A poet's blood

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Movie
German title A poet's blood
Original title Le Sang d'un poète
Country of production France
original language French
Publishing year 1930
length 52 (German version) 49 (French version), 55 (English version) minutes
Rod
Director Jean Cocteau
script Jean Cocteau
production Count Charles de Noailles
music Georges Auric
camera Georges Périnal
cut Jean Cocteau
occupation

and Odette Talazac , Fernand Dichamps , Lucien Jager , Barbette

chronology

Successor  →
Orpheus

A Poet's Blood is a medium-length, experimental, French feature film from 1930 directed by Jean Cocteau .

action

The film is divided into several sections.

The sequence of scenes begins with a factory chimney just before it collapses. You can see the room of the poet who tries to be a draftsman. He sketches, with a bare upper body and a blonde wig, a head whose mouth suddenly comes to life. Immediately he wipes that mouth away. When the poet washes his hands, the same mouth opens on his right palm. The poet looks spellbound at this mouth and tries desperately to shake off this foreign body. When he fails to do this, he falls asleep. Awakened again, the poet went to an armless statue in his room and pressed his hand to the statue's lips with his mouth. The white marble then comes to life and prompts the poet to jump into a mirror.

After this jump he ends up in the corridor of a hotel. The poet peers through the keyholes of individual room doors. There he sees strange scenes one after the other: a political execution in Mexico, a shadow play, a harsh woman who harassed a child hung with numerous bells with her knuckle, whereupon the child makes the viewer a long nose, and a surreal arrangement with a hermaphrodite , a sofa and a hypnotizing rotating turntable. At the end of the corridor, a hand hands the poet a revolver. He shoots himself in the head with a weapon, is then crowned with a laurel wreath worthy of a poet prince, but immediately awakens to new life and angrily tears the wreath down. He then runs back to the statue and smashes it with a hammer.

New scenery: Children play and have a snowball fight in front of another statue, this time sitting. This statue is destroyed in the process. More snowballs are formed from the remains and thrown at one of the boys. He then falls to the floor bleeding and is dead. This arrangement becomes part of a theater performance in which the poet plays cards with a woman. A man in Rococo outfit watches them from the background. Well-dressed gentlemen take their seats as spectators in the boxes. The poet takes a heart playing card from the chest pocket of the dead boy, where his heart is, which is also his trump card. A black angel descends the steps and covers the body of the dead boy. Then it suddenly disappears. The black angel also climbs the stairs again. When the poet sees the game lost, he shoots himself again. Blood oozes from the pentagram- shaped wound on the temple. The audience gave frenetic applause.

The card player gets up, takes on statuesque features and leaves. Finally she stands next to a bull draped with scraps of map. Then the woman who has become a statue mutates into a drawing and lies next to a lute and a globe draped on the floor. The last scene shows how the factory chimney presented at the beginning finally collapses.

Production notes

The Blood of a Poet , Jean Cocteau's first publicly shown feature film, was filmed largely silent in 1930 and was probably shown for the first time in the same year. However, the IMDb names January 20, 1932 as the Paris premiere date. In Germany, the film was shown on ARD for the first time after the Second World War on November 18, 1963.

Cocteau's patron, Count de Noailles, who was as art-loving as he was promoting, contributed one million francs for the production of the film and is officially listed as the producer of the film. The film structures were created by Jean d'Eaubonne , Louis Page assisted head cameraman Georges Périnal .

Reviews

Reclam's guide wrote: “The original plan was to make a drawing film; Cocteau then suggested making a "real" film that would be "as free as a drawing film". The result was a film full of poetic ideas, bizarre contradictions, paradoxical inventions, of which a summary table of contents gives only an inadequate impression. Cocteau called his film "a realistic documentary about unreal events". He emphasized the dreamlike, unreal, by starting and ending the film with images of a collapsing factory chimney, so that its “subjective” duration is reduced to fractions of a second. Cocteau was certainly concerned with the situation of the poet, to whom his vocation (mouth) clings like a wound, like a flaw, who cheats his own childhood for success, whose death is applauded by the audience, etc. Many thematic and optical motifs of the Films return later in Orphée . "

In Kay Weniger's Das Großes Personenlexikon the film is called “His“ The Blood of a Poet ”, in which the focus is less on the content than on the form, which floats between reality and surreality, is considered the main work of surrealism, in its comprehensive originality at best comparable with Luis Buñuel's two early works " An Andalusian Dog " and " The Golden Age ". "

Georges Sadoul wrote: “The film “ Le Sang d'un Poète ” (The Blood of a Poet), in which Jean Cocteau is influenced by surrealism, cannot be called surrealist, but the film, which deals with the author's traditional themes with virtuosity, is different. The subtle film, perfectly formed to the point of manner, is full of feelings of emotion about students in capes, admiration for angelic youths and ephepic heroes, the precious pleasure in the mendacious and artificial. It is the work of a skilful amuseur who was content with himself and the world at the time. A patron, Victomte de Noailles, had commissioned the film as well as Bunuel's subsequent work, "L'âge d'or" . "

The Lexicon of International Films found: “First film work by the French writer Jean Cocteau, who uses the medium's poetic and trick-technical possibilities in a virtuoso and playful manner. Together with Buñuel “The Golden Age” and “An Andalusian Dog” the outstanding work of the surrealist avant-garde in France in the late 20s. "

Jerzy Toeplitz writes in his history of the film: “This film is still part of the repertoire of specialty cinemas and film clubs. Cocteau intended to polemicize the philosophy and aesthetics of the Surrealists in his first film intended for the public. He was of the opinion that art is not called to address the world and people, but to solve its own internal conflicts. (...) The film A Poet's Blood has no fable; rather it is an inner adventure, a metaphysical observation of the author of himself. "

For Bucher's encyclopedia of the film, The Blood of a Poet was "an allegorical fantasy film."

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reclams Filmführer, by Dieter Krusche, collaboration: Jürgen Labenski. P. 509. Stuttgart 1973.
  2. ↑ Kay Less : The film's great personal dictionary . The actors, directors, cameramen, producers, composers, screenwriters, film architects, outfitters, costume designers, editors, sound engineers, make-up artists and special effects designers of the 20th century. Volume 2: C - F. John Paddy Carstairs - Peter Fritz. Schwarzkopf & Schwarzkopf, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89602-340-3 , p. 111.
  3. ^ Georges Sadoul: History of the cinematic art. Vienna 1957, p. 196
  4. ↑ Klaus Brüne (Red.): Lexicon of International Films, Volume 1, p. 380. Reinbek near Hamburg 1987.
  5. ^ History of the film, Volume 2, 1928–1933, Ostberlin 1976, p. 96
  6. ↑ Bucher's Encyclopedia of Films, Verlag CJ Bucher, Lucerne and Frankfurt / M. 1977, p. 675.

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