“It is the filmmaker’s privilege to be able to allow a large number of people to dream the same dream together.” – Jean Cocteau

Jean Vigo held a mutually convivial relationship with the Surrealists. He was a great admirer of Un Chien Andalou and Buñuel in general, and his work made their must-see lists. An early short in his sadly truncated career, Taris, roi de l’eau is a documentary on French swimming champion Jean Taris. In its playful underwater camerawork, the film reveals Taris to be a magical, sensual creature of the sea, not unlike the specimens in Jean Painlevé’s scientific films. Its “real rendered surreal” techniques were highly regarded by the Surrealists who preferred heightened realism over trickery. And it is precisely this delineation that saw Jean Cocteau’s exclusion from the movement. Breton and company were repelled by the dandy’s taste-making attempts, his hobnobbing with la haute bourgeoisie, his debonair and apolitical approach to art and life, but they disapproved most harshly of his cinematic flights of fancy. Though reviled by the original members of Surrealism, Cocteau’s astonishing first film, Le Sang d’un poète is one of the most enduring, influential works of cinema and it announced Cocteau as a new cinema talent. The first film in his famous Orphic trilogy, Sang is a bastion of creativity that captures the oneiric, tormented inner world of an artist attempting to go further in his pursuit of imagination. Told in four vignettes, the film includes Cocteau’s signature themes of myth, beauty and death, each portrayed with ingenious artistry using drawings, trick photography and elliptical montage. Sang, which features the ethereally gorgeous Lee Miller’s only screen performance, was financed by the Vicomte de Noailles and therefore suppressed for two years on account of the scandal elicited by L’Âge d’or.