In the Key of Cocteau
Art Music Film
Nov. 21st 2025 7:30pm
Heliconian Club, 35 Hazelton Ave.
An evening of art, music and film in partnership with The Toronto Silent Film Festival, North Wind Concerts and in collaboration with the historic Heliconian Club.
The art exhibit will feature works by members of the Heliconian Club and inspired by Cocteau & his ground breaking contemporaries of the late 1920s and early 1930s.
The music will be performed by a quartet of North Wind Concerts musicians (Ben Grossman, Alison Melville, Colin Savage & Debashis Sinha).
The film is none other than Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet presented as a silent film with music by North Wind Concerts.
This is truly going to be a cine-concert as members of North Wind Concerts will not only take on the challenges of creating music for the film but also perform a prelude and postlude.
The Blood of a Poet explores the plight of the artist, using the power of metaphor and the deep relationship between art and dreams. One of cinema’s great experiments manages to push the boundaries of the medium to its limits in an effort to capture the poet’s obsession with the struggle between the forces of art, death, life, dreams and transcendence.
An avant-garde fever dream set in a hallucinatory dreamscape, Cocteau’s first film, made in collaboration with Vicomte de Noailles (Un Chien d’Andalou), unfurls like a phantasmagoria. As a viewer, you’re constantly questioning your own reality as the film repeatedly folds in on itself, building layers with nuanced Catholic iconography, queer longing and the type of experimental imagery that became reflected in the works of David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Derek Jarman and other surrealist and avant-garde inspired filmmakers throughout the years.
Tickets may be purchased at this link.
Greg Woods
Greg Woods has been a film enthusiast since his teens, and began his writing "career" at the same time- prolific in capsule reviews of everything he had watched, first on index cards, then those hardcover dollar store black journals, then an old Mac IIsi. He founded The Eclectic Screening Room in 2001, as a portal to share his film love with the world, and find some like-minded enthusiasts along the way. In addition to having worked in the film industry for over two decades, he has been a co-programmer of films at Trash Palace, and a programmer/co-founder of the Toronto Film Noir Syndicate. He has also written for Broken Pencil, CU-Confidential, Micro-Film, and is currently working on his first novel. His secret desire is for someone to interview him for a podcast or a DVD extra.