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By Michael Hootman

INGMAR BERGMAN VOLUME 2 (BFI Blu-ray).

It’s hardly an overstatement to say the BFI’s continuing collection of the director’s work represents pretty much the crown jewels of European cinema. The director blends human drama with some of the most beautifully composed images in film. The works pose – and thankfully don’t try to answer – important philosophical questions, but they’re also not without humour: even something as dark as The Seventh Seal has scenes of warmth and comedy filmed with a deft lightness of touch.

Bergman has the technical prowess coupled with a direct emotional connection to his characters and therefore the audience. Apart from The Seventh Seal, Volume 2 contains masterworks such as his joyful romantic comedy Smiles of a Summer Night. A retired doctor looks back at his life and faces up to his own flaws in Wild Strawberries. Summer With Monika has a young man giving up a menial job to throw his lot in with a beautiful young woman. Gothic romance mixes with a meditation on art and truth as Max von Sydow stars as a travelling hypnotist in The Magician.

The set also includes A Lesson In Love, Summer Interlude, Waiting Women, a short film, Karin’s Face, plus other extras and a 100-page bound book of essays.

SHORT SHARP SHOCKS VOL 2 (BFI Bluray).

Like its predecessor this collection of macabre shorts is a fascinating look not so much at horror or the supernatural but at the representation of England in cinema. Quiz Crime shows some beastly murders where the audience have to spot the clues to the perp’s identity. Both films seem to rely on the killer lying pointlessly; they’re done without any claim to art but are both great examples of a kind of cinema that has – with some justification – been completely forgotten.

The Three Children is a public information film about road safety, yet its off-kilter atmosphere and paedophilic representation of death make it an extraordinary example of the genre. I had high hopes for Mingoloo as the director, from his work in Vol 1, seemed to be an English Ed Wood; the title itself had me chuckling for a good week before the discs arrived. But it turns out to be complete nonsense which drags on until it gets to a twist, the relevance of which had me completely baffled. Escape from Broadmoor is a decent ghost story which gives the viewer the chance to see the lovely John Le Mesurier playing a psychotic criminal.

The most charitable word I can use to describe a promo for Screaming Lord Sutch’s song Jack the Ripper is ‘unfortunate’. The Face of Darkness is a fantastic find, a real one-of-a-kind about an extreme right-wing politician who raises the corpse of a 15th-century man to do his bidding.

Hangman is a training film about dangers in the construction industry in which a masked executioner talks us through some terrible, but preventable, deaths. The Mark of Lilith is an experimental lesbian vampire film, which is as boring as being forced to watch a lecture on the patriarchy – partly because it actually includes a lecture on the patriarchy.

The Dumb Waiter stars Geraldine James in an English riff on Halloween, which has the feel that its funding was abruptly pulled and so it ends just as it starts to get going. Crazy, terrible, weird and wonderful, this is a fascinating assortment.

INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (BFI Blu-ray).

Don Siegel’s 1956 sci-fi horror is one of the classics of the genre, a seminal work which has been the inspiration for films as diverse as Night of the Living Dead to The Stepford Wives. In a sleepy California town a doctor, played by Kevin McCarthy, finds a rash of patients who seem to be suffering from the same delusion: namely that their relatives have been replaced by imposters.

With his girlfriend, played by Dana Wynter, he gradually comes to learn the strange and sinister truth. In terms of pacing, the movie is 80 minutes which never let up. It sets up its initial sense of unease, there’s a classic false-sense-of-security scene and as soon as that’s been blown it runs full tilt into the horror. It’s a surprisingly downbeat film in which there’s no pre-credit final clinch for the doctor and the woman he loves. In fact it was so downbeat that a prologue and epilogue had to be tacked on to make it more acceptable to the audience. Its true ending, of a man screaming the unacceptable truth only to be ignored as either drunk or crazy, is brilliant and its dilution is a bit of a shame.

Apart from being a wonderful genre picture, part of its greatness lies in its protean ability to sustain a number of readings. It could equally be about the evils of McCarthyite conformity or the infiltration of Communism. Extras include a thoroughly charming commentary in which Wynter and McCarthy reminisce about making the film, an analysis of the film’s themes and, in a wonderful piece of BFI idiosyncrasy, some botanical shorts from the early part of the 20th century.