A Film Canon

This enigmatic film is divided into four parts. The first, "The Blood Of A Poet" depicts an artist's studio in which the distinctions between subject and object, artist and artwork, and subjectivity and gaze are on the verge of collapsing. Paintings and sculptures speak, while the artist's body is reduced to a canvas. In the second, "Do Walls Have Ears?", the artist attempts to recombine subjectivity and gaze by stepping into his mirror, which transports him to a distant corridor of his mind. This dream-like medium is resolutely abstracted from time, space and language, and haunted by a series of keyholes that confirm the breakdown between observer and observed with a series of episodes from the artist's subconscious. These turn on ritualistic violence and homosexuality, and are sublimated and translated back into a more realistic register in "The Snowball Fight", which depicts the torture and murder of a young schoolboy, and the ambiguous frisson that it provides his schoolmates. Finally, "The Profanation Of The Host" construes this trip to the subconscious as a necessary part of the artistic process, as well as offering a gentle parody of social institutions, both of which pave the way for the appearance of an oiled, androgynous, African angel. It feels as if the entire film has been a preparation for this conspicuously homosexual love object and, more specifically, that Cocteau's characterisation of the sexualised body as part subject, part object, has been an attempt to grapple with homosexuality's peculiar complications of the relation between self and other. In this way, the film allegorises the moment at which self-love is understood as an indirect expression of love for a transgressive external object; or, alternatively, at which the gaze shifts from itself to the outside world, explaining Cocteau's uncanny taste for painting eyes on eyelids.