Essential Art House Vol. 1 - Janus Films

The first volume in Janus Films’s release of 50 classic films to celebrate their 50-year anniversary of delivering high quality foreign films to the masses. Region 1, NTSC. Features TBA. Included in volume 1 are the following titles:

Grand Illusion - Jean Renoir’s pacifist masterpiece stars Jean Gabin as a French World War I POW held by Erich Von Stroheim’s German captain. One of the greatest antiwar films ever made, as well as a rousing prison-escape adventure, Grand Illusion is an exemplar of the 1930s poetic realist movement.

Beauty and the Beast - Jean Cocteau reinvented the fairy tale for the cinema with this enchanting, exquisitely realized vision of Mme Le Prince de Beaumont’s fantasy romance. With all manner of unparalleled visual effects and photographic tricks, Cocteau makes the spellbinding tale of transformative love both ethereal and tangible, and his indelible images haunt the cinema like no others.

Lord of the Flies - Under the direction of Peter Brook, William Golding’s classic fable, about a swarm of young boys who, without adult supervision, devolve into chaos after crash-landing on a remote island during wartime, becomes an unforgettable work of cinematic horror. Shot with almost verite camera work, Lord of the Flies takes a radical approach to Golding’s metaphor, grounding it in a terrifying reality.

Wild Strawberries - Weaving a tapestry of memory and dreams, Ingmar Bergman delves into the past of aged professor Isak Borg, en route to receive an award from his alma mater for a life he no longer understands. Following directly on the heels of his international breakthrough The Seventh Seal, the alternately warm and nightmarish Wild Strawberries cemented Bergman as the leading art-house visionary of his era.

Knife in the Water - A husband, a wife, a stranger, a knife: Roman Polanski sets them all adrift on a weekend filled with simmering resentments and gut-churning suspense in his seminal psychological thriller, still one of the greatest feature debuts in film history. With Knife in the Water, Polanski revealed his delight in exploring sexual and class boundaries with ruthless precision.

Rashomon - Akira Kurosawa’s critically-acclaimed Oscar-winning drama. Sometime in 12th-century Japan a bandit (Toshiro Mifune) is accused of raping a woman and killing her husband. Four very different versions of the story are represented as the bandit, the victim, the ghost of the murdered man, and a lowly peasant each give their own account of events. Japanese AC3 audio track with English subtitles.

For the separate “Essential Art House” release of “Rashoman”, see this post.

Available at the following retailer(s) on September 9, 2008:

• Amazon.com
• Amazon.ca
• YesAsia