The Blood of a Poet (1930)
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94% of critics liked it
(16 reviews) -
82% of users liked it
(2,777 ratings)
In the first of this film's four episodes, a tall smokestack starts to collapse. Then the scene shifts to a young poet who is sketching faces. He sees that a sketch's mouth is moving and wipes it off with his hand; the mouth attaches itself to his palm. Eventually he transfers the mouth to a… More In the first of this film's four episodes, a tall smokestack starts to collapse. Then the scene shifts to a young poet who is sketching faces. He sees that a sketch's mouth is moving and wipes it off with his hand; the mouth attaches itself to his palm. Eventually he transfers the mouth to a statue in his room. In the second episode, the statue tells the poet to enter a mirror. He falls into the darkness of the mirror's interior and finds himself at the Hotel de Folies-Dramatiques. The poet crawls along the hallway and peers into the keyholes, where he sees various bizarre situations. He reaches the end of the hallway, someone hands him a gun, and he shoots himself. The poet returns to his room and smashes the statue; then he becomes a statue himself in a courtyard. In the third episode, a group of boys engage in a snowfight in the courtyard. The statue is destroyed and one boy is left bloody and possibly dead after being hit with a snowball. In the final episode, the courtyard is revealed to be a stage on which a young woman and the poet play cards next to the boy's body, which is still lying on the ground. The woman tells the poet that he is lost without the Ace; he takes the card from the boy's jacket. The boy's guardian angel appears and covers him. He takes the Ace from the poet and leaves; the poet shoots himself in the head and the audience applauds. The woman walks away and it is revealed that she is the statue; then the film ends with the final collapse of the tall smokestack. ~ Todd Kristel, Rovi
- Directed By
- Jean Cocteau
- Written By
- Jean Cocteau
- Genres
- Drama, Musical & Performing Arts, Art House & International, Science Fiction & Fantasy, Special Interest
Unrated,
- In Theaters
- Jan 1, 1930 Wide
- Studio
- Home Vision Entertainment
Critic Reviews
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Variety Staff, Variety
On the face of it, this film represents six reels of scraped together footage from off the cutting room floor. A more vague or hopeless mess could not have resulted.
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Derek Adams, Time Out
The honesty and robustness of the images prevents the movie from lapsing into pretension or preciousness; it remains extremely interesting as a source of Cocteau's later work.
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Fernando F. Croce, CinePassion
Cocteau approaches cinema as a parlor riddle, a hermaphroditic catalogue, the ultimate medium for the aesthete's search for the ineffable and the sublime
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, TV Guide's Movie Guide
A haunting poem, as exciting today as it was in 1930.
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Jeffrey M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid
Cocteau's film contains unforgettable moments of cinematic poetry in its purest form.
See more critic ratings and reviews on Rotten Tomatoes
Fresh (60% or more critics rated the movie positively)
Rotten (59% or fewer critics rated the movie positively)
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Cast
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Lee Miller
as The Statue
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Pauline Carton
as Child's Tutor
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Féral Benga
as Black Angel
- Odette Talazac
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Enrique Rivero
as The Poet
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Jean Desbordes
as Louis XV masked
- Fernand Dichamps
- Lucien Jager
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Barbette
as Woman in Box/at Balcony
- Jean Cocteau
- Elizabeth Lee Miller
