”Je est un autre” (Rimbaud) 

A module of facial transplant movies that delves into the consequences of exterior changes on inner personality. Not a John Travolta and Nicolas Cage blockbuster this time, but a quartet of film classics representing a different genre, style and period: film noir of the 1940s, French horror, Japanese New Wave and 1960s neo-noir.

 

Each film is, in its own way, a Faustian nightmare that not only explores the central theme of changing identities but also shares a sense of paranoia, terror and pure insanity through both content and style, making use of disorienting edits and expressionist cinematography to cultivate a fractured universe. And if the idea of a complete facial transplant were nothing but a purely grotesque fantasy at the time these films were made, today the metaphor is more relevant than ever. In an era of Nip/Tuck, The Swan and Extreme Makeover, these excessive surgical transformations are no longer the stuff of science fiction, they are a daily reality.