"Actor: Lucien Jager"

• Jean Cocteau Collection | DVD | (30/04/2007) from £13.79   |  Saving you £6.20 (44.96%)   |  RRP £19.99

  This stunning Jean Cocteau box set features Le Sang D'Un Poete (aka: The Blood Of The Poet) and Testament D'Orphee (aka: Testament Of Orpheus). Also an artist poet playwright and novelist Jean Cocteau is widely regarded as one of the most pioneering and important avant-garde directors cinema has produced. His debut Le Sang D'Un Poete and swansong La Testament D'Orphee are released here together in a boxset for the first time in the UK; made 30 years apart they bookend his filmic career and are both masterpieces of the avant-garde movement of which he was at the heart. Cocteau released 12 films in his lifetime including the award-winning La Belle Et La Bete (1946) perhaps his most accessible (and therefore well-known) work. Though often described as a poet first and foremost Cocteau's films were also infused with the phantasmorgorical surrealist imagery and rich symbolism characteristic of all his work. Le Sang D'un Poete (1930): In an artist's studio an unfinished statue comes to life. The lips of its androgynous face move pressing a kiss to the artist's hand. At the statue's demand he plunges it into a mirror. Le Testament D'orphee (1960): Jean Cocteau gave the cinema a truly abstract piece of work as his swansong in which the mind of a poet (played by Cocteau himself) takes control of reality twisting and re-moulding it until it bears not the slightest resemblance to reality as we know it in real life.

• Blood Of A Poet / Testament Of Orpheus | DVD | (04/04/2005) from £N/A   |  Saving you £N/A (N/A%)   |  RRP £15.99