Le Sang D'un Poète

“Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered.”

So begins Cocteau’s decadent and sensual first feature, a subversively autobiographical work that mines his own history as an accomplished artist to contemplate the sometimes-tortured relationship between creator and creation. Cocteau conjures indelible images of life, death and dreams in this free-associative, sensorial and homoerotic dance, establishing the vividly surrealist sensibility that defines the director’s later films.