Aug 10, 2020
With his nearly 30-years-in-the-making thematic trilogy, director/poet Jean Cocteau uses innovative film techniques and diverse strategies steeped in personal and classical mythology to consider the needs, methods, obstacles, and curse of the creative mind and the creative life. First with his groundbreaking The Blood of a Poet (1930), non-narrative sequencing and "not surrealist" (but totally surrealist) imagery presents a groundbreaking experimental film. Orpheus (1950) is a dreamy retelling of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth set in a kind of poet-crazed pre-teenybopper contemporary France. Many of the characters and themes return in The Testament of Orpheus (1959), the final installment but with Cocteau now playing himself as he wanders through time defending his existence as a creative force.
So, you know, listen in to hear us talk about poetry with far less respect than Cocteau demands.
If you'd like to watch ahead for next week's film, we will be discussing and reviewing Marco Bellocchio's Fist in The Pocket (1965).