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