The research group Critical Inquiry hosts 'Green Screens: Xenoecologies', a series of screenings and discussions on ecology, environment and cinema, taking a closer look at imaginaries of ecologies from beyond Earth’s ecosystems. In this session, we will watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), a science fiction film directed by Philip Kaufman.

Organised by Callum Copley, this programme of three screenings will explore the encounter between humans and alien Others and attempt to understand how cinematic depictions of these events betray deeper Western anxieties of “reverse colonisation”, contamination and replacement, to name a few. How have we perceived aliens and what imagined threat they pose? What fears about humanity’s own actions and the current state of Earth do we project onto these external, speculative lifeforms? During the series, we will view the selected films and, after, for those who wish to stick around, discuss their explicit ecological themes and subtexts.

In this session, we will watch Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), a science fiction film directed by Philip Kaufman. This remake of the 1965 classic sci-fi film (itself based on a novel from the year prior) involves a San Francisco health inspector and his colleague who discover that alien duplicates are replacing humans; each a perfect copy of the person replaced but devoid of human emotion. Among many other themes, this psychological drama is a lamentation for the end of the counterculture of the 1960s, and uses invading alien ecologies (xeno-mono-cultures) as a vehicle to explore such ideas. The film is wrought with the paranoia and anxieties that pervaded the USA at this time (during the height of the cold war), and as such, explores this notion of an "invisible enemy at home", albeit in the form of gelatinous creatures that take the form of small pods with pink flowers.