Essential Art House.

Dave Kehr opens his overview in the New York Times of the Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films collection - 50 DVDs, handsomely bound with "a 240-page book of notes, credits and stills on all 50 titles," all for a reasonable yet, for most of us, prohibitive $850 - with a comparison Charles William Eliot's 50-volume set of world literature published in 1909, the "five-foot shelf" which "found a place in countless American homes as it was published and republished over much of the 20th century." He notes that "it says a lot about the central role Janus has played in American film culture that the selections made by a modestly staffed for-profit distribution house have come to assume almost as much canonical authority as Mr Eliot's choices."

Updated through 11/15.

Time's given Richard Corliss space for a full appreciation, and it's a fine read, tracing his initial conversion to the worship of the "sacred, rarefied, demanding goddess of cinema" to that evangelist to a generation, The Seventh Seal. There's space, too, for the story of the company that takes us from the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge to the Criterion Collection, an arc that also happens to map foreign films' journey in the US pop cultural landscape from the theater to the DVD player.

And there's more from John Powers on NPR, but while we're on the subject of Criterion, Richard Lacayo has a generously annotated top ten from the Collection for Time - and at the site itself, Peter Cowie, who's written an essay on Janus for the Essential box, has another: "These are not necessarily my favorite films, nor the best DVDs that Criterion has published. (What, no Kurosawa, no Renoir, no Fellini!?) They are, though, films that continue to surprise me each time I watch them."

Update, 11/15: Max Goldberg at SF360: "American film culture as we know it - university departments, the serious criticism found in magazines like Film Comment and increasingly on the web, the repertory programming which makes organizations like the Pacific Film Archive institutions in their own right - is unthinkable without Janus's spark."

Posted by dwhudson at November 11, 2006 4:10 AM