Le Sang D’un Poète by Jean Cocteau

In Burgin’s article titled ‘The Remembered Film’, the concept of a cinematic heterotopia is proposed. Foucault’s idea of a heterotopic space is the place of otherness; a place that is both mental and physical. There is also a mentioning of inner speech; a sort of language we speak in our minds. Thoughts we have in our minds are like words which are then produced into images. These ideas are invariably linked to the aesthetic appeal of Cocteau’s film Le Sang D’un Poète (1930).

The film’s purpose is to illustrate the blood or pain of a poet which is done so through visual imagery. Like any poem, an arrangement of abstract ideas in structured phrases, the film successfully manifests this through its visual medium. Cocteau puts it best in the film as he describes it as “…a realistic documentary of unreal events”. Obviously not a linear narrative, Le Sang D’un Poète is non-sequential, it is a series of disjointed surrealist imagery assembled around the main theme of the blood of a poet.

The film is permeated with the juxtaposition of ‘real things’ to symbolic imagery. We see statues coming to life, mirrors as portals to other spaces and so on. The first scene depicts a poet painting on a translucent canvas that symbolizes a screen; a cinematic screen onto which the poet draws a picture of himself, inviting the audience into his mind. Following on from the idea of heterotopia, we as an audience disconnect from the real world inhabiting a space behind the screen – we get lost within whatever is shown on the screen. Cocteau himself described his film as "a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body” (http://www.netcomuk.co.uk/~lenin/jean_cocteau_boap.html).

My experience watching the film, Le Sang D’un Poète by Cocteau, was like watching visual poetry. Like any avante-garde film, the film deviates from traditional film making. I’m normally not a fan of avant-garde film, primarily because of the fact that I struggle to make any sense of it. However, after watching this film I discovered that in order to get the most out of it was to respond to it as a collection images and not as a conventional narrative. Similar to viewing a collage, we look at the images as an assemblage of images that constitute a new whole. As in the film, each scene stands on its own independently of the others that constitute the film’s purpose.

Dubbed the forerunner of experimental film, Cocteau’s film reminded me a lot of the independent, art house films that are in circulation today. A film like Donnie Darko (2001) comes to mind which that had me befuddled throughout the whole movie but despite its unusualness, it generated quite a large cult following. Upon retrospect, it’s no wonder Le Sang D’un Poete paved the way for independent films of today.