Two films by Jean Cocteau - Featuring Le Sang D’Un Poete Testament D’OrpheeAlso an artist, poet, playwright and novelist, Jean Cocteau is widely regarded as one of the most pioneering and important avant-garde directors cinema has produced. Cocteau released 12 films in his lifetime, including the award-winning La Belle Et La Bete (1946) perhaps his most accessible (and therefore well-known) work. Though often described as a poet first and foremost, Cocteau’s films were also infused with the phantasmorgorical surrealist imagery and rich symbolism characteristic of all his work. His debut Le Sang D’Un Poete and swansong La Testament D’Orphee are released here together in a box-set for the first time in the UK; made 30 years apart they bookend his filmic career and are both considered masterpieces of the avant-garde movement of which he was at the heart. LE SANG D’UN POETE (1930)
Starring Enrique Rivero, Lee Miller and Pauline Carton
In an artist’s studio, an unfinished statue comes to life. The lips of its androgynous face move, pressing a kiss to the artist’s hand. At the statue’s demand, he plunges it into a mirror.
TESTAMENT D’ORPHEE (1960)
Jean Cocteau gave the cinema a truly abstract piece of work as his swansong, in which the mind of a poet (played by Cocteau himself) takes control of reality, twisting and re-moulding it until it bears not the slightest resemblance to reality as we know it in real life. Le Sang D’Un Poete And Testament D’Orphee