Un Sang d'un Poete

Compared to Cornell's Rose Hobart, Jean Cocteau's, un Sang d'un Poete is a much more personal film, displaying a heterotopic space (Burgin), composed of the artist's own memory and experience. Although images are presented in a fragmented manner, the Cocteau's film appears less hypnotic than Cornell's since Cocteau provides a four section structure with accompanying titles: "The Wounded Hands or Scars of the Poet", "Do Walls Have Ears?", "The Snow Ball fight", "The Profanation of the Host". The narrator's words break up that hypnotic effect providing a foundation to which the audience might attempt to allegorise or attempt to make sense. This structure becomes problematic for Le Sang d'un poet in some ways contradicting Cocteau's quote that "a film is not a telling of a dream" .

The first and last part of the film appear the most absurd and abstract following the unexplantory logic of dreams. In the first the mouth of the painted portrait moves from the canvas to the artists hands. The latter depicts a woman, transforming into the statue of Orpheus similar to the one the poet smashes in the second section. Yet traces of Cocteau's experience of an artist are evident within these dream sequences. The poet becomes autobiographical figure of Cocteau who as an artist would no doubt have succumbed to the creative blocks and tortures of the artist. Similarly the transformation of the woman into god like figure of Orpheus, echoing the poet's death in part two, suggests the poet's desire to be immortalised as a great creative figure.

The middle section of the film in which the poet plunges into the mirror seems as if we travel with the poet into another dimension, a dream within a dream. Although quite surreal, these episodes aren't quite so random in so far as they tell of Cocteau's inspiration of an artist. Death seems to be a major theme in these two sections, the suicide death, and the accidental death in the boy in the snow, connects to Cocteau's personal childhood, for its difficult not to separate the man's suicide, with Cocteau's loss of his own father at a young age. Similarly the slowness of the action in the snowball fight imbues the incident with great pathos, almost as if Cocteau tells us an episode from his own childhood (except of course he doesn't die like the boy) When I saw this, it reminded me of other Modernists artists who had interwoven the stories of childhood into their art, in particular novelists like James Joyce in his partially autobiographical novel, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and W Somerset Maughn in Of Human Bondage. The slowness of both two sections, in particular the snow section, make these episodes appear less dream like, less hypnotic, they seem more like accounts of Cocteau telling the viewer his childhood life, the doorways like passages into his personal history telling of his past desires, delinquency as a teenage boy and personal loss.

So although the film attempts to mimic a dream like logic, Cocteau perhaps unintentionally interweaves his own personal dream into this film, for some of the best films, art and novels derive from an artist's own experience of life. Indeed even Freud wrote an essay on un Sang d'un Poete. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find a copy of, however, I can imagine the contents of this film, are brimmed with symbols and events for which Freud would be able to psychoanalyse.