Le Sang d'un Poet (The Blood of a Poet) (詩人之逝)

Le Sang d'un Poet (The Blood of a Poet) (1930) is another film I saw as part of the Le French Mai this year. In many ways, it's a very unusual film:  it's old, in black and white, has some bizarre drawings and jerky photographic images and treats of some very uncommercial themes, done in some formalistic and certainly very innovative ways. It's directed by the famous French poet and novelist, painter, stage designer, actor and director Jean Cocteau. it forms part of an Orphic trilogy including Orphée (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).

This film unrolls in four parts. In the first, a bare chested male artist wearing an 18th century wig, enclosed within the four walls of an empty room, sketches a face of a woman, then her mouth, studies it, absorbed but before long, it starts moving. He tries to rub it off with his hands when another man also in a powdered wig, arrives to deliver him something but after the man leaves,the artist discovers that the mouth has become embedded in the palm of his hands. He tries to wash it off in a basin of water, like Macbeth, but cannot. The artist hands and then feet appear through first one and then another hole in a painting .After a while, he falls asleep. When he wakes up, he goes to a marble statue of a woman and places his hands over her mouth and learns to his great delight that the mouth on his palm has finally agreed to leave it and to reattach itself to another of his own artistic creation, a marble statue of a woman and after that the mouth begins talking.

In part two of the film, the statue begins to talk. He's urged to walk through a mirror and to try look at what he'd find through that mirror. He does and finds himself in a hotel corridor with a number of closed doors. He tries to open the door but cannot but when he leaves, he is unable to, as if his hands and feet were drawn towards the walls of the room like magnet in contact with iron walls. He peeps through several keyholes of the hotel room doors and sees an opium smoker and a hermaphrodite. He's given a gun and a voice directs him to shoot himself. He does so but does not die. He feels he's had enough, returns through the mirror and smashes the statue with a hammer. .

In part 3 of the film, we see some teenage students having a snowball fight. Thinking that he's throwing a snowball when it is in fact a chunk of marble, an older boy kills a younger one. Is the marble a piece broken off from the smashed statue of the female statue?

In the final section of the film, the artist was playing a card game on a table in a court yard over the body of the dead teenager, He was being watched over by a masked man in 18th century costume behind the midpoint of a table with apparent interest amidst the bitter cold of the snow in that courtyard and higher up by certain wealthy ladies or even perhaps a royalty on what looks like two box seats in an opera house. The woman, which looks like the smashed statue, tells him he would lose unless he got an ace of heart. The man steals an ace from the breast pocket of blazer of the dead teenager. Then the teenager's black guardian angel appears and takes back that card from the man's hands also the dead body of the boy and then leaves through the flight of steps by which he came and disappears behind the door from which he originally emerged. Realizing he has lost, the man takes out a revolver and shoots himself. The spectators on the balcony then applaud and the woman walks through the snow, leaving no footprints and turns back into the smashed statue and then into a female figure with a lyre, the traditional symbol of lyrical poetry and later, of poets in general, to her right in a drawing, The film ends.

It's a most peculiar film. Is Cocteau telling a moral tale with surrealistic and expressionist techniques, deliberately blurring the boundaries of reality and fiction, life and art, death and  life, Thanatos and Eros, appearance and "truth", surface and depth, the conflict between survival and conscience, creation and destruction, chance and destiny? Is he trying to deal with the adventures of the human psyche? Is he trying to tell us something of the functioning of certain unconscious forces pushing us in certain directions, following its own dream logic? Is he making some oblique reference to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland? Is he trying to explore the difference between sense and nonsense? Is he suggesting that that everything is a spectacle? Is the cloth folding over the couch the fold of art over the psychoanalyst's couch to illuminate it a little, like the little stars surrounding the human figure in the ? Are the hands and feet of the artist which emerge from behind the couch the symbolic "action" of art upon the psychic reality of the artists "true" situation?   Do we shape our life by certain images or is it the other way round? The film starts with a drawing and ends with a drawing, passing through images of a statue which starts talking and moving and ends with the same statue and/or drawing sealed in silence. Is he exploring the process of artistic creation itself? In the same way that his hand is the instrument of his artistic expression, is the mouth of the woman he sketches not an instrument of the expression or the "articulation" of art itself? Is he dealing with the paradoxes of art and/or life itself? Is he exploring the relations between interior content and external form, of reference and expression? Is form the materialisation of expression itself, with nothing deeper than the surface of that form of artistic expression itself? There is an image of a vortex at the start of the film upon what looks like the cloth of stage magicians with stars etc, spiralling outwards from an invisible point at its centre, which evolves into a line which makes itself progressively visible in ever bigger spirals in white against a background of blackness until the last one merges from the foreground into the surrounding blackness of the background again:emerging from one kind of  invisible darkness, the obscurity of nothingness at its centre morphing and merging into to another kind of obscurity of mystery of nothingness, the totality of that image, as part of a drawing being folded onto the image of the artificial cinema screen? From silence to voice, back to silence through action? From two dimensions to three and then back to two? From the hand, to the eye, to psyche, through certain masks, cloaks or clothes over the naked body of the artist, through a mirror and a door,to certain visible products of art, to life and back? Is he suggesting that after its creation, the art work will take on an independent life of its own, no longer subject to the control of the artist and on the contrary, becoming something which turns back to mesmerize the mind and the heart of the artist himself and perhaps to torture him until he dies?