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The Blood of a Poet

1932 [FRENCH]

Action / Fantasy

13
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh95%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright85%
IMDb Rating7.3106815

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Plot summary


Uploaded by: FREEMAN

Director

Top cast

720p.BLU 1080p.BLU
433.32 MB
860*720
French 2.0
NR
24 fps
12 hr 0 min
P/S 2 / 2
796.06 MB
1280*1072
French 2.0
NR
24 fps
12 hr 0 min
P/S 0 / 4

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by MartinHafer2 / 10

looks like a home movie made with an 8mm camera!

I LOVED Orpheus and Beauty and the Beast--both Jean Cocteau masterpieces. However, this "movie" doesn't really appear to be a movie at all, but looks like a lot of little skits Cocteau created to amuse his friends--sort of like performance art, not cinema. There is absolutely no coherence whatsoever or theme. And this is NOT just because he adored surrealism. You can have surrealism in a movie provided it's not just bits and pieces of celluloid pasted together--which is what this is.

Maybe this film would have best been shown at some gallery where they have "new wave" art. I could see people looking at jars of placentas, cow excrement statues, a yodeling woman standing in a bucket of Jello and this film being played all at the same time. That's the sort of reason I could see for making the movie.

Many of the segments in the film were just camera tricks Cocteau was working on as an experiment. With MOST directors, the tricks and home movies they make do not make it to the cinema--but for some odd reason this did. They are sometimes COOL camera tricks, but that's all--I certainly would NOT want to pay to rent or to go see his little experiments. The only good from this mess I can see is that some of the tricks he used later appeared in much more polished form in Orpheus--such as running the film backwards or building rooms that were upside down or sideways. Cool tricks, but that's all. Watching this film is like staring at rough drawings that will be used for set designs or matte paintings--interesting but only a tiny piece of a whole movie.

So, it's pretty much a waste of time to see this, though I guess it is interesting to see a few statues come to life, the man wipe the smile from the painting and it becomes ALIVE and stuck on his hand, AND you get to see a couple people blow their brains out--complete with copious amounts of blood! If this ain't performance art, I don't know what is!

Reviewed by gridoon20215 / 10

Far below Bunuel's work in a similar vein at the same time

I watched "Blood Of A Poet" right after Bunuel's (and Dali's) "Un Chien Andalou" and "L'Age D'Or"; it comes a distant third. It is totally inaccessible (whereas Bunuel's films are equally bizarre but I felt like I was connecting some dots - if perhaps not in the ways that he would have wanted me to!),and pompously self-important (whereas the others are generally playful). It is also blatantly homoerotic - fixated on two strapping, muscular, bare-chested men, one white, one black (not saying that's a good or a bad thing, but it's definitely there). Some impressive photographic tricks cannot sustain even 50 minutes. I didn't understand this film, it didn't make me feel anything, and it didn't entertain me; I gave it a second try, and I liked it even less! But hey, art is subjective, maybe others will get something out of it that I missed (twice). ** out of 4.

Reviewed by Nazi_Fighter_David8 / 10

"A realistic documentary of unreal events!"

In film, Jean Cocteau found the perfect medium to portray his own personal mythology… Though his involvement in cinema was uneven, spasmodic and largely undertaken during later life, his fantastic images, well-meaning amateurism and continuous self-preoccupation were inspirational to the avant-garde and underground…

By 1930, when Cocteau made his first film, he was already an established poet, novelist, dramatist and artist… "Le Sang d'un poète" (The Blood of a Poet) was a characteristically romantic portrait of the artist structured as a surreal succession of images centered on a private mythology: desiring immortality, the poet, martyr to creativity, must first pass through a mirror into a deathly private dream-world… Financed, like "L'Age d'Or," by the Vicomte de Noailles, its indulgent celebration of artists in general (and, therefore, Cocteau in particular) makes it inferior to Buñuel's film, but its strong, bizarre symbolism is often alarming…

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