ICE-Vision: “The Blood of a Poet” and “La Villa Santo-Sospir” (Jean Cocteau, 1930 and 1952)
Wednesday, September 12 at 8 PM
Lamar Dodd School of Art Room S150
ICE-Vision continues with Film Studies major Daniel LoPilato’s weekly selections of eclectic, idiosyncratic, psychotronic, or otherwise eccentric excursions into world cinema.
The Blood of a Poet: “‘Every poem is a coat of arms. It must be deciphered.’ Adding cinema to a resume that already includes writing, theater, painting, sculpture, and self-mythology, Jean Cocteau approaches it as a parlor riddle, a hermaphroditic catalogue, the ultimate medium for the aesthete’s search for the ineffable and the sublime. The dream and its dissipation, ‘a realistic document of unreal events,’ everything suspended in the time it takes a chimney to topple into dust. Two episodes in two parts each, from ‘The Wounded Hand’ to ‘The Defamation of the Host,’ with fetishes weaving in and out of each other. … At the finish line is nothing less than the ‘mortal tedium of immortality,’ harp and globe and all.” – Fernando F. Croce
La Villa Santo-Sospir:
“Shot in 1952, this is an ‘amateur film’ done in 16mm, a sort of home movie in which Cocteau takes the viewer on a tour of a friend’s villa on the French coast (a major location used in ‘Testament of Orpheus’). The house itself is heavily decorated, mostly by Cocteau (and a bit by Picasso), and we are given an extensive tour of the artwork… This informal little project once again shows the joy Cocteau takes in creating art, in addition to showing a side of his work (his paintings and drawings) that his films often overshadow.” – Mike Pinsky
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