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.
The Blood of a Poet(Le Sang d'un poète)
✭ ✭ ✭ Read critic reviews
France · 1932
55m
Director Jean Cocteau
Starring Enrique Rivero, Elizabeth Lee Miller, Pauline Carton, Odette Talazac
Genre Fantasy
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The first part of Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy. Told in four episodes, an unnamed artist is transported through a mirror into another dimension, where he travels through various bizarre scenarios. The surreal film explores the relationships between artists, dreams, and reality.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
Despite its flaws, the film remains a fascinating souvenir of a vanished avant-garde.
Cocteau has produced a bizarre, interesting although at times tedious movie.
As a groundbreaking examination of the reality-bending potential of film, it's of a piece with Un Chien Andalou and L'Age D'Or.
The A.V. Club by Mike D'Angelo
Few drug-induced visions, however, can match the playful ingenuity of this freewheeling assault on the senses, which eschews conventional narrative in favor of one mesmerizingly bizarre image after another.
The New Yorker by Pauline Kael
The first time you see this film, you're likely to find it silly, autoerotic, static, absurd, and you may feel cheated after having heard so much about it. But though it may seem to have no depth, you're not likely to forget it -- it has a suggestiveness unlike any other film.
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