Le Sang d'un Poète - Jean Cocteau

Why start off a survey of modernist cinema with surrealism or, more specifically, Jean Cocteau’s Le Sang d'un Poète? Well, arguably, the reality-destabilising challenges to accepted modes of perception and expression posed by the melting clocks, exquisite corpses and fur-covered cutlery of Breton and the like appear to prompt a more open mind-set for approaching film. This is of particular use to a contemporary film student considering that, as Victor Burgin notes in The Remembered Film, one’s experience of cinema is not restricted to a one-way exchange of meaning from screen to audience but is dynamically heterotopic, encompassing everything from the film’s promotional materials to personal memories and associations.*

Consequently, though I found Cocteau’s stubbornly deliberate refusal to privilege any reading of the film and rejection of linear narrative in favour of provocative, disturbing and unexpected audio-visual juxtapositions unnerving, frustratingly pretentious and often unintelligible in any conventional sense, these same attributes struck me as not only strangely amusing but also quite liberating in the sense that any expectations of what a film should be go straight out the window, leaving you to your own innate interpretive devices.

For instance, are the images of the collapsing factory chimney that bookend the film merely a repetition emphasising the circularity of the themes and the unity of the otherwise disjointed mise-en-scene? Or do they imply that the action which passed between their appearances occurred in the split-second it took for the collapse to take place, disrupting the link between space and time? In any case, it is not really the meaning but the interrogative experience encountered that matters.

One of the things I enjoyed most about Le Sang… was the manner in which Cocteau playfully took advantage of the lee-way accorded to amateurs in his use of numerous clever, self-consciously experimental yet stagy and obvious film tricks, inadvertently (or perhaps deliberately?) drawing attention to film as a tool for creating evocative, highly poeticised images. For instance, scenery is constructed on the floor and then filmed from above to enable the characters to appear magnetically pulled along, inextricably attracted to, or levitating against the walls but the trick is used so frequently and for such long periods that one’s initial reaction of awe is demystified when given too much time to grasp the mechanics behind it.

Cocteau also seems to acknowledge film as an unpredictable, independently creative element beyond his control in a signed note displayed onscreen in his own handwriting that reads ‘I got caught in a trap by my own film.’ Indeed, the suitable haziness of the snowball episode was in fact created by the chance combination of cleaners sweeping the set and the camera’s mechanical ability to select, distort and modify.**

Of course, the note can also be interpreted as referring to the reoccurring theme or motif in Le Sang… of the poet-artiste’s creative processes as based on both self-inflicted suffering for one’s art (consider the poet-protagonist’s irresistible urge to gaze voyeuristically through the hotel-room key holes only to find decidedly sado-masochistic scenes; the suicide of the card-player when he is caught and exposed for the unoriginal act of cheating, etc) and punishment by Art itself for even attempting to produce it (consider the statue exiling the poet-artiste through the mirror; the chunk of statue concealed in the snowball that kills the boy, etc).

In line with modernism's tendency to rework and interrogate past movements, this strongly recalls Romanticism’s preoccupation with the inevitable failure of the poet-artist who though uniquely able to commune with the simultaneous beauty and ferocity of the Sublime, is incapable of recapturing the experience exactly in art form and thus ultimately doomed to a lifetime of underachievement and unwanted solitude. Given that the movie camera is basically an extension of the filmaker's eye, would the Romantics' dilemma have been solved if they had had such technology?

Speaking of solitude, my conflicted but rewarding experience was seemingly heightened by the fact that watching Le Sang… alone in the library prevented me from looking to the facial expressions and comments of others for reassurances that I was “getting” what was happening on screen. Was it any different watching it in a group?


* Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film, London, Reaktion Books, 2004, 7-28.
** Jean Cocteau Films: The Blood of the Poet, http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~lenin/jean_cocteau_boap.html, (Accessed 13 August 2007).