The Blood Of A Poet

A poet’s mouth appears in the palm of his hand; he steps through a mirror and wanders the corridors of a mysterious hotel where each room is a private myth. Jean Cocteau’s first film — made the same year as his play La voix humaine — is a landmark of surrealist cinema: statues that live, a snowball fight that turns fatal, a card game with death, and the artist’s own blood offered up as spectacle. Neither a story nor a dream exactly, The Blood of a Poet is Cocteau inventing a language of images he would later refine in Orpheus and Testament of Orpheus. This presentation features 2026 English subtitles translated by Roger Avary.