Product Details

• Actors: Barbette, Féral Benga, Pauline Carton, Jean Desbordes, Fernand Dichamps
• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Language: French
• Subtitles: English
• Rating: Unrated
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Hollywood Select Video
• VHS Release Date: July 15, 1994
• Run Time: 55 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6303184057
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #49,422 in Video (See Bestsellers in Video)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

"A realistic documentary of unreal situations" reads the introductory card of Jean Cocteau's debut film, which recalls the work of the silent surrealists (notably Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un Chien Andalou and L'Âge d'Or). Cocteau uses dream imagery to explore poetry, artistic creation, memory, death, and rebirth in four separate fantasy sequences. In the first scene, an artist confronts his creations when they take on a life of their own. In the second, he dives through a mirror (a primitive but startling effect Cocteau refines for Orpheus) and into a skewed hall where every door reveals a fantastic dream scene. The third sequence finds a gang of boys turning a snowball fight into a cruel war, and in the last an audience gathers to witness a dead boy's resurrection amidst a strange card game. These descriptions do little to communicate the poetry of each segment, which rely on creative imagery to create meaning not in stories but in symbols and metaphors. Cocteau's realization is often stiff and stilted, the work of a visual artist transforming still images into an medium that moves through time, but it's never less than beautiful and evocative. Cocteau returned to many of the same themes in Orpheus and The Testament of Orpheus. --Sean Axmaker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Poor quality edition, January 17, 2000

By A Customer

The particular edition I have seen (Timeless Video) is unwatchable. Apparently they recorded it from a television broadcast. After the first 23 minutes of this 55 minute feature, the top half of the screen is occupied by VCR data.

The movie itself is Cocteau's first effort, and the half I was able to see in this edition is a bit primitive, though one already sees visual themes used to great effect in Orpheus.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars hauntingly beautiful, richly chaotic imagery--first rate, November 4, 2001

By	J from NY (New York) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

i may dislike cocteau's literature, but i'm a fanatic when it comes to his work in film. "blood of a poet" is such a gem that it almost makes up for the instinctual dislike and boredom i feel when reading his poetry and essays. from start to finish this masterpiece will fascinate and hypnotize the lover of surrealist art, and also lovers of film as a whole. the image i most love from this movie is the armless greek statue with a superimposed mouth on it's face. it is, of course, useless to try to interpret intellectually and it doesn't have a 'meaning' rationally, (at least to the viewer), but don't dismiss it as nonsense for this reason. revilers of surrealism don't seem to understand that art is the beauty of the irrational, NOT, as the classicists believe, an expression of excellence or perfection through order. the appeal of this movie lies in it's appeal to the dionysian, primal side of our aesthetic organ. sheer genius on the part of cocteau the like of which we may never be fortunate enough to see again in this age of multi million dollar special effects-corporate (...) festivals.