COVID on Screen: Are Movies and TV Avoiding the Pandemic?
variety.comElsa Keslassy International CorrespondentIn the early days of what we used to call “coronavirus” in March 2020, before we all became budding epidemiologists, people flocked to Steven Soderbergh’s eerily prophetic 2011 drama “Contagion” on streaming services.
Within a month or so, the movie was propelled from the 270th slot to the second most watched film in the Warner Bros. library, according to numbers from iTunes.Two years down the line, COVID-19, which shut down the world and altered our way of life, hasn’t yet made its way into many series and movies, apart from a handful of fleeting acknowledgements. (Berlin competition contender “Both Sides of the Blade” from Claire Denis is one such example.) For comparison, the Spanish Flu, which killed more than 50 million people worldwide over roughly two years following World War I, is still nearly invisible in popular culture to this day. “There have been movies about all the Balkans wars, about the world wars and hardly anything on pandemics, and even if you look at photography, what has been shown from this Spanish Flu era?
Almost nothing. No one can really say much,” says Fredric Boyer, the artistic director of the Tribeca Film Festival.Boyer points out that the most compelling films about imaginary pandemics have been written before or after these dark historical chapters by visionary filmmakers, for instance, Leos Carax’s “Mauvais Sang” (1986). “This cult film with Juliette Binoche was not only about a deadly virus but also also about the Earth heating up, way before we started talking about global warming,” says Boyer.“There’s an emotional exhaustion about the subject because we’re still in it.
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