Films/Programs
Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films
Founded in 1956 Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey, Janus Films served as a landmark film distribution company that championed the stateside exhibition of international cinema. In 1965, Janus Films was sold to William Becker and Saul Turrell who decided to concentrate on old films, consolidating a library of the finest in international cinema and booking titles on the repertory and college circuits. Becker and Turrell merged past and present, giving film history an ongoing life and presence in the cultural life of America. Their successors, Peter Becker and Jonathan Turrell, have maintained tradition by continuing to acquire the very best films available from around the world and providing the best prints available to the repertory houses still standing. They have also brought Janus into the future and created, with The Criterion Collection, the finest line of DVDs on the market.
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France, 1959, 99 min.
François Truffaut’s first feature changed the way we look at movies by examining childhood in a way that no other filmmaker had ever done before.
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France, 1962, 30 min.
In this charming short follow-up to The 400 Blows, Jean-Pierre Léaud’s Antoine Doinel grows up, only to be disappointed in love.
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Soviet Union, 1959, 89 min.
Grigori Chukhrai's wondrously delicate and compassionate 1959 classic, about a young Russian soldier named Alyosha who falls in love with the beautiful Shura on a brief train trip home during the war.
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France, 1946, 96 min.
Jean Cocteau’s adaptation of Leprince de Beaumont’s immortal tale is both enchanting and enchanted, and Josette Day and Jean Marais (under layers of glorious make-up) are as breathtakingly beautiful as Henri Alekan’s cinematography and Christian Bérard’s sets.
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France, 1945, 190 min.
Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert’s glorious epic of 19th-century French theater was made during the occupation under impossible conditions, and quickly became a romantic benchmark in cinema.
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Soviet Union, 1957, 94 min.
Mikhail Kalatazov’s extraordinarily lyrical film about young love interrupted by war has proven to be one of the most enduring of all Soviet films.
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Spain, 1976, 107 min.
Carlos Saura’s haunting, delicately woven, and heartbreaking tale of a young girl (Ana Torrent) growing up at the end of the Franco regime, who dreams her dead mother (Geraldine Chaplin) back to life.
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Denmark, 1943, 97 min.
Perhaps the greatest film ever made by one of the greatest filmmakers who ever lived about the compliant young wife of an old pastor who falls deeply in love with his son. It's a great film about freedom and the human urge to curtail it.
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Spain, 1955, 88 min.
Bardem's 1955 classic, about an adulterous couple that run down a bicyclist on their way home from a tryst and leave him to die by the road because they can't help him without exposing their affair.
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France, 1953, 105 min.
Max Ophüls’s incomparable adaptation of Louise de Vilmorin’s novel about a Parisian noblewoman (Danielle Darrieux) who sells her earrings to pay a debt: every gesture, every glance, every evasion, and every advance counts in this breathtaking, ultimately tragic film, brilliantly acted by Darrieux, C
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Sweden, 1983, 188 min.
Ingmar Bergman intended this to be his swan song, and it is the legendary filmmaker’s warmest and most autobiographical film, a triumph that combines his trademark melancholy and emotional intensity with immense joyfulness and sensuality
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Japan, 1959, 110 min.
Kon Ichikawa's ferocious adaptation of the Shohei Ooka novel is about a group of ragtag Japanese soldiers in the Philippines during the final days of the war who are forced to survive under the most extreme conditions imaginable.
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Japan, 1963, 142 min.
Kurosawa-sensei
Toshiro Mifune is Kingo Gondo, an honest executive who’s poised to gain control of the National Shoe Company to keep it out of the control of venal company men.
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France, 1961, 105 min.
Truffaut’s third film, this adaptation of Henri Pierre-Roché’s autobiographical novel about a bittersweet ménage à trois (with the great Jeanne Moreau at the apex of the triangle) is one of the classics of modern cinema.
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Poland, 1962, 94 min.
A tense, unnerving psycho-sexual chess game, beautifully directed by 29-year-old Roman Polanski, whose mastery was already evident in his feature debut.
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Japan, 1965, 161 min.
