I attempted to 'read' Cocteau's film by looking through the succession of images and trying to discern the adventures of the protagonist, but it gets increasingly difficult to come to any deductions given the contestations Cocteau had with the surrealists when this film was made. Blood of a Poet and Luis Bunuel's L'Age D'Or, both commissioned by Vicomte de Noailles, are often heralded as the pinnacle form of surrealist imagination in cinema. But interestingly, Cocteau has consistently denied any relation of his film to the surrealist movement. As he claims, the film draws nothing from dreams and symbols, rather it "initiates" the mechanism of dreams and "rejects" symbols by substituting them with allegories. It is true that many artists who associated themselves with the surrealist movement later left it due to political reasons, and Cocteau's disassociation might probably be on the same lines. But I am more interested in reading Cocteau's statement as a proposal for a new-fangled process of reading surrealist texts. Several readings have pinned the images to Cocteau's biographical details. The suicide of the protagonist, for example, is supposed to be a reference to Cocteau's father's suicide, the snowball game to Cocteau's childhood memory, or the pervading homoeroticism to his sexual inclinations. But in response Cocteau has always maintained, "People read it in many ways, but the only solid truth is the "valid opinions of the technicians" who agree that the images are lasting and fresh."
His interest, therefore, precisely rests on the images he conjured in a "half-sleep" state, allowing himself to wander in a labyrinth where conscious reflection exist in an interactive relationship with drives, memories, and trauma. As some critics have pointed out, the images are not derived from restful sleep but from exhausted slumber. The referentiality of the forms and objects are not fixated, it is in the process of making. Reminiscent of the half-finished statue, head half-constructed with wires, or the fragmented body of the hermaphrodite, the film's aesthetic principle harps on the incomplete stages of creativity that has failed to achieve its aesthetic culmination. This unformed, unfinished structure is manifested in the texture of the film. To perform a reading following surrealist tenets, it is necessary to consider the film as a spontaneous celluloid manifestation of images derived by "psychic automatism", as Breton would prefer. Uninhibited from the rules of reason, it is supposedly a "pure" vision of our functioning of thought. Cocteau's film does the opposite. He does not claim to have stripped his images from moral reasoning or conscious thought. He retains the tensions, the impurity of the images in a semi-wakeful state, to inculcate a new mode of reading surrealist texts. The ensuing tensions in Cocteau's images particularly emerge from the inconsistencies in the "pure" flow of uninhibited thought. The resulting gaps make our reading more difficult because it is not based on following referential channels of 'pure' signifiers but to harbour the impassive movement in comprehension. Thereby, the direct textual references to his biographical or symbolic existence cannot be completely disregarded, at the same time they also unexpectedly blend into elements that radically depart to purely meaningless forms.
His interest, therefore, precisely rests on the images he conjured in a "half-sleep" state, allowing himself to wander in a labyrinth where conscious reflection exist in an interactive relationship with drives, memories, and trauma. As some critics have pointed out, the images are not derived from restful sleep but from exhausted slumber. The referentiality of the forms and objects are not fixated, it is in the process of making. Reminiscent of the half-finished statue, head half-constructed with wires, or the fragmented body of the hermaphrodite, the film's aesthetic principle harps on the incomplete stages of creativity that has failed to achieve its aesthetic culmination. This unformed, unfinished structure is manifested in the texture of the film. To perform a reading following surrealist tenets, it is necessary to consider the film as a spontaneous celluloid manifestation of images derived by "psychic automatism", as Breton would prefer. Uninhibited from the rules of reason, it is supposedly a "pure" vision of our functioning of thought. Cocteau's film does the opposite. He does not claim to have stripped his images from moral reasoning or conscious thought. He retains the tensions, the impurity of the images in a semi-wakeful state, to inculcate a new mode of reading surrealist texts. The ensuing tensions in Cocteau's images particularly emerge from the inconsistencies in the "pure" flow of uninhibited thought. The resulting gaps make our reading more difficult because it is not based on following referential channels of 'pure' signifiers but to harbour the impassive movement in comprehension. Thereby, the direct textual references to his biographical or symbolic existence cannot be completely disregarded, at the same time they also unexpectedly blend into elements that radically depart to purely meaningless forms.