As part of its semicentennial, the foreign-film distributor Janus Films has struck new prints of more than 30 features, which will screen at the Music Box through Sunday, March 11. Series passes are available for $30 (five admissions) and $50 (ten admissions). Following are screenings through Thursday, January 18; for a complete schedule visit musicboxtheatre.com.
RCleo From 5 to 7 Agnes Varda’s 1961 New Wave feature–recounting two hours in the life of a French pop singer (Corinne Marchand) while she waits to learn from her doctor whether she’s terminally ill–is arguably her best work, rivaled only by her Vagabond (1985) and The Gleaners and I (2000). Beautifully shot and realized, this film offers an irreplaceable time capsule of Paris, and fans of Michel Legrand won’t want to miss the extended sequence in which he visits the heroine and rehearses with her. The film’s approximations of real time are exactly that–the total running time is 90 minutes–but innovative and thrilling nonetheless. Underrated when it came out and unjustly neglected since, it’s not only the major French New Wave film made by a woman but a key work of that exciting period–moving, lyrical, and mysterious. With Antoine Bourseiller. In French with subtitles. (JR) Screening in a double feature with Zero de Conduite (see separate listing). a Sat 1/13, 2 PM, and Mon 1/15, 9:20 PM.
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The Seventh Seal Returning from the Crusades, a 14th-century knight finds his homeland devastated by the plague and swept by a religious mania. He discovers that he is no longer able to pray, but just as his faith reaches a low ebb, death comes calling in the person of a very grim reaper. The ending is a cliff-hanger: the knight challenges death to a chess game, hoping to win himself enough time to settle his doubts. Ingmar Bergman’s 1956 film is still his most celebrated (probably because the stark imagery reproduces so well in still photographs), yet Bergman himself later repudiated it. It survives today only as an unusually pure example of a typical 50s art-film strategy: the attempt to make the most modern and most popular of art forms acceptable to the intelligentsia by forcing it into an arcane, antique mold (here the form of medieval allegory). The film in fact consists of a series of very dull speeches spun on simple themes; Bergman barely tries to make the material function dramatically. With Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, and Bengt Ekerot. In Swedish with subtitles. 96 min. (DK) a Tue 1/16, 5:45 PM.
RZero de Conduite Jean Vigo’s 1933 masterpiece charts the rebellion of three young French boys in a sordid little provincial boarding school. A wholly original creation, the film walks a narrow line between surrealist farce and social realism. The most famous sequence, which leads directly to Lindsay Anderson’s If …, has the boys atop the school on graduation day, merrily dumping garbage on the assembled dignitaries–some of whom are cardboard cutouts. In French with subtitles. 44 min. (DK) Screening in a double feature with Cleo From 5 to 7 (see separate listing). a Sat 1/13, 2 PM, and Mon 1/15, 9:20 PM.
