Special Screenings
SPECIAL SCREENINGS
IN THE KEY OF COCTEAU
ART MUSIC FILM
November 21, 2025 7:30pm
In collaboration with North Wind Concerts
and members artists of the Heliconian Club
An evening of visual art, music and film inspired by Jean Cocteau & the his fellow Parisian artists
“Poets…shed not only the red blood of their hearts but the white blood of their souls.”- Jean Cocteau
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
Music by North Wind Concerts: Ben Grossman, Alison Melville, Colin Savage & Debashis Sinha
Film: Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet screened with live music by North Wind Concerts. North Winds will 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, in what became the first instalment of Cocteau's Orphic Trilogy, stretches the medium to its limits as it captures the poet’s obsession with the struggle between the forces of art, death, life, dreams and transcendence.
Equal parts avant-garde fever dream and metaphysical hallucination, Jean Cocteau’s first foray into the cinematic arts was made in collaboration with Vicomte de Noailles (Le Chien d’Andalou). Cocteau invites the audience into a state of lucid dreaming, asking you to question your own reality as the film repeatedly folds in on itself, building nuanced layers filled with queer longing, Catholic iconography and the type of experimental imagery that is reflected in the future works of David Lynch, Guy Maddin, Derek Jarman and other surrealist and avant-garde inspired filmmakers.
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”
Tickets available September 18th
SILENTS IN PARADISE
The Wild, the Beautiful, and the Damned
Explore the sublime to the outrageously sublime, the deliriously mad, the adventurous, the drippingly decadent, and the comic masterpieces of the silent era-with live accompaniment .
Lineup coming soon.
January 11
February 28
May 3
June 7
PARADISE THEATRE 1006c Bloor St. W
Buy tickets in Advance or at the door (if not sold out)
Past Screenings
The Flesh & The Devil Series
Casanova Pt 4 May 24 Paradise
Flesh and the Devil Pt 3 February 22 Paradise
Salome Pt 2 January 18 Paradise
Haxan Pt 1 November 16 2024 Paradise
Sparrows June 2024