The Many Faces of Janus

Whether they were bred in the musty rep houses of yesteryear, public TV or video, cinephiles know the coin-on-blue-stucco logo of Janus Films like old explorers knew the North Star. There was a time—from the ’50s to the ’70s, the belle epoque for art film—when scores of imported movies, and virtually any older global classic of significance, bore the company’s insignia. Starting Jan. 3 at the Belcourt and continuing through the end of February, the touring package “50 Years of Janus Films” offers a golden-anniversary homage to this venerable distributor. Surviving today as a library distributed to TV and DVD, Janus lists a crash-course Cinema 101 of international masterpieces. Many are available on lovely Criterion DVDs already, but a substantial hunk remains, in this century, rarely screened and all but forgotten in modern film culture. The 30 films in this traveling retrospective have only their Janus-ness to connect them, so the range is titanic—from Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938) to Dusan Makavejev’s Slavic act of post-Godard transgression W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (1971). At the same time, there’s a certain uniformity in the movies’ risk-taking uniqueness. Janus was apparently never interested in buying up placid audience-pleasers or middlebrow echoes of what made an arthouse splash the month before. The outfit looked for auteurs, because in the postwar decades, personal vision and substance of statement were what sold in the urban market. Start with a pair of films that, though they might not even live up to their august reps today, should be required viewing for any filmgoer to earn the right to praise Quentin Tarantino or impatiently dismiss Abbas Kiarostami: Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) and Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957). But there are also the gimmes, the oft-screened landmarks that have only bloomed with resonance and grace with the years and should belong to the cultural arsenal of every film buff: Jean Vigo’s rebel yell Zero de Conduite (1933), Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939), Carl Dreyer’s forbidding wartime witch-hunt saga Day of Wrath (1943), Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff (1954) and François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959). Personal favorites not to be overlooked, and arguably the retro’s most romantic inclusions: Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying (1957), a war-torn Soviet love story by the director and wizardly cinematographer of I Am Cuba; and Agnés Varda’s breakthrough film Cleo From 5 to 7 (1961), which New Wavishly dances around the lovelorn vacuum of a celebrity beauty (Corinne Marchand, oh my) convinced she has cancer. But as always, the rare and DVD-unavailable should make the headlines. Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (1955) is a savage interrogation of Franco regime privilege and class abuse that traces the ethical perversions of a pair of adulterous lovers as they decide to abandon a pedestrian they accidentally run down. Now receiving its widest exposure in decades, thanks to the joint efforts of Janus and Criterion, Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) remains arguably the finest and most beautifully wrought first film of the European ’70s. Set in post–Spanish Civil War 1940, the movie dreamily documents a rural village’s quotidian. But Erice’s symbol-drunk film does it so elliptically that, as is the vogue in recent Asian cinema, half the story and all of the backstory must be sought at the movie’s fringes, between its scenes and in its silent ruminations. Shot in an unforgettably jaundiced twilight (the cinematographer, Luis Cuadrado, was reportedly going blind during the shoot, and killed himself in 1980), Beehive is a graceful and potent lyric on children’s vulnerable hunger. But it’s also a sublime study of cinema’s poetic capacity to reflect and hypercharge reality—which could serve as the underlying principle of this remarkable series.