By Callum An artist stands in a garret, sketching faces on canvas. One face’s mouth moves in the silence. He wipes it off. But the mouth lives beyond his palm, transferring itself to statue.
Through a mirror, the room becomes another room. In the hotel-corridor world behind the glass, there are keyholes, shadows, whispers. A cow maps continents. A statue speaks. A voice instructs a poet how to load a gun.
Snowballs turn lethal. Children collide with myth. A card game tips toward death. An audience applauds what they do not fully witness. All the while, the poet dissolves: self, art, life.
Cocteau’s film is less narrative than incantation. It carries the weight of nightmares, of creation, of reflection. It is a journey not outward but downward into the mind, where figures are distorted, language becomes object, mirrors become passageway.
To watch The Blood of a Poet is to sense the cusp of inspiration and decay. To know art is ritual, myth, mirror—and that sometimes breaking the statue might be the only way to see the voice behind the face.