Quotes of the Day

Confession of a movie-mad youth: I enjoyed seeing pictures of all kinds, and by my early teens had become a little connoisseur of certain actors, directors and genres—all American, since I was an American kid, and since Hollywood product dominated movie theaters. Then one day, at a Philadelphia art house in early 1959, I saw Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, and saw the light. The knight playing chess with Death, the panorama of medieval questing and suffering, the clowns and flagellants, all convinced me: this was art! There were movies, I knew, and now... there was film! A thing apart and above. The sacred, rarefied, demanding goddess of cinema.

You'd be surprised how many film lovers my age tell exactly the same story, like a mass-hallucination tale from some '50s science-fiction epic. And with the same film cuing the conversion. The Seventh Seal sparked a generation of young people to make foreign-language films their urgent research project, their obsession, their religion. Our interest spread to other Bergman films, to other European and Japanese directors and the actors who graced their works. Soon enough, we noticed that many of these hallowed pictures were distributed by one company: Janus Films.

From the beginning, Janus Films had two corporate hallmarks. One was great taste in choosing films — or perhaps the company's choice of films shaped the tastes of me and my fellow cinephiles. The other was a sprightly and pliable imagination in showcasing movies. The success Janus had with The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries helped it buy the rights to more than a dozen older and newer Bergman films. But instead of releasing them all separately, Janus packaged the lot in a Bergman retrospective. Theaters would book the program for a two- or three-week run, showing double features for a few days each and making available fold-out brochures on the entire series, with notes by a young film critic named Andrew Sarris. (At least, that's how I remember it.) Janus had turned art houses, for this occasion, into repertory cinemas.

Janus was a company that had become a brand — more than that, a beacon. And not just to American moviegoers. In an interview later in his long career, Bergman complained about the shoddy treatment his early films had received in the U.S., with distributors splicing their own footage of nude women into the prints. Then, he said, two young fellows came to see him and showed him and his films the greatest respect. These were the two heads of Janus: Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey.

Fifty years after their founding of Janus Films, the company has evolved into the Criterion Collection, the foremost packager of DVDs of foreign and specialty films. I can't think of another area of popular art, or commerce, where one brand is considered the standard of excellence, so far above its competitors, as Criterion. Consider: that it's the only label to have its own section in many video stores; that a copy of the out-of-print "white ring" edition of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo has been bid up, last time I checked, to $1,025 on eBay, and the auction doesn't end till midnight tomorrow; and that Criterion's new megabox set, Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films, retailing for all of $850, places an impressive #737 on the Amazon.com best-seller list — higher, for example, than any single DVD edition of Citizen Kane.

As Richard Lacayo explains in the illuminating essay that accompanies this one, the company built its lustrous reputation two decades ago in its intermediate stage between Janus the movie distributor and Criterion the DVD producer: as the Voyager label in the brief, glorious age of laser discs. Voyager was noted for the care its took in reproducing, sometimes restoring, pristine print quality. In graphics and production, the discs had the elegance of art books; they were the first coffee-table movies.

Voyager/Criterion also pioneered the plethora of "extras" taken for granted on today's DVDs: the commentary, by the film's director or a noted scholar, which was laid over the sound track, and which discussed the making of the work and the visual and narrative strategies in it; and the supporting materials — director interviews, short films, documentaries on the restoration — that made Voyager laser discs a film class you could play at home.

Weighing in at 13 lbs., 12 oz., Essential Art House is a whole film school in a really big box. It comprises 52 films that Janus either originally released in theaters or picked up after their initial runs for distribution to repertory theaters, 16mm film programs and the more enlightened TV stations. The A list of foreign films is here: Rashomon and Pandora's Box, The 400 Blows and Viridiana, The Third Man and The Lady Vanishes—the basics of an educated person's film education.

I have to say it drives me nuts that these discs don't include any of the extras I've extolled; a Criterion disc without all the cool Easter eggs is missing something... essential. But the box is a testament not to Criterion but to Janus; indeed, to serious lovers of serious films. As such, there's not a richer gift (if you happen to be rich) for someone ready to experience the wonders of movies beyond Hollywood than this sumptuous set.

BACK TO THE FIFTIES

As Peter Cowie describes it in his comprehensive and evocative study of Janus in the 240-page book included with Essential Art House, the company had its roots in the early '50s, when Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey started showing old movies — Humphrey Bogart dramas and W. C. Fields comedies — at the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, Mass. Then Haliday and Harvey had the first of many inspirations, as heralded by a sign on the Brattle facade: "Opening Soon! Foreign Films." With the success of their new program, they moved to New York City and leased the 55th Street Playhouse. And in 1956, from an office in the Wellington Hotel across the street, they launched Janus Films by purchasing a 1951 documentary called La course de taureaux, which they renamed Bullfight.

Their timing was impeccable, for in the U.S., foreign films were at last starting to make a bold impression on the domestic culture. Up to the mid-'40s, foreign films were a cottage industry. Art houses, small theaters in large cities, could be counted in the dozens. They showed French and Soviet films to the cinerati. But there were also many theaters for first- and second-generation immigrants homesick for the kinds of movies they left back in the old country. Hence the foreign-language pictures, typically without subtitles, in German, Greek and Italian neighborhoods.

