Last week, a new Inverness Film Fans (InFifa) season launched with Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Check out the rest of the line-up below alongside InFifa's Tony Janssens preview of the season.
Metamorphosis is a striking change in appearance, circumstances, condition, character of a person; it is the action or process of changing in form, shape or substance.
- The Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, volume IX
I have come up with a Metamorphosed Seven, bookending the season with the same story – Invasion of The Body Snatchers. The 1956 version deals with the differences between a human and an automaton-like existence - now even more urgent with the rapid rise and risks of AI. The remake - two decades later - deals more specifically with the "me" generation, the selfishness in society and its equally unlimited rise and damage. Don Siegel’s Body Snatchers has become one of the best known sci-fi films, gaining a legendary status. The witty, more opulent Kaufman remake is less raw, not as sharply focussed, but the fear of turning into a vegetable or the dread that someone intimate suddenly becomes aloof and unfeeling towards us prevails like it did in the original.
The other films in the season are simply great classics, made by supreme stylists, each of the films clearly infused by each director's highly individual traits.
Mamoulian’s version (innovatively photographed by Karl Struss) of the Robert Louis Stevenson novel Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was only the third film he made. It explores the cinematic language of movement, lighting and sound decades ahead of its time. A key scene is a 360-degree panning shot, the first of its kind, and the director's own heartbeat forms part of the soundtrack, determining the rhythm of the film. Made before the Hays code self-censored American pictures, the brutality and terror remain shocking, but it's the accent on the sexuality of its protagonists that makes even contemporary films seem prudish.
Screening Jacques Tourneur’s spellbinding Cat People, made ten years later and based on a Serbian legend about a woman who changes into a felid creature when in a jealous rage, will give viewers another wild surprise. It shows how inventively an outstanding director could elude the - by then – far stricter rules imposed by censors.
The subtle yet chilling film of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray persuades the audience to do most of the scaring. Although the storyline is well known, Harry Stradling’s Oscar-winning deep-focus photography, Lewin’s suggestive direction and the perfect casting of George Sanders as manipulator, Hurd Hatfield as hedonist, build up to an extraordinary final scene - truly Wild(ean).
I wanted Ingmar Bergman's The Hour of the Wolf as part of the seven, but like so many foreign films it isn't available. Luckily Nic Ray's Bigger Than Life is. A flop when it was released, and still underappreciated, this is one of the best American films of the fifties, in that it shows how alienation, mania and inflated ego have all been spreading in America - while a patriarchal structure, no matter how destructively chaotic, is firmly kept in place.
Every season contains a dark horse, and the Japanese horror movie Onibaba, simultaneously lyrical and macabre, fits the bill perfectly. It is in tune not only with the theme of change that runs through the season but with the very human concepts of the will to survive and the sexual instinct. Set in medieval Japan where men are fighting endless wars, a mother and daughter are forced to take extreme measures in order to stay alive, resulting in a catastrophic impact on their personalities.
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