the blood of a poet, by jean cocteau

After a one-week hiatus from Film Club (Spring Break!), we returned with Skunkcabbage's pick to follow up Cronenberg's Naked Lunch, Jean Cocteau's 1930 wonderment The Blood of A Poet.

From the title, Cocteau's film sounds like it's going to be another film about the life of a writer—it isn't, really. One could possibly argue that the film is about writing: there is, for instance, a brief moment where a some of Cocteau's own [untranslated!] writings are inserted directly into the film:

That's not the only place writing interrupts the film, either: it breaks into the narrative a number of times (especially early on) in the form of intertitles. It's not incredibly notable for early films to use intertitles, of course, but Blood of a Poet isn't a silent film, so the intertitles here aren't serving a traditional function, such as conveying dialogue. Instead they're operating in a manner one could describe, perhaps, as "poetic" (Cocteau himself refers to them as "commentaries"). So you get stuff like this:

So possibly about writing, yes, but not really about a writer: although the main character (Enrico Rivero, chosen for his "dispassionate appearance") identifies himself as a writer once, we never actually see him doing any writing, although we do see him working on some drawings:

This would seem to imply that the film is more about the visual than it is about the linguistic. It's probably not an accident that the film's opening shot has a ton of lighting gear visible in the background:

And, indeed, one way that we can enjoy The Blood of a Poet is to disregard the (disjointed) narrative and (indecipherable) allegory and to enjoy the film solely as a series of arresting and enigmatic images. Cocteau, for all his inscrutability and pretention, seems legitimately interested in giving something to the audience: using the cinema generously, by making us see things we haven't seen before. Towards this end, the film ends up being something of a special effects tour-de-force, using illusionistic makeup, cleverly constructed sets, composite shots, expressive processing, editing gimmickry, reversed film, and basically every other cinematic and theatrical trick available in the 1930s to make us see the unseeable. From a modern perspective, it's not too hard to figure out how some of the images and effects were created, but many of them remain pretty arresting:

And it's this tendency towards optic weirdness (and psychosexual ferment) that ultimately bears out the Cronenberg parallel that Skunkcabbage had in mind. At one point, early on in the film, our "poet" ends up with an extra orifice on his hand—not really world's away from the vaginal slit that opens in Max Renn's abdomen in Videodrome (1983):

And our protagonist responds to this bodily mutation with a mix of disgust...

and fascination...

and, eventually, aroused pleasure...

...which is pretty much the key three-way Cronenberg mix right there. Long live the new flesh!

Next week: short films by Maya Deren.

thematic recurrences

It amuses me that Carol Spier, the woman who worked as the production designer for the insect-laden Naked Lunch (Film Club No. 25), was also the production designer for Joe's Apartment (1996).

If you don't recall this film, or the original short film on which it was based, suffice it to say that it's about a man who shares his apartment with a swarm of sapient roaches.

If only they'd also gotten Cronenberg to direct, we might really have had something.

naked lunch, by david cronenberg

So this week, continuing on our "films about writers" thread, we turned to David Cronenberg's Naked Lunch (1991).

Like many films in our recent sequence, this film blurs the line between biography and fiction, being partially a retelling of events from the life of writer William S. Burroughs, and partially a retelling of the novel Naked Lunch... a novel which, just to muddy the waters a little bit more, expends some of its narrative energy telling the tale of a Burroughs-esque writer, Bill Lee.

At first glance, Lee looks like a semi-autobiographical stand-in for Burroughs himself, an interpretation that's certainly helped along by the fact that Burroughs writes his first book, Junkie, using "William Lee" as his pseudonym. But try to read Naked Lunch as straight autobio and you won't get far: the book's narrative is so alien that it really lands closer to the realm of nightmarish science fiction than it does to the realm of memoir. So, long before Cronenberg comes along to complicate matters even further, one can already make onesself dizzy by playing the game of trying to discern which events in Naked Lunch are "real," which are false perceptions induced by drug addiction, and which are pure fiction invented by Burroughs.

Ultimately, of course, the answer to the question can never be determined (it's doubtful that even Burroughs himself could, or would, have distinguished between these three layers in a way we could have called "authoritative"). This confusion between reality and fantasy, between external realities and internal perceptual states, is perhaps a necessary precondition for the onset of paranoia, and, indeed, Burroughs is one of the 20th century's great chroniclers of the paranoid mindset. The world of Naked Lunch and Burroughs' later works is a world utterly riddled with conspiracies and confidence artists, a world in which the individual is, at best, a naive mark, and at worst, an unwitting cog in some vast, sinister operation. In Burroughs' world, it is possible to learn at any moment that all your human activity, whatever you thought you were doing out of free will, has in fact been merely you toiling in the service of a conspiracy designed to enslave and control you.

Cronenberg zeroes in on this aspect of Burroughs' work, and makes it the central narrative mechanism of the film. Cronenberg has explored this territory fruitfully in the past, most notably with his own Videodrome (1982), in which television executive Max Renn ends up as a kind of zomboid drone, having had his consciousness programmed and re-programmed by a pair of warring secret societies. But Renn has further to fall: at the outset of Videodrome he's essentially a functional member of society, and much of the film details the way he becomes enmeshed in the conspiracy, and begins to lose his identity. Lee, by contrast, begins Naked Lunch already on the fringes, his personality already only halfway operational, his status as a perceiving individual already questionable. This allows the hallucinatory / paranoid hijinks to kick in much earlier: nearly everyone he encounters in the film seems to know more about his life than he does, and before a dozen minutes have elapsed he's been picked up by police who officially inaugurate him into the film's mysteries by presenting him with a mysterious box:

—which contains this nasty fellow, who begins to give Bill cryptic instructions, and will continue to for much of the remainder of the film.

So, basically, Naked Lunch feels like the last twenty minutes of Videodrome expanded into feature length. It's so rife with double-agents and perplexing alliances that it becomes impossible to discern who's on which side, much less which side might constitute the "good guys." Puzzling out the intrigue is really beside the point anyway; the appeal of the film comes much more from watching Bill Lee's identity grow increasingly tattered under the grinding force of conspiracies and drugs. Poor Bill's personality ends up being so emotionally reversed that he scarcely reacts when he finds one of his only friends fucking his wife, but he's reduced to tears by the sight of a bowl of dried centipedes in a marketplace:

And that's only twenty minutes into a film that's about two hours long!

Final note: part of the disorienting effect of Naked Lunch derives from the fact that it's a very interior film. Although the film is ostensibly set in picturesque locales (New York City, and Interzone, a fictional analogue for Tangiers), Cronenberg bucks the demands of cinematic grammar by pointedly avoiding the use of any sort of establishing shot, in fact almost entirely avoiding any exterior shots whatsoever. This helps create a very effective insular feeling, adding to the overall menace and claustrophobia. Part of the credit here belongs to production designer Carol Spier, whose eclectic, jumbled interiors are some of the most lastingly memorable elements of the film for me:

Next week: Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet.