SOURCE: Thiher, Allen. “Le Sang d'un Poète: Film as Orphism.” In The Cinematic Muse: Critical Studies in the History of French Cinema, pp. 49-62. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1979.

In the following essay, Thiher examines Cocteau's poetics in his film Le Sang d'un Poète as a point of departure from modernism to postmodernism in cinematic history because of Cocteau's interpretation of the myth of Orpheus.

When the Viscount Charles de Noailles financed the production of Luis Buñuel's L'Age d'Or and of Jean Cocteau's Le Sang d'un Poète, it is unlikely that he knew he was subsidizing those two opposing modes of sensibility that have tended to dominate France in the twentieth century, total revolt and tragic acceptance. Indeed, there appears to be something contradictory in his putting up money, on the one hand, for a surrealist work that provoked riots on its first showing...