The Blood of a Poet (French: Le sang d'un poète, pronounced [lə sɑ̃ dœ̃ pɔɛt]) is a 1932 avant-garde film directed by Jean Cocteau, financed by Charles de Noailles and starring Enrique Riveros, a Chilean actor who had a successful career in European films.

The mirror transports the artist to a hotel, where he peers through several keyholes, witnessing such people as an opium smoker and a hermaphrodite.

In the final section, a card shark plays a game with a woman on a table set up over the body of the dead boy.

Intercut through the film, oneiric images appear, including spinning wire models of a human head and rotating double-sided masks.

The film is considered, along with The Golden Age (1930), one of two French films released at the end of this first phase of avant-garde film-making that continue to develop the model presented by Chien Andalou:[2] ...elements of narrative and acting arouse the spectator's psychological participation in plot or scene while at the same time distancing the viewer by disallowing empathy, meaning and closure; an image of the disassociated sensibility or 'double consciousness' praised by Surrealism in its critique of naturalismThe film is a blend of Cocteau's classical aesthetics and the Baroque stylings of Surrealism.

Cocteau's voice satirically explores his character's obsession with fame and death: "Those who smash statues should beware of becoming one".

[citation needed] Cocteau would later write that, when he made the film, he "avoided the deliberate manifestations of the unconscious in favor of a kind of half-sleep where I labyrinthed myself.

[3] The Blood of a Poet was funded by Charles, Vicomte de Noailles, who gave Cocteau 1 million francs to make it.

Cocteau invited the Vicomte and his wife Marie-Laure de Noailles, along with several of their friends, to appear in a scene as a theatre party.