Toronto Silent Film Festival: In the Key of Cocteau at – Toronto, Canada
Toronto Silent Film Festival: In the Key of Cocteau at – Toronto, Canada
Get your tickets to see Toronto Silent Film Festival: In the Key of Cocteau in Toronto, Canada. Happening on Friday, November 21, 2025 at . Doors open at 7:30 PM.
Art Music Film
A Cine-Concert evening in collaboration with North Wind Concerts inspired by the legendary French avant-garde artist Jean Cocteau
Art by member artists of the Heliconian Club inspired by Cocteau and his Parisian contemporaries
Music by North Wind Concerts: Ben Grossman, Alison Melville, Colin Savage & Debashis Sinha
In addition to performing their unique score for the film, they will also perform a prelude and postlude.
Film: Jean Cocteau’s The Blood of a Poet presented as a silent film with live music by North Wind Concerts
“Poets…shed not only the red blood of their hearts but the white blood of their souls.”-Jean Cocteau
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, what became the first installment of Cocteau’s Orphic Trilogy stretches 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.
Part avant-garde fever dream and hallucinatory experience, Cocteau, in collaboration with Vicomte de Noailles (Le Chien d’Andalou) unfolds the film like lucid phantasmagoria. As the viewer, you’re constantly questioning your own reality as the film repeatedly folds in on itself, building nuanced layers with Catholic iconography, queer longing and the type of experimental imagery that would be reflected in the works of David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Derek Jarman and other surrealist and avant-garde inspired filmmakers throughout the years.
Cocteau called the film “a disturbing series of voyeuristic tableaux, a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body”
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