Le Sang d’un Poète Frankrike 1932 Regi Jean Cocteau Med Enrique Riveros, Lee Miller, Pauline Carton 55m DCP Fransk tale og plakater, utekstet Aldersgrense 6 år
Le Testament d’Orphée Frankrike 1960 Regi Jean Cocteau Med Jean Cocteau, Edouard Dermithe, Henri Crémieux, María Casares 1t 19m DCP Fransk tale, utekstet Aldersgrense Tillatt for alle
OBS! Kopiene av Blood of a Poet og Testament of Orpheus som vi har fått er dessverre uten engelske tekster, de har kun fransk tale. Alle interesserte må være klar over dette ved billettkjøp, det gis ingen refusjon av kjøpte billetter.
After the projection of Orphée (1950) at Cinemateket Trondheim as part of the Vampiric Projections, and the rich conversations that took place after the screening, The Blood of a Poet (1930) and The Testament of Orpheus (1960), the first and last instalments of the Orphic trilogy, will be screened as a double bill.
!OBS! 2 films for the price of 1:
The ticket for this double bill screening covers both films for the special price of 120- only!
OBS: The movies have NO subtitles.
Jean-Luc Godard wrote in Cahiers du Cinéma, in the 152 issue of February 1964 (from an essay on Cocteau’s Orphée):
“In all his films, Jean Cocteau tirelessly proves to us that, in order to know how to make cinema, we need to find Méliès, and for that, quite a few Lumière years are still necessary.”
The Blood of a Poet (1932) was a commission by the Viscount of Noailles, with a fund of 1 million francs. Charles de Noailles had, around the same time (in 1929), also funded Luis Buñuel’s L’Âge d’Or (1930).
Writer, poet and artist Jean Cocteau, in an interview with Georges-Michel Bovay in the 1950’s said:
“When I made The Blood of a Poet, I had no doubt that it was cinema. It was a way for me to create plastic poetry.”
Véronique Doduik, responsible for documentary production at the Cinémathèque Française, wrote in November 2022:
“Le Sang d’un Poète is a key work in the filmography of Jean Cocteau. It already contains all of his personal mythology, with figures and scenes which will be the leitmotifs of his following films: crossing the mirror, the elasticity of time, [flying], the statue that comes to life, the snowball fight, [the wound and the blood], the suicide of the poet…
The Blood of a Poet can be understood as a self-portrait of Cocteau. Cocteau projects his double in the figure of Enrique Rivero, with whom he establishes, through voice, an organic link, both interior and exterior.
The film remained on display in a small New York cinema for at least twenty years, breaking the record for longevity of a film on display. In this same room, Charlie Chaplin saw this film and understood “that there could be a cinema in Europe” (Du Cinématographe, Jean Cocteau).”
With Le Testament d’Orphée (1960), Cocteau returns to the ‘limboic’ (so to speak) zone of his Orphée (1950), that zone which, according to the author, is his “naked soul.. in other words, a shadowy zone where realism resembles the absurd order of dreams, a zone of shadows where intelligence, our worst enemy, does not have control and does not spoil the best in us”, adding in the preface to his published Testament of Orpheus script, that “this film has nothing to do with dreams except that it borrows the rigorous illogicality of dreams, their way of giving during the night, a kind of freshness to the falsehoods of the day that is dulled by routine. In addition, it is realistic, if realism means a detailed painting of the intrigues of a universe that is personal to every artist and is totally unrelated to what we are used to accepting as reality.
In a rather spontaneous interview on the set of his filming The Testament of Orpheus, the cinématograph-maker (as Cocteau didn’t associate with being a filmmaker) added, speaking with eyes which were not quite his, painted on his eyelids:
“Much was said that my film has no meaning, that is to say that it has no plot. It’s a film where ideas take shape and flow into one another, a bit like a dream, but it is not a dream. I never liked to tell dreams; I like the mechanism of dreams, and I am inspired by it.
This film is called The Testament of Orpheus because I bequeath it to a whole youth who for half a century have helped me a lot, always supported me. And it’s a shadow youth. Picasso said a magnificent phrase, which is not a joke: “it takes a very long time to become young”.
Oscar Debs, curator of Vampiric Projections, will talk about both films after and between their screenings, and how the relationship between the 3 Orphic films is an “anti-poetic relationship”, according to Cocteau, among other reflections…
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