The Persistence of Cocteau

Over the next couple of days I will be making some comments about the first two films of the unit, Rose Hobart and Le Sang d'un poète, but first a musical interlude.


Here is Stereolab's "Cybele's Reverie," from their 1996 album Emperor Tomato Ketchup. For those of you who have watched Le Sang d'un poète, some of the images in this video will be uncannily familiar. You might think of the homage to Cocteau entangled in this video's collage as embodying Victor Burgin's description of film as something no longer merely experienced within the context of a "visit" -- to the cinema, for instance -- but rather to be "encountered" in various forms and fragments, creating a multitude of new contexts and memories through these various encounters. The video records something of the experience of these encounters, and of what Burgin calls the "sequence-image." It situates Cocteau among other vintage film moments, crafting its "reverie" from the sense of "pastness" all memory instills and all reverie exploits.