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.

dazed and confused, by richard linklater

This week in Film Club, we chose to look at Dazed and Confused (1993), another piece about adolescence in the 1970s.

Dazed and Confused is a pretty successful example of the ensemble film, a form I'm extremely interested in (most of the fiction-writing I've done over the last, eh, decade has been in the ensemble form). However, watching it this time I was more interested in a particular relationship in the film, particularly the one between freshman Mitchell Kramer and senior Randall "Pink" Floyd. The film begins to draw a parallel between them about thirty minutes into the film:

For the remainder of its run-time, the film investigates parallels between these characters, in part by investigating what is important to each of them. Young Mitch is enthralled by the novelties that are becoming available to him, here on the threshold of late adolescence. Three of the big ones, of course, are drugs:

booze:

and women:

Mitch's arc involves his introduction to and successful negotiation of these pleasures. It's almost heartwarming, in a way—and this is testament to one of Dazed and Confused's great strengths: it aptly observes that for a certain type of (middle-class?) adolescent, "high-risk" behavior is also a, perhaps the, primary source of enjoyment. Antisocial perhaps: but also life-affirming in a way that is deeply felt and legitimate.

The story complicates this, however, through the narrative arc of Randall. Randall undeniably enjoys these same sorts of "antisocial" pleasures throughout the entire course of the film:

However, Randall also derives affirmation through another, more official, channel: he plays high school football, and his team is preparing to embark upon a promising-looking season, one where he's the designated starting quarterback. Part of the tension of Dazed and Confused's narrative, then, comes from setting up these two sources of pleasure as mutually exclusive, through the narrative device of the "pledge sheet." In order to continue on with the football team, Randall is required to sign a sheet pledging not to drink or do drugs (womanizing appears to be left as an option). This forces him to make a choice between two sources of enjoyment, each of which the film designates as legitimate.

To be precise, it should be said that the sheet itself doesn't force this choice: the film takes pains to set up the act of signing as essentially empty. We see other football players who have signed the pledge, but explicitly state that they have no plans to honor it. Randall has effectively forced the choice on himself, in the name of principle—he sees it, understandably, as a virtue not to put your name to a document you have no intention of honoring. But the film is not content to show this as a heroic act: the more lasting impression the film gives us is that Randall's "principled" choice is one with lasting consequences, one that he will come to regret, and which will also hurts his teammates and their own chances of success. The degree to which they feel betrayed by Randall is palpable, just check out the mug of that fella on the right:

For a movie with almost no footage of actual sports being played, Dazed and Confused makes a compellingly strong case for sports as a source of meaning, value, unifying narrative, and homosocial community for young people, presenting it as a more legitimate and lasting source of life-affirmation than the more obviously hedonistic pleasures that the film glorifies with a much greater percentage of screen-time. Maybe that means that next week we'll move into the world of sports movies? Stay tuned.