema that's influenced countless great directors.
The whole movie is a bunch of pretentious crap. There's hardly anything new to be said or shown, even for early cinematographic art. kinda like depicting a Picasso on screen. Anything Cocteu tried to imply or show had already been done before in other mediums of art.
I liken this film to modern artist hacks who paint a canvass half white and half black and then try to sell it as a touch of genious because they "understand good and evil".
I am sure I will get a bunch of phonies who disagree with me and call this horrendous movie "a think piece", "Genious!!!!", "orgasmic!!!",and perhaps overpraise it by saying its "good".
You can defend it all you want, call me uncultored swine, tell me I do not know the pain and suffering it takes to be a real artist, show me links to tortured 13 year old goth girl websites with hurting souls and deep poetry so that I may understand what real pain is. But the fact is this movie will still blow chunks and and be overpraised.
Hey izzy et al.
I just watched this for the first time. I have the Criterion Trilogy. This was interesting, historically, but also somewhat amateurish, and even Cocteau would agree with that. I really enjoyed the 66min documentary which also appears on this disc. I look forward to the much more accomplished Orpheus, and Testament Of Orpheus.
Still, I enjoyed this short, archaic work of art. One must put it in context....this is 1930, and surrealistic films were very, very new indeed. I'll watch it again! But lets not kid ourselves....this is no Film Masterpiece. It is, however, very interesting.
Darren Skuja
"Film Is The Ultimate Artform"
My post was meant to irk "film students" who cream themselves at the mention of Cocteau. I just think that, surrealism having been done in oder mediums of art prior to the movie,a little more creativity would have been in order.
To answer the "you gotta remember that these was 1930 and cinematography was new" crowd, let me just ask you, if a new medium of art was invented or discovered and some one half heartedly experimented with it and came up with a similar work of art, would you also praise them as a visionaries?
izzymateos said:
<<call me uncultored [sic] swine>>
Okay. Uncultured swine.
sure it's pretentious but that's a bad thing? It's funnier and more disdurbing than thelatestactioner so i's good as far as I'm concerned.
the point? To be a work of art perhaps?
As a sci-fi, horror, and adventure fan, I'm not drawn to existential efforts such as this one . . . usually. I saw BLOOD OF A POET (as it's known here in the States) almost by accident one night about fifteen years ago (I believe it was on the A&E network), and I've never really shaken its imagery since. I tend to agree with the earlier poster who offered the opinion that the film doesn't have a distinct purpose or meaning, but the vision with which it is imbued certainly is powerful and resistant to the changes of time and fashion.
BLOOD was created at a time of great upheaval and experimentation, as films moved fully into synchronized sound, and that period remains virtually unique as the birth of a new artform. Of course, films had been around for almost forty years by then, but their first "genesis" doesn't compare to the coming of sound, due to the slow spread and acceptance of the initial motion pictures (for years following the Lumieres and Edison, many critics in the world of the arts remained convinced that "the movies" were a fad that would dissolve with a bit more time) and the general difficulty in penetrating the vast majority of the world which was unprepared to present the product. By the late Twenties, films were perhaps the most popular artform (possibly surpassing literature by that point), especially among the less-advantaged groups. So revolutionizing them by the inclusion of sound was a fantastic achievement that Cocteau and his painting/sculpting/poetry writing contemporaries seized eagerly in effort to extend their own artistic exploration into new dimensions.
Even with all of its obtuse imagery, homo-eroticism, and deliberate "artiness," BLOOD remains a highly successful attempt to portray the interior of another sort of human mind in visual (and audible) terms. I don't watch it often, but I try to run my copy at least once a year just to take a respite from my own linear and self-involved life and peek into an existence that almost seems to belong to an entirely different species of being. It is a legitimate classic of the art of filmmaking. Steve.
