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Jawnts: From movie screen to silk screen art

The huge Brutalist bulk of Philadelphia's International House looms near the intersection of Chestnut and 37th Streets. Inside are dorms, eclectically outfitted vending machines, and a movie theater.

The exhibition "You Don't Belong to This Century" will be at Philadelphia International House until Tuesday. The collection is by Justin Miller.
The exhibition "You Don't Belong to This Century" will be at Philadelphia International House until Tuesday. The collection is by Justin Miller.Read moreJAKE BLUMGART / Staff

The huge Brutalist bulk of Philadelphia's International House looms near the intersection of Chestnut and 37th Streets. Inside are dorms, eclectically outfitted vending machines, and a movie theater.

For the last five years, a bimonthly parade of American art house and classic European and Japanese movies have flashed across the International House screen. They have come courtesy of Janus Films, a distribution company that made its name by bringing little-seen foreign films to U.S. audiences.

This series inspired Justin Miller, the institution's associate creative director, to create eight silk-screened posters of some of his favorite films. The collection, shown in the art gallery at the theater entrance until Tuesday, is called "You Don't Belong to This Century." It is accompanied by a huge rendition of Janus, the two-faced Roman god of beginnings and endings, that Miller painted on the wall.

Miller's collection takes its name from a line in one of the films he celebrates, the Czechoslovakian New Wave masterpiece Daisies (uttered by a character to send up pretentious young men). In this 70-minute blast of exuberant chaos, two young women tear down the stifling, patriarchal world around them after declaring everything to be "spoiled." Their response is to throw themselves a ceaseless party. Miller says the original posters for movies like Daisies were a huge inspiration, as artists living under communism often used them to articulate ideas they were not allowed to express elsewhere. "They were considered commercial so they weren't censored like other kinds of art," Miller said.

The other films celebrated in the posters are The Spirit of the Beehive (Spain), Stranger Than Paradise (U.S.), Red Desert (Italy), Black Moon (Germany and France), Pierrot le Fou, and La Jetee (France) - this last was the photo essay that inspired 12 Monkeys.

"I was trying to include films that spoke to me on a personal level and from a fairly diverse range of regions - although I tend to gravitate toward French cinema," Miller said.

Once the exhibition ends, 12 copies of each print will be available for $40 each on Miller's website, hauntlove.com.