Blood of the Poet (1930)

The Blood of A Poet from UMSchoolOfCommunication on Vimeo.

There has never been a film like Le Sang d'un Poete (Blood of a Poet). It was not only the first film made by Cocteau, one that ignited another satisfying scandal, but it brought all his diverse talents into focus in a medium that was new to him. The work represents an aesthetic milestone in Cocteau's career.
The idea of a film had its germination during a house party given by Charles and Marie-Laure de Noailles at Hyeres in 1929. Georges Auric, Cocteau's lifelong musical collaborator, surprised his hosts by announcing that he wanted to compose the score for an animated cartoon. Cocteau was asked on the spot to provide a scenario. After some discussion, the Noailles agreed to give Cocteau a million francs to make a real film with a score by Auric. This became The Blood of a Poet, still one of the most widely viewed of all Cocteau's screenworks. Cocteau described its disturbing series of voyeuristic tableaux 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."
Technically, The Blood of a Poet reflects Cocteau's trials and errors as a novice filmmaker who had to turn irreversible mistakes to his advantage and improvise every celluloid foot of the way. During shooting, he used the dust raised by studio cleaning men to enhance the mysterious atmosphere of the final scenes. Special weightless effects were obtained by camera trickery to show the little girl flying up to the ceiling and the poet moving painfully along the corridor wall. Once Cocteau discovered that he could turn shooting disasters into happy accidents, he was off on a career of making films that carried his cachet of surprises: the miraculous mirror and mercury scene in Orphee, he live arms holding candlebra from he walls of La Belle et la Bete, and the accelerated time sequences of flowers opening in Le Testament d'Orphee are only a few of his trucs.