Le Sang dun Pote (1930)
Posted by Aspasia Stephanou on July 30, 2009 in Blog tagged withLe Sang d’un Poète (The Blood of a Poet) was the first film made by poet, playwright, novelist, painter,actor, set designer and film director Jean Cocteau in 1930. The film is a series of events, centred around a painter’s consciousness of the creative process and its agonizing effects on the poet/artist. The visual experiments of Cocteau gain a dark, surrealistic quality by the use of uncanny animation of body parts, such as the talking mouth of a painted face on a canvas or the animated sculpture that instructs the painter to plunge into a mirror- the world on the other side where dreams construct and deconstruct the creative process.
Of course the mirror here becomes a symbol of reality, of the illusion of representation and the surrealists’ obsession with imagination and dreams. At the same time it questions the narcissistic world of the artist and presents the fear of a fragmented self.
Inside the dark world where the poet plunges himself, he witnesses through a keyhole strange and nightmarish events, one of these being the figure of a mother whipping her little girl, while the child levitates up over the fireplace. For Cocteau the unexplicable and strange events signify that creativity and art, which are to be found in the underworld or in the world beyond the mirror, are dangerous and result in the artist’s suffering, pain and self-doubt.
The film reveals another preoccupation of surrealism, suicide and death. In the film a boy is killed by a snowball after he and a group of boys play with snow and in another scene, the poet while playing a game of cards shoots himself with a gun. Both of the scenes focus, in a highly theatrical manner, on the bleeding wound. Blood is suffering and especially here it depicts the suffering of the creative process. The film is of course a surrealistic experiment, but there seems to be, I think, a gothic sensitivity in the themes and the way the events are staged.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hF74QZ9nVvg
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I’m working on this, and so was interested. But, there must be some distinction surely between the surreal and the gothic, or there’s no point.
There is definitely a distinction of course. They are different movements. Surrealism however was interested in the gothic, as Breton clearly showed in his first manifesto. If surrealism for example is fascinated with the unconscious, dreams, supernatural, madness, suicide, occult, then all these can also, under certain conditions (uncanny,transgression, limits, past-present-hauntings,sublime, terror, fear)acquire a certain gothic quality. If a work of art presents a dream that becomes a nightmare haunting a person,blurring reality, creating madness, terror, then I could claim that it might be gothic surrealism. For example the work of Lynch. In art a recent example would be David Stoupakis(http://www.davidstoupakis.com/).
Have a look at Montague Summers’s chapter on Surrealism and the Gothic in _The Gothic Quest_: some interesting leads there, I think.
Yes, Summers talks about the politics of surrealism which is very interesting. Like Benjamin,Breton is in favour of gothic marxism which is not related to the gothic. But the fact that the surrealists saw in the gothic some of their own ideal is an essential parallel between gothic and surrealism. Tristan Tzara commented on the gothic novel’s surrealist qualities, Breton loved The Castle of Otranto,and most surrealists valued the works of Marquis de Sade.