In section one, an artist sketches a face and is startled when its mouth starts moving. He rubs out the mouth, only to discover that it has transferred to the palm of his hand. After experimenting with the hand for a while and falling asleep, the artist awakens and places the mouth over the mouth of a female statue. In section two, the statue speaks to the artist, cajoling him into passing through a mirror.
Jean Cocteau's 1930 film 'The Blood of a Poet' is a surrealist film split up into four parts, but what do these parts mean?
The mirror links to a hotel and the artist peers through several keyholes, witnessing such people as an opium smoker and a hermaphrodite. The artist is handed a gun and a disembodied voice instructs him how to shoot himself in the head. He shoots himself but does not die. The artist cries out that he has seen enough and returns through the mirror.
He smashes the statue with a mallet. In the third section, some students are having a snowball fight. An older boy throws a snowball at a younger boy, but the snowball turns out to be a chunk of marble.
- 20 January 1932 () Running time. The furore caused the release of The Blood of a Poet to be delayed for more than a year.
- Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet. L'age D'or, released around the same time and both funded by Le Vicomte de Noailles, it was not released in Paris until 1932.
- The Blood of a Poet/Le Sang d’un po
The young boy dies from the impact. In the final section, a card shark plays a game with a woman on a table set up over the body of the dead boy. A theatre party looks on. The card shark extracts an Ace of Hearts from the dead boy's breast pocket. The boy's guardian angel appears and absorbs the dead boy. He also removes the Ace of Hearts from the card shark's hand and retreats up a flight of stairs and through a door. Realizing he has lost, the card shark commits suicide as the theatre party applauds.
The woman player transforms into the formerly smashed statue and walks off through the snow, leaving no footprints. In the film's final moments the statue is shown with a lyre. Intercut through the film, oneiric images appear, including spinning wire models of a human head and rotating double- sided masks.
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