Cinematheque and repertory theater programming typically focuses on film history’s significant cinema artists, most frequently directors. To a devoted cinephile, the mere idea of a movie mecca like George Eastman House without the works of Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, François Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, Carl Theodor Dreyer, or Luis Buñuel is tantamount to suggesting a church without a God (a suggestion that would no doubt appeal to the brazenly blasphemous Buñuel).

The talent of these great auteurs notwithstanding, without the pioneering work of Janus Films, America’s first great art cinema distributor, it’s hard to imagine that moviegoing over the last fifty years would be quite the same. In March and April, our primary series will pay homage to fifty years of Janus, the landmark organization that was instrumental in making household names of Bergman et al.

Founded in 1956 by the owners of two legendary repertory theaters, Cambridge’s Brattle Theater and New York City’s 55th Street Playhouse, Janus sought to bring the best of international cinema to American viewers. These were films like Bergman’s legendarily symbolic The Seventh Seal and Juan Antonio Bardem’s subtly anti-Franco Death of a Cyclist, both of which Janus released for the first time to US theaters. In the mid-1960s, Janus expanded their catalog by acquiring numerous older films and making them available again on the big screens of repertory cinemas and universities. These titles ranged from Albert Lamorisse’s sublime short, The Red Balloon, to Hitchcock’s last great British film, The Lady Vanishes, to Rashomon, the movie that put Kurosawa on the map outside of Japan.

In the late 1980s, Janus moved into the home-video realm, expanded their catalog even further, and reached out to whole new generations of movie lovers by establishing the Criterion Collection and making the first significant utilization of supplemental tools on laserdiscs and DVDs such as filmmaker or scholarly commentary on alternative audio tracks.

Now, in celebration of their 50th anniversary, Janus has returned to their cinematic exhibition origins by striking a number of new 35mm prints for a touring series. Three of the titles screening in the Dryden—Truffaut’s stunning debut, The 400 Blows; Jean Renoir’s classic study of the French class system, Rules of the Game; and Dreyer’s chilling study of witchcraft, Day of Wrath—have each undergone full restorations. There are also new prints of great films never shown in the Dryden before, like Agnès Varda’s influential French new wave entry Cléo From 5 to 7; Carlos Saura’s haunting and allegorical Cría Cuervos; and Masaki Kobayashi’s evocative quartet of Japanese ghost stories, Kwaidan.

Each print has been emblazoned with the two-headed logo of Janus, Roman god of new beginnings, a more-than-appropriate symbol for these distributors who have been so influential in changing the face of film culture.

~Jim Healy, Assistant Curator, Exhibitions, Motion Picture Department