I agree with mvance-1, Blood of the Poet is like a moveable art-gallery. It's really one of the first films that appeared a visual art-form as an untouchable existence. It's funny, this film also served me very well throughout years as a Muse or inspirational magnet of some kind for its potency waking up so many creative ideas in my head, well, as a matter of fact only Cocteau's works had this effect on me.
share[deleted]
Wish I could help, but the version I saw of this film was on a battered VHS tape that had awful sound and no English subtitles.
However, if you really are wanting an answer, check out the DVD of Cocteau's La Belle et La Bete. It includes a documentary that talks about ALL of Cocteau's films.
this film is reminiscent of silent surrealists like Luis Bunel and Salvador Dali's Un Chien Andalu and L'Age d'Or.
the dream imagery explores poetry and the creative process, as well as memory, death and rebirth in seperate fantasy sequences.
The more interesting vignette is when a gang of boys turn a snowball fight into a cruel war, and the audience gathers to witness the dead boy's resurrection.
Re: and the point is..?
There's no point. Or if there is a point, it's buried so deep in esoteric symbolism, abstract metaphor and supercilious hogwash that I doubt it's even worth talking about.
I love Jean Cocteau's writing. He's truly a master of words, plot, theme structure and meaning. I love his later works of film which reflect his literary background. But this visual frolic is simply an artist playing with a camera. I'm sick of pretentious film school nerds claiming this is the best movie ever and accusing nonbelievers (like me) of being uncultured buffoons. (Not that anyone here fits the snotty description; I'm just ranting in general.)
I'm relieved that this wasn't my 1st Cocteau film, otherwise I would have written him off completely. Luckily, I've already seen ORPHEE and BELLE, so I know the true masterpieces Cocteau is capable of creating. As others have said, this is just experimentation. Approach it the same way you'd approach the doodles on Da Vinci's desk blotter.
Only truthful way of interpreting it would be from Cocteau himself. Just looking at some of the techniques used to create the images (and keeping in mind it was 1930), I imagine cocteau went through alot to make sure his vision reached the screen. I've always felt that the film itself was meant to represent abstractly cocteau's own feelings about the artist as creator, while in itself being another whole creation from the artist.
Its shallow to take this film as meaningless. I'm not saying everyone should love it. Hate it if you want. But why can't those of us who enjoy it like this film without being pretentious A-holes? An elitest is someone who doesn't like others to have opinions outside their own.
Anyone & everyone is free to like this movie. My gripe is not about that. But what does irk me is when the pretentious A-holes claim that it's full of meaning and that I'm too stupid to understand. Again, I say that no one here is acting that way, but I've gotten that attitude from a lot of people at the "Chien Andalou" and "Age d'Or" boards (two other early surrealist films which are mostly--if not entirely--devoid of a central "point").
The original poster asked what the point is, and I believe the answer is that there is no point, or that the point is impressionistic, subjective and unclear. Perhaps it is indeed about the artist's abstract feelings, but if so, it is left vague. I believe, like you said, the greatest value of this film seems to lie in the techniques & visions invented Cocteau, which he would later use in his more lucid works Orphée and La Belle et la bête.
Maybe I didn't enjoy this film because I had seen those two already (several times over), and in comparison this was just an early sketch.
Well..i see this film as a visual explication of poetry itself and the inner world of a poet. Wee see that film begins with the collapsing chimney and ends with that same chimney collapsing compleatly. So all that we see in this film is taking place in those few seconds, but thats just hronological time, all the visual and narrative content in this film is about the inner time, the "time of dream" or "time of poetry". Its the same with dreams in everyday experience - when we are seeing a very narrative and dynamic dream, it seems that it lasts for a very long time, but objectively only few minutes have passed. So this could be the only solid structure in the film, because all the other qualitys referes to realm of intuition, association and subjectivity and they can`t be or there is no necesity for them to be somehow interpreted and they can be perceived with aesthetical pleasure.
sharetheres no pointWhen there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...
I thought it was silly. I'm sure you can interpret it all you want though.
share