"The Janus Films icon-the black and white image, the lettering, the two faces on the seemingly ancient coin-meant that you were going to see something special, something new, something completely different from anything you’d ever seen before." - Martin Scorsese

Martin Scorsese’s quote about Janus Films just about says it all. This crusading New York-based distribution company has been instrumental in bringing to American shores some of the most treasured, the most celebrated as well as some of the most provocative cinema classics from all over the world, including England, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Poland, Sweden, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, Japan, China, India, Brazil and other countries to numerous to mention. The one essential is that the films had to be great, no matter they be drama or comedy, mystery or war film, samurai sword play or love story. Subject matter and genre did not matter, as long as the film was a masterpiece. Janus Film releases have featured pantheon directors of world cinema, including Akira Kurosawa, John Ford, Roberto Rosselini, Howard Hawks, Carl Dreyer, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, Jean Vigo, Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Luis Bunuel, Carlos Saura to name only a handful. Please join us for this celebration of 50 years of Janus Films. LACMA will also be paying tribute to Janus in Marc and April, with a different selection of films.

Series compiled By Gwen Deglise, Program notes Dennis Bartok, Chris D and William Boodell.

Wednesday, March 28 – 7:30 PM

New 35mm Print! HIGH AND LOW, 1963, Janus Films, 142 min. Dir. Akira Kurosawa. Ed McBain's 87th Precinct mystery King's Ransom provides an ideal starting point for Akira Kurosawa's study of a man who must measure the extent of his responsibility to others in a society with a huge gulf between the haves and have-nots. Toshiro Mifune stars as a Yokohama shoe manufacturer who has just arranged a 50-million-yen loan in order to gain control of his corporation. His phone rings and a kidnapper (Tsutomu Yamazaki) demands the very same amount in ransom for his only son. That the kidnapper has taken the son of his chauffeur by mistake only makes the manufacturer's dilemma worse: must he face financial ruin in order to save the life of another man's child? The answer lies in this supremely stylish and suspenseful film, as visually and structurally dazzling as it is provocative. With unflagging support from Tatsuya Nakadai as the unassuming head police inspector, Kenjiro Ishiyama and Isao Kimura as dogged police detectives, Kyoko Kagawa as Mifune’s wife and, last but not least, Tatsuya Mihashi as Mifune’s double-dealing personal secretary.

Thursday, March 29 – 7:30 PM

New 35mm Print! CRIA CUERVOS, 1976, Janus Films, 115 min. Dir. Carlos Saura. The marvelous, almost otherworldly Ana Torrent (SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE, THESIS) stars as an 8-year-old girl who is convinced she holds the power of life and death over her house’s inhabitants. The title refers to an old Spanish saying: "Raise crows and they’ll peck out your eyes." Winner of the Special Jury Award at Cannes, CRIA CUERVOS is Saura at his very best -- mysterious, breathtaking, inescapable. With Geraldine Chaplin. "Ana Torrent, Conchita Perez and Maite Sanchez Alexandros constitute the most extraordinary incarnations of childhood I have seen on the screen. To watch these three girls... is to see childhood at long last as a jungle of wild feelings in which death is stared at without flinching." -- Andrew Sarris, Village Voice

SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE (EL ESPIRITU DE LA COLMENA), 1973, Janus Films, 95 min. Dir. Victor Erice. A film of sublime silence and mystery, equal to the best of Tarkovsky or Antonioni, starring Ana Torrent as an intense young girl who searches the barren fields outside her town, looking for the disembodied spirit of Frankenstein’s monster. Erice’s first feature film was widely hailed as a masterpiece on its release, a near-perfect blend of myth and pure cinematic imagination. The fragile Torrent became, ironically, as haunting a symbol as the film itself – critic Luis Arata noted that "her big soft black eyes seem to be open windows into her mind, where much of THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE actually takes place," and Katherine Kovacs memorably described her as "wandering like a sleepwalker across a vast and bleak countryside, where the wind never blows and the sun never shines."

