Blood of a Poet, The (1930) *** (out of 4) The first film in director Jean Cocteau's "Orphic" trilogy is clearly a very personal film, which means that the director knows what it's about while the viewer simply has to guess what it means. There's not any "plot" to speak of but instead we're treated to just over 50-minutes worth of images ranging from snow ball fights to a man shooting himself to countless other images, which are supposed to be taking part during the time it takes for a chimney to fall to the ground. There's no question that this film is full of surreal images and many people are going to watch this film and see nothing more than a lot of images thrown together without any rhyme or reason as to why they're being shown. I'm sure some people would like to unlock the mysteries behind the stories and will rack their brains trying to figure out what the director meant by each frame in the picture. I personally never put too much into a film like this where it's clear the director doesn't want to viewer to know what's going on. I'm sure Cocteau could explain each second of this film in full detail but as a viewer I really wasn't trying to figure out what was going on but instead just sit back and enjoy what I was seeing. I thought the first forty-minutes of this movie was extremely entertaining with many of the images really jumping out of me. My favorite sequence was the one where a man is ordered to put a gun to his temple and pull the trigger. What happens next is something I won't spoil in detail but the aftermath of the gunshot was quite creative. Another nice scene is when an artist goes "into" a mirror only to splash into some water instead. Many of these early images are shown in a wide range of ways and this really adds to the surreal nature of the picture. The final ten-minutes or so is where I started to get bored as the final act didn't strike me as being nearly as well-made or interesting. I wouldn't rank this film as a masterpiece and I wouldn't rank it up against the work of Luis Bunuel but on its own it's still a rather impressive little film but, again, I wouldn't try figuring it out.

While Bunuel's bitingly critical and ironically distanced surrealism is masterful in its own right, Cocteau opts for a highly personal, self-reflexive, distinctly poetic way to entrance the viewer's subconscious.To grasp concrete meaning while watching this beautiful fleeting cinematic poem would be as futile as hammering a nail into a drop of water. Surely, its main concern is the fragile and, to be honest, quite vain self-image of the artist in a material world with all its obstacles. But closer interpretations wouldn't befit an enigmatic pic as this.9 out of 10 collapsing chimneys

This film is brilliant, but I do wish people would stop calling it a surrealist masterpiece! Cocteau was NOT a part of the surrealist movement - in fact the surrealists, especially Andre Breton, the founder of surrealism - hated him. I think it was Breton who said that Blood of a Poet was 'a bad copy of a surrealist film' (or words to that effect). And Cocteau never thought of himself as a surrealist.Obviously, the word surrealism now is applied to anything strange, weird, wacky etc. But I think you do need to be accurate when discussing art that was made at a time when surrealism was a specific, and new, movement!

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!