Masaki Kobayashi's supernatural tour de force: four tales - "Black Hair," "The Woman in the Snow," "Hoichi the Earless" and "In a Cup of Tea" - rendered with remarkable tonal and emotional precision. Without a doubt, one of the greatest color films ever made.
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United Kingdom, 1938, 97 min.
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 tour de force is set entirely on a moving train, with Michael Redgrave and Margaret Lockwood as the couple who suspect that the lady has vanished ... with Dame May Whitty as the Lady.
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France, 1958, 120 min.
The great Jeanne Moreau enjoyed one of her finest roles in Malle's wildly successful but controversial second feature. Considered scandalous at the time for the casualness with which a married woman slipped in and out of marriage and love affairs; there's little hint of remorse or consequences, just
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Japan, 1983, 140 min.
Kon Ichikawa‘s wondrously eye-filling and richly detailed adaptation of the famous Tanizaki novel, about four sisters in pre-war Osaka and the codes of the social world they inhabit. A visual and behavioral feast.
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Sweden, 1953, 96 min.
Ingmar Bergman’s early masterpiece, about the impetuous courtship and marriage between a confused boy and a girl (the divine Harriet Andersson) hungry for love, is one of his greatest films, and had a profound effect on the French New Wave.
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Italy, 1963, 130 min.
One of the great political films from the Golden Age of Italian cinema, with Marcello Mastroianni as the traveling labor organizer Professor Sinigaglia, who galvanizes a group of striking workers in Southern Italy in the 1890s.
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Japan, 1950, 87 min.
Brimming with action while incisively examining the nature of truth, Rashomon is perhaps the finest film ever to investigate the philosophy of justice. Starring Toshiro Mifune in another commanding performance, Rashomon revolutionized film language and introduced Japanese cinema to the world.
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Japan, 1954, 207 min.
Kurosawa-sensei
Akira Kurosawa’s furiously dynamic and deeply engrossing 1954 epic made an instant and dramatic impact. It not only set a dramatic template for many films to come but changed the way filmmakers imagined onscreen action.
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Sweden, 1957, 95 min.
Ingmar Bergman's medieval morality play struck the international film world like a bolt of lightning and made its creator world-famous.
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Sweden, 1956, 108 min.
This prize-winning comedy at last ushered in an international audience for director Ingmar Bergman. Set in turn-of-the-century Sweden, four women and four men attempt to juggle the laws of attraction amidst their daily bourgeois life. One of film history's great tragicomedies...
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Italy, 1954, 115 min.
Federico Fellini’s 1954 tale of the simple Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) sold into a life with travelling strong man Zampano (Anthony Quinn) is one of the undisputed classics of post-war Italian cinema. A film of the greatest joy, the bleakest despair and the most delicate heartbreak.
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Mexico, 1961, 90 min.
Luis Buñuel's triumphantly perverse return to Spanish filmmaking after thirty years in Mexican exile, with Silvia Pinal as the virginal Viridiana, taken as a bride by her perverse uncle (Fernando Rey) before she assumes the role of Mother Bountiful to the local beggar population.
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Australia, 1971, 100 min.
Nicolas Roeg's solo feature debut is a ravishing, sensuous experience: After an Australian brother and sister are left to wander in the outback after their father commits suicide, they cross paths with an aboriginal teenager.
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Sweden, 1957, 91 min.
Ingmar Bergman’s extraordinary portrait of an old professor (played, indelibly, by the great director Victor Sjöstrom) looking back at his life has served as an inspiration for countless movies, but remains as fresh and modern as the day it came out.
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Japan, 1964, 147 min.
Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes and nominated for two Academy Awards, Teshigahara’s masterpiece is a disquieting examination of power and sexuality fueled by stunning visual imagery. An essential big-screen experience, shown in its original, extended version!
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Yugoslavia, 1971, 85 min.
Yugoslavian filmmaker Dusan Makavejev’s 1971 cine-political-sexual explosion — part comic burlesque, part essay, part political inquiry, part documentary on Wilhelm Reich, and all glorious free-for-all.
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France, 1933, 41 min.
The great Jean Vigo’s immortal classic of pure revolutionary anarchy breaking out in a boys’ boarding school. A thrillingly, lyrically liberating piece of moviemaking.
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