The Blood of a Poet

(1932)

★ 7 IMDb · 202 votes

Genres: Fantasy

Year: 1932

Runtime: 55 мин

Country: France

Director: Jean Cocteau

Cast: Enrique Rivero, Elizabeth Lee Miller, Pauline Carton, Odette Talazac, Jean Desbordes, Fernand Dichamps, Lucien Jager, Féral Benga, Barbette, Jean Cocteau

Plot

In a poet’s room, an armless statue abruptly comes to life. It invites the poet to step through a mirror and to discover another world. Strange places and characters present themselves to him. The poet tears himself away from these twisted fascinations and returns, with some difficulty, to his room.

A young artist draws a face at a canvas on his easel. Suddenly the mouth on the drawing comes into life and starts talking. The artist tries to wipe it away with his hand, but when he looks into the hand he finds the living mouth on his palm. He tries to wipe it off on the mouth of an unfinished statue of a young woman. The statue comes into life and tells him that the only way out of the studio is through the looking glass. The artist jumps into the mirror and comes to the Hotel of Dramatic Lunacies. He peeps through the keyholes of a series of hotel rooms. In the last room he sees desperate meetings of hermaphrodites. One of them has a signboard saying "Mortal danger". Back in the studio the artist crushes the statue with a sledgehammer. Because of this he himself becomes a statue, located at the side of a square. Some schoolboys start a snowball fight around the statue. One of the boys is killed by a snowball. A fashionable couple start playing cards at a table beside the corpse. The woman tells the man that unless he holds the ace of hearts he is doomed. The man takes the ace of hearts from the dead boy. The child's guardian, a black angel, appears and takes away the corpse as well as the card. Losing the ace of hearts the man shoots himself. The woman is transformed into the unfinished statue from the studio, and walks away.