Friday, March 30 – 7:30 PM

New 35mm Print! THE SEVENTH SEAL, 1957, Janus Films, 92 min. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Arguably Bergman’s most iconic film and the movie that helped create the international arthouse cinema craze of the 1950’s. While the Black Plague rages all around, medieval knight Max von Sydow plays a game of chess with Death … but who will win? Often imitated and parodied but never equaled, THE SEVENTH SEAL is an astonishing, protean masterpiece: a film to storm the gates of Heaven with. Winner of the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. "Bergman's spiritual quest is at the center of the films he made in the middle of his career. THE SEVENTH SEAL opens that period, in which he asked, again and again, why God seemed absent from the world." – Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

WILD STRAWBERRIES, 1957, Janus Films, 91 min. Dir. Ingmar Bergman. Bergman at his finest: an aging professor (played to perfection by Victor Sjostrom, himself a great director of the silent era) reflects on the bitter dregs of his life as he approaches his final day of reckoning. To this day few filmmakers have gazed as deeply into the human heart as Bergman did here. Co-starring the sublime Ingrid Thulin as Sjostrom’s disillusioned daughter-in-law and Gunnar Bjornstrand as his bitter son. With Bibi Andersson. "…this wonderfully composed movie in which Bergman is able to vary the tone from melancholy to gaiety in the most deeply satisfying way." – Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian (UK)

Saturday, March 31 – 7:30 PM

New 35mm Print! ZERO FOR CONDUCT (ZERO DE CONDUITE), 1933, Janus Films, 41 min. Dir. Jean Vigo. Although he only made two features and a pair of shorts before his tragic early death in 1934, French director Jean Vigo remains one of the guiding lights of French cinema. This, his first feature, shows why: at a repressive boarding school a group of students decide to revolt, leading to full-scale (and wildly surreal) anarchy. Suppressed for decades in France, ZERO FOR CONDUCT went on to inspire everyone from Truffaut (THE 400 BLOWS) to Lindsay Anderson (IF …).

New 35mm Print! JULES AND JIM, 1962, Janus Films, 105 min. Dir. Francois Truffaut. Love, Truffaut-style … Jeanne Moreau is the elusive, sad-eyed object of desire, and Oskar Werner and Henri Serre her two lovers, in this bittersweet adaptation of the Henri-Pierre Roche novel. For many, the movie that defined the very essence of the French New Wave.

New 35mm Print! CLÉO FROM 5 TO 7, 1951, Janus Films, 90 min. Agnes Varda’s breakthrough film, two hours in the life of a hopelessly pretty pop singer (Corrine Marchand), who may or may not be dying of cancer. CLEO ranks with BREATHLESS and THE 400 BLOWS as one of the seminal works of the French New Wave. "The streets of Paris are filmed like they have never again been filmed." – Telerama

Sunday, April 1 – 7:30 PM

New 35mm Print! VIRIDIANA, 1961, Janus Films, 90 min. One of director Luis Buñuel’s most brilliant, scandalous films was banned in his homeland of Spain and almost had him arrested in Milan! A novice nun (Silvia Pinal) finds herself corrupted by her spectacularly wicked uncle, Fernando Rey – until she turns the tables by installing a group of beggars and lepers in his rural mansion. Bunuel gradually, mischievously weaves a web of contradictory impulses: faith, hope, charity and selflessness become inextricably bound up with lust, hypocrisy, sloth and greed in the schizophrenic universe of Old World Latin Catholicism. Co-starring longtime Buñuel friend Francisco Rabal (GOYA IN BOURDEAUX). "Luis Buñuel returned to his native Spain to create this 1961 masterpiece, which marked his rebirth as a filmmaker of international repute. " – Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader; "…no less than a schematic attack on Catholic piety… a clawhammered critique of liberal aristos, responsible for constructing a society that creates a beggar class and then "doing good" through fits of unwelcome charity. " – Michael Atkinson, Village Voice