Blood of a Poet (1930, Jean Cocteau)
Under an hour long and just packed full of goodies. No reason not to watch this all the time.
Poet grows a mouth on his hand, transfers it to an armless statue, awakening her. She traps him in the room but he escapes through the mirror into a Cocteau Crooked Hallway™ where he peeps through some keyholes seeing drugs and death and poetry. Later a boy is knocked down by a snowball and left bleeding while the poet and the statue woman play cards. Then some Cocteau Mysterious Poetic Stuff™ floats the film to a close.
Dargelos and the Killer Snowball:
The scene below was originally shot with the Viscount who financed the film and his wife, for whom the film was some kind of birthday present. Cocteau: “But when their families saw that they were applauding a suicide, they forbade it. We had to reshoot the scene of the loges with extras.” The real Viscount fled Paris for a while and delayed the release of “Blood of a Poet” for over a year while the furor from the Viscount’s other production, Bunuel’s “L’Age d’Or” cooled down.
Cocteau calls the movie “a disturbing series of voyeuristic tableaux, 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.”
Ebert calls Cocteau’s “Testament of Orpheus” minor, and “Les Parents Terribles” a masterpiece. Of course I’ll have to watch both of them again.
Tags: 1930's, Criterion, Jean Cocteau, silent