Category

Janus Films

From The Grindhouse Cinema Database

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Founded in 1956, Janus Films is an American film distribution company that covers both arthouse and grindhouse films. The studio was founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Bryant Haliday and Cyrus Harvey Jr. in the Brattle Theater. They purchased the theater and turned it into a movie house for art films. They brought the works of such acclaimed directors as Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Sergei Eisenstein, Michelangelo Antonioni, François Truffaut, Akira Kurosawa, Satyajit Ray, Yasujirō Ozu and many others to America. Bergman's The Seventh Seal was a major early hit for them. Haliday and Harvey sold the company in 1965 due to a decline in the art-film market. Kino Lorber acquired the rights to the company's film library in the 1970s.

They have a close business relationship with The Criterion Collection.

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