Jean Cocteau Collection (1932 / 1960) (2 DVD)

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 swansongLa 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.