The Blood of a Poet; The Testament of Orpheus

Poet/sculptor/painter cum filmmaker Jean Cocteau's semi-autobiographical trilogy--The Blood of a Poet, Orpheus, and The Testament of Orpheus--made over a 30-year period is an intermittently interesting collage of abstract imagery, literary conceits, and pure self-indulgence. Newly subtitled, the bookend films Blood and Testament are now being re-released, struck from pristine prints with crystal clear subtitles. The Blood of a Poet is the better of the pair. Inspired by the Dada movement of the 1920s, as well as the early surrealistic films of Luis Bunuel, the film features a young poet in conversation with first, himself (talking to a mouth that appears on his hand), and later, a statue. When the poet falls through a mirror, he finds himself in a hotel hallway, and in the film's best sequence, makes his way Spiderman-like along the wall from door to door. Other sketches deal with a boy killed in a snowball fight, a card game with Destiny, and a hermaphrodite. Cocteau's homoerotic and narcissistic obsessions are the primary focal points of each of the sketches, yet there is a genuine sense of innocent playfulness in Blood that is hard to resist. That playfulness would carry over to Orpheus (1949), the second film in the trilogy, but would become almost completely self-mocking in tone by the time of The Testament of Orpheus. Testament is a weak film, entirely self-referential (everything in the film refers to former works by or events in the life of Cocteau), that opens with an interesting rumination on the theme of time travel as Cocteau himself, playing "The Poet," meets a scientist at various times in his life who is perfecting a time-travel device (a kind of precursor to the Marty/Doc relationship in the Back to the Future series). But this theme dribbles away quickly, as "The Poet" is forced to stand before a tribunal for a lengthy and quite boring question and answer period, and then walks from scene to scene, encountering a good portion of the cast from Orpheus, various French artists, and even Yul Brynner. While serious students of Cocteau's work (Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus will do quite nicely for regular film-loving folk) would benefit from studying the opening and closing films from Cocteau's trilogy, most people are going to feel like they've got two pieces of bread, and will want to know "where's the beef?" The beef is in the middle film Orpheus. Universities will want to pick up these technically excellent versions of The Blood of a Poet and The Testament of Orpheus, but for public libraries these are not necessary purchases. (R. Pitman)