Edouard Dermithe

A poet in love with Death follows his unhappy wife into the underworld.

Outside time and reality, the experiences of a poet. The judgement of the young poet by Heurtebise and the Princess, the Gypsies, the palace of Pallas Athena, the spear of the Goddess which pierces the poet's heart, the temptation of the Sphinx, the flight of Oedipus and the final Assumption. This film is the third part of Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, which consists of The Blood of a Poet (1930), Orpheus (1950) and Testament of Orpheus (1960).

Elisabeth and her brother Paul live isolated from much of the world after Paul is injured in a snowball fight. As a coping mechanism, the two conjure up a hermetic dream of their own making. Their relationship, however, isn't exactly wholesome. Jealousy and a malevolent undercurrent intrude on their fantasy when Elisabeth invites the strange Agathe to stay with them -- and Paul is immediately attracted to her.

Political intrigue and psychological drama run parallel. The queen is in seclusion, veiling her face for the ten years since her husband's assassination, longing to join him in death. Stanislas, a poet whose pen name is Azrael, is a suicidal anarchist, his imagination haunted into hate by longing for this queen who's drawn apart. He enters her private quarters intent on killing her then himself, but they fall in love, in part because he looks like the king. Stanislas wants her to regain political power by appearing to the public, and she tries to convince him to find hope and escape. All the while, the queen's enemies plot to keep the lovers together but to thwart their plans.

In this experimental film, Isidore Isou, the leader of the lettrist movement, lashes out at conventional cinema and offers a revolutionary form of movie-making: through scratching and bleaching the film, through desynchronizing the soundtrack and the visual track, through deconstructing the story, he aims to renew the seventh art the same way he tried to revolutionize the literary world.