Then, after the war, America embraced world culture. It was only natural. GI's returning home from their first time abroad had some residual interest in the cultures of Europe and Asia; and the souvenirs they wanted were not so much of the war they'd served in as of the women — war brides and whore-brides — they had encountered. So to add a touch of exotica or erotica to their movies, American producers imported actresses from France (Corinne Calvet, Francoise Rosay), Austria (Maria Schell), Japan (Miyoshi Umeki) and especially Italy (Alida Valli, Sophia Loren, Anna Magnani, Gina Lollobrigida, Silvana Mangano ... and the twins: Pier Angeli and Marisa Pavan). These actresses and others gave an appealing face, and body, to foreign films, which had then what most of them lack now: star quality.

As I've written on this site before (http://www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,127065,00.html), foreign films were just one aspect of America's fascination with the world outside itself. Not everybody, but a significant minority plunged into non-U.S. books, music, theater precisely because they were different. But foreign films profited the most from this curiosity, because they were movies.

Sometimes they became mainstream hits, like Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which, in tickets sold, may still be the all-time foreign-language boxoffice champ. The hits spawned satellites: suddenly Italian films were hot. In the years after La Dolce Vita, dozens of pasta pictures played the big cities; foreign-film fans sought them out because of the director, the stars, the country. Another Italian film of less reputable pedigree turned into a hit: the shock-documentary Mondo Cane, on which we can blame not just a raft of cheap-n-sleazy Mondo movies but the wedding-reception standard "More," which had been Mondo Cane's theme song.

DECLINE AND DVD

No specialized form of pop culture could keep the heat up for long, and in the mid-'60s the foreign-language film wave started to ebb. In 1966, Haliday and Harvey gave up control of Janus, with Haliday going to Europe to concentrate on his acting career. (IMDb notes that two of the films he appeared in, Devil Doll and The Projected Man, were cheesy enough to be riffed on Mystery Science Theater 3000.) The company was taken over by Saul Turrell and William Becker, who steered Janus into its non-theatrical middle age, and whose sons Jonathan Turrell and Peter Becker run Criterion today. They eventually did fine; the foreign-film genre didn't.

You can guess the reasons for the decline of foreign-film cachet. Some European directors came to Hollywood, as they had decades before, because that's where the action was and is. The two enticements foreign films offered U.S. audiences — intellectual panache, with a little sex — were no longer unique once Hollywood raised its I.Q. and dropped its drawers. Later still, many of the best filmmakers died or retired, and the films, frankly, weren't as exciting. (Or maybe, after all those years, we of the first film generation weren't so easily excited.) And the art houses that regularly played exotics from abroad switched to Sundance-type indie movies. Foreign-film revenue gradually dropped from its '60s high of about 5% of the total U.S. box office. Today it is .5% — one-tenth what it was.

Around the same time, the American film industry spread its power and conquered the world, dominating every market it was allowed into. And Americans became more self-centered, less interested in anything non-American, including movies. This ignorance of national, ethnic, religious and artistic cultures different from, even alien to, ours was reflected in American movie habits as well as in American foreign policy. In both cases, by wearing those blinkers we missed out on what the rest of the world thought of itself and us.

There are still foreign-language hits — the martial-arts romance Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the oh-really-it-was-French? documentary March of the Penguins, the all-Aramaic Passion of the Christ. But those are flukes. Almost no foreign films make so much as $10 million in U.S. theaters. Ask most Americans about foreign films and they'll say they don't go to the movies to read. (These are the same people addicted to the running ribbons of copy on the news channels and the glut of statistics flashed on the screen during sports events.) In a way, foreign films are back where they were 60 years ago. They are patronized by a small coterie of educated Americans, and by a significant slice of first- and second-generation foreigners: the Indian diaspora that still loves its Bollywood musicals.

I made some of these points at a Venice Film Festival panel on foreign films in the U.S. And every one of my colleagues made another point: foreign films may be dying in theaters, but they are surviving, thriving, soaring on DVD. As Jonathan Rosenbaum, film critic for The Chicago Reader and DVD reviewer for cinema-scope.com, noted, there's a wealth of international cinema out there, including films that never play in American theaters or film festivals — and it's all on disc, to be rented or bought, either online or at the more comprehensive video stores.

As someone who sees most of the movies that most interest him in venues other than traditional theaters, I can't disagree. I plunder the treasures at Kim's, a Manhattan video chain that embraces both the ineffable and the unspeakable — Kenji Mizoguchi and Jesus Franco. And I scan the Internet for films other people may think of as obscure, and I call essential. Who knows what the Essential Art House movies of the next 50 years will be? Nobody knows. But we can be pretty sure that we won't see them in theaters like the Brattle or the 55th Street Playhouse, let alone your 24-screen Googolplex. The kids of the future, knocked for a loop by their own, 21st century Seventh Seal, will see it on a TV or computer screen.

Maybe it'll be beamed directly into their brains. That's how I felt when Bergman and Janus showed me what film could be.

• Richard Corliss
• Janus, the premier foreign-movie distributor of the '50s has become Criterion, the great DVD producer of our time