Poet and painter Jean Cocteau made his first significant foray into filmmaking with this surrealist burst of artistic angst, to be followed by Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus, and Testament of Orpheus, among others. The Blood of a Poet centers on an artist (Enrique Rivero) who wipes off the mouth he has painted on his canvas, only to have it come to life on his hand. Things become stranger from there, including a classical statue that gains consciousness (model and photographer Lee Miller), as well as the artist’s disappearance into a mirror, where the halls of a hotel seemingly ignore the laws of gravity (Rivero displays a dancer’s sense of grace navigating the space). Closely following Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, The Blood of a Poet is startling in its experimentation, if a bit more literal and self-importantly grandiose in its declarations. (“Nothing but blood and tears…” an early title says of the artistic life.) Still, this is a key title in the Surrealist cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, paving the way for the likes of everyone from Maya Deren (Meshes of the Afternoon) to David Lynch (Eraserhead).
(9/26/2026)
