August 20, 2006
44th New York Film Festival
Lineup Announced!
Sure, the Tribeca Film Festival is big but that film festival has always seemed like it's been more about quantity than quality. The other major festival in town is the New York Film Festival and this years lineup shows that in spite of its much more modest size, the NYFF is still the B.M.O.C.
The festival with open with Stephen Frear's The Queen and close with Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth.
Other films playing include Bong Joon Ho's The Host, Michael Apted's latest installment of the "Up series," 49 Up, and more from directors such as Sofia Coppola, David Lynch, Alain Resnais, Johnny To, Hong Sang-Soo, and Pedro Almodovar.
But, big names from the international film circuit isn't all the festival has in store. The NYFF is also doing a series entitled "50 Years of Janus Films." I can't even begin to describe how exciting this is so I'll just post the press release:
50 years of Janus Films at the New York Film Festival
FILM SOCIETY OF LINCOLN CENTER ANNOUNCES FESTIVAL DATES
SEPTEMBER 29 OCTOBER 15, 2006
New York Film Festival Retrospective: 50 Years of Janus Films
Renoir, Bergman, Ophuls, Antonioni, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Cocteau, Buñuel, Polanski return to New York in glorious new prints!
CANNES INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL May 16, 2006 The 44th annual NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL will unspool at Lincoln Center from Sept. 29 through Oct. 15, and this years Retrospective will celebrate 50 Years of Janus Films, it was announced today by Claudia Bonn and Richard Peña, executive director and program director respectively of the Film Society of Lincoln Center.
From Italian neo-realism to the French New Wave, from Bergman's existential inquiries to Kurosawa's samurai epics, this years NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL Retrospective promises to be a thrilling, encyclopedic overview of world cinema classics. 50 Years of Janus Films will open with Jean Renoir's humanist masterpiece, The Rules of the Game (1939), on Sept. 30 and will continue through Oct. 27, showcasing unprecedented survey of over 30 world cinema classics, most of them screening in pristine new prints at the Walter Reade Theater.
"This series is our chance to salute 50 years of specialized film programming in New York and the United States," says Peña, chairman of the selection committee of the NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL. "For many decades Janus Films was the gold standard for foreign film releases and much of my own film education came from following Janus film festivals presented practically continuously throughout my teenage years."
Other epochal titles in this luminous survey include: Marcel Carné's Children of Paradise (1945), Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast (1946) and Orpheus (1950), Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954), Federico Fellini's La Strada (1954), Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957), Luis Buñuel's Viridiana (1961), Michelangelo Antonioni's L'eclisse (1962), Roman Polanski's A Knife in the Water (1962), and François Truffaut's The 400 Blows (1959) and Antoine and Colette (1962).
"Our goal with this program is to make available new prints of films that were once staples of the art house revival circuit," says Film Society of Lincoln Center Associate Director of Programming and retrospective curator Kent Jones. "Many film lovers take it for granted that everyone is going to know the movies they knowthe iconic titles like The Seventh Seal and Rules of the Game and The 400 Blows and thats just not the case. These are the films we grew up with, theyre part of our cinematic DNA, but a lot of people have yet to be introduced to them. We are proud to be able to show them in new prints on the big screen and delighted to partner with Janus Films and Criterion on this historic undertaking."
Jones is also a member of the NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL Selection Committee which is comprised of Peña, Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, Vogue and Fresh Air's John Powers and author Phillip Lopate.
The NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL celebrates its 44th anniversary in 2006, continuing an extraordinary tradition of showing the newest and most important cinematic works by directors from around the world. The 17-day noncompetitive festival takes place at Alice Tully Hall and the Walter Reade Theater at Lincoln Center and features inspiring and provocative cinema by emerging talents and first-rank international artists whose films are often recognized as contemporary classics.
Founded in the 1950s, Janus Films became synonymous with bringing the most notable foreign language features to the American market. While the art house revival circuit has in certain respects been eclipsed in recent years by the prevalence of home theaters, 50 Years of Janus Films hopes to reintroduce audiences to the legendary distributors canon of films in the manner in which they were always meant to be experienced, in pristine 35mm. In addition, a number of the titles in the survey are not yet available on DVD or VHS, including director Carlos Sauras rarely screened 1976 masterpiece, Cria! (Cria Cuervos). In the planning stages for over a year, 50 Years of Janus Films marks a glorious return and an inspiring reminder of our shared cinematic history.
Complete list of films
The Phantom Carriage / Victor Sjöstrom, Sweden, 1921
Haxan / Benjamin Christensen, Denmark, 1922
Zero for Conduct / Jean Vigo, France, 1933
The Crime of Monsieur Lange / Jean Renoir, France, 1935
Daybreak / Marcel Carné, France, 1939
Rules of the Game / Jean Renoir, France, 1939
Day of Wrath / Carl Dreyer, Denmark, 1943
Children of Paradise / Marcel Carné, France, 1945
Orpheus / Jean Cocteau, France, 1950
Miracle in Milan / Vittorio de Sica, Italy, 1951
The Earrings of Madame de... / Max Ophuls, France, 1953
Monika / Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1953
Sansho the Bailiff / Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan, 1954
La Strada / Federico Fellini, Italy, 1954
Death of a Cyclist / Juan Antonio Bardem, Spain, 1955
The Cranes Are Flying / Mikhail Kalatotov, USSR, 1957
The Seventh Seal / Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1957
Ashes and Diamonds / Andrzej Wajda, Poland, 1958
The Horses Mouth / Ronald Neame, England, 1958
Fires on the Plain / Kon Ichikawa, Japan, 1959
The 400 Blows / François Truffaut, 1959
Antoine and Colette / François Truffaut, 1962
Le Trou / Jacques Becker, France, 1960
Cléo from 5 to 7 / Agnès Varda, France, 1961
Viridiana / Luis Buñuel, Spain, 1961
Eclipse / Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962
Knife in the Water / Roman Polanski, Poland, 1962
The Organizer / Mario Monicelli, Italy, 1963
Kwaidan / Masaki Kobayashi, Japan, 1964
W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism / Dusan Makavejev, Yugoslavia, 1971
CrÃa Cuervos / Carlos Saura, Spain, 1976
