The Dark Heart of the Cinema Update

Face/Off
Greetings fellow travelers, I hope your respective cinematic journeys have been dark and strange in the days since we last spoke.  Allow me to apologize for the lapse in posts, but I assure you there is a pot of gold at the end of this Blackest Rainbow.  I followed a film tangent from the noir films that I had been immersing myself in, propelled by Dark Passage into rewatching John Frankenheimer's Seconds, to the strange and small world of face-transplant/plastic-surgery films.  This lead to the idea of a series of posts analyzing these films, and looking at them within the context of a genre cinema, in an attempt to establish some of the underlying cultural subtexts of the face transplant film, and perhaps the significance of their existence as a subgenre/pastiche of various seemingly unrelated types of cinema.

The List
This is the list of films that I came up with that were of potential interest.  This is more or less the complete list of films that I could find pertaining to face transplants and extreme plastic surgery.  There are obvious omissions which warrant further investigation (Face/Off, The Hands of Orlac), and perhaps I will exmine those further, but these are the films I watched and rewatched in my examination of this theme. 

• Eyes Without A Face (1960) Georges Franju
• The Face of Another (1966) Hiroshi Teshigahara
• Dark Passage (1947) Delmer Daves
• Time (2007) Kim Ki-Duk
• Seconds (1966) John Frankenheimer

Conveniently, I managed to incorporate this topic of interest into a [relatively long] research paper.  The whole thing came together as an analysis of Seconds, but examines the face-transplant theme within the greater context of film, citing many of these other films, and some literature pertaining to plastic surgery in South Korea as a means of making connections to the world outside of cinema.  Not sure on whether I want to post the entire piece, or perhaps just a shortened streamlined version to fit the blog, but my next post will [hopefully] shed some light on this overlooked area of cinema.

 Recent Viewing:

• Father Ted episodes
• Winter's Bone
• Black Swan
• The King's Speech
• Red Riding Trilogy
• Grindhouse blu-ray
• Logan's Run
• Sin City
• Machete
• all sorts of other great genre stuff...

Perhaps after the face transplant post, I will feature a post discussing some of the academy award nominees, and my thoughts regarding them.  Salud!