Manoj Barpujari– Effects of Pandemic and Cinema
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E-CineIndia April-June 2020 ISSN: 2582-2500 Article Manoj Barpujari Effects of Pandemic and Cinema In the worst nightmare of the 21st centu- OTT platforms while many film festivals have ry befalling mankind, the world has become gone online. This suffocating atmosphere has aware that a pandemic has exposed a number also signaled a new challenge to INOXs and of weaknesses and in some cases reinforced PVRs which were largely instrumental in those weaknesses, as economist Joseph Sti- bringing back audiences to big screen some glitz proclaims. The neo-liberal economic years back. Part of the responses to a global model has been a glaring failure, the health- crisis has obviously been how to bring movies care system itself cries for help, government to the home market – to release films on home functionaries grasp for ways to fulfill expecta- entertainment media without or simultaneous- tions, and the entertainment industry becomes ly with theatrical debut. static instantly. With strict guidelines set by In this backdrop, an idea of drive-in open air governments for lockdown, cinema became theatres is mooted and some of the renowned worst sufferer as the fate of the workers were festivals join hands to showcase a select few left to private charity and a few superstars’ from old and new archives. The curators, pro- mercy, while workers in regional and margin- grammers and presenters are in a spot now. al film industries were left to rot. As theatres A much-hyped 10-day long ‘We Are One: A were closed and organizers of film festivals Global Film Festival’ in YouTube met with had to face unprecedented financial crunches, modest success, as it didn’t feature promi- some makers opted for releasing their films on Page 1 E-CineIndia April-June 2020 ISSN: 2582-2500 nent films that were earlier screened in major on cinematic language more than any other festivals or those set to premiere in coming cultural forms – in his latest book ‘Pandemic! festivals. However this arrangement made Covid-19 Shakes the World.’ possible by minimalist contribution from 21 different festivals has set the ball rolling for futuristic models of film viewing amid Covid-19 pandemic. The independent film- DOTs After the novel coronavirus pandemic caught the world off-guard, filmmaking continues to suffer a heavy toll. Following several phases of lockdown, shooting for films resumed cau- Contagion tiously, starting with prohibiting bodily touch- makers couldn’t sit idle at home howsoever; es between actors. The norms probably mean a few have worked from home, using sever- that literature and cinema have to reinvent al platforms and social media tools to make themselves for the time being. How surreal digital films with innovative ideas of online will it appear? How the filmmakers adapt to talks between men and women. One such film the newly designed production and exhibition DOTs (2020) by Singapore-based indepen- guidelines, while keeping in mind safety and dent director Shilpa Krishnan Shukla led a protection of workers will be a matter of pro- line-up of films having world premiere online. found introspection. Throughout history, art Mainstream Bollywood movies are now get- forms, not excluding cinema, tell stories of ting release via different OTT platforms: Am- death from epidemics and resilience against it. itabh Bachchan starrer Gulabo Sitabo, Vidya From spatial to temporal arts, these stories are Balan starrer Shakuntala Devi to name a few. relayed truthfully and vividly by writers and All four South Indian film industries too are artists of all hues. Didn’t Shakespeare live his catching up fast. No doubt, things are expect- entire life in the shadow of bubonic plague? ed to gradually return to normal, but the crisis In the years between 1606 and 1610 – the is feared to drag on, at least if we believe what period when ‘Macbeth’, ‘Antony and Cleop- the Slovenian philosopher and cultural theo- atra’, ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and ‘The Tempest’ rist Slavoj Zizek says. Zizek studied the pres- were written – the London playhouses could ent crisis from a different perspective with ex- be opened for less than nine months, as social tensive references of films – clearly a reliance distancing was in force. With change in the Page 2 E-CineIndia April-June 2020 ISSN: 2582-2500 weather the epidemic had slowly waned, but set of rulers: Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro and after an interval of a few years the plague re- Netanyahu may fit well in a selfish world. turned. As a shareholder and sometime actor But there are the likes of Jacinda Ardern, Ka- in his playing company, as well as its prin- trin Jakobsdottir, Pinarayi Vijayan and Justin cipal playwright, Shakespeare had to grapple Trudeau in the opposite. The virus of ideol- throughout his career with these situations, ogy, as termed by Zizek, is responsible for a and often in expressions of rage and disgust dogma that acts against the notion of going referred to epidemic disease in his characters’ for an overhauling of systematic response to speeches. Covid-19 as the UN fervently appealed for universal solidarity. Be that as it may, unconditional solidarity on a global scale is highly doubtful, with the US defunding the World Health Organization amid present health crisis. Noam Chomsky, arguably the most celebrated thinker and po- litical dissenter of our times, in a salvo of ac- Pandemic. cusations against ‘the sociopathic buffoons who are running the government’ in Wash- ‘A plague on both your houses’, ‘plague-sore’, ington, has put the blame squarely on the ‘a plague upon it when thieves cannot be true ‘colossal failure of the neoliberal version of to one another’, ‘a plague upon this howl- capitalism’ for its approach to the coronavi- ing’, ‘a plague of these pickle-herring’ and so rus challenge worldwide. Under conditions on – all that make the acceptance of plague of pandemic, seeking recourse to the idea of as an inescapable feature of ordinary life in herd immunity by reopening the markets pre- Shakespeare plays. Who would deny that the sumes that the strong enough can endure the plague and the fear of infection played a cru- virus and develop immunity. Social Darwin- cial role in the tragic suicides of both Romeo ism is thus coming to the fore as black and and Juliet? One passage in ‘Macbeth’ vivid- brown minorities in the world’s oldest democ- ly conveys what it must have felt like when racy ‘count as vulnerable or not destined to the whole population of a country fell into the survive’, as alleged by American philosopher grip of plague: ‘Where violent sorrow seems Judith Butler. Writers in their dystopian fears / A modern ecstasy’. But Shakespeare seems already imagine today’s Wuhan as a typical to have focused his attention on a different of the future cities. Post-apocalyptic movies plague too – the plague of being governed by are in rising demand now. Those Hollywood a morally bankrupt, ruthless, and self-destruc- movies like Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach tive leader. Juxtapose this with the present (1959) dealing with a nuclear fallout, later Page 3 E-CineIndia April-June 2020 ISSN: 2582-2500 remade in 2000 by Russell Mulcahy keep- this type of film is that a virus is a kind of ing the same title with a twist to the original zero-level life, i.e. not the elementary form of screenplay, and even a South Korean flick life, it is rather purely parasitic. Thus viruses like Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016) replicate themselves through infecting more showing a city with most of its population developed organisms; when a virus infects wiped out by not aliens but microscop- humans, people simply serve as its copying ic threats transforming humans into living machine. dead are no longer considered ludicrous or It may sound naive to sense a conspiracy of removed from the reality. depriving the civil society of their basic and constitutional rights through the social distanc- ing norms during a pandemic. But a check of chronology of events may appear interesting too. The year 2019 saw uprisings across the globe. People were up against corruption and incompetence of the political class, demand- ing equality and workers’ rights and so on. But The Decameron the Covid-19 epidemic has suddenly changed Although a sci-fi like Pandemic (2016) the scenario. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin showing a New York doctor leading a group Netanyahu invoked an ‘emergency decree’ to to Los Angeles to find survivors of a world- authorize the security forces to deploy sur- wide pandemic is tailored as a thriller by veillance technology normally reserved for John Suits, it hardly rises above the cliché of battling ‘terrorists’ to track Covid-19 patients. a zombie action movie. This particular can- ‘Over the skin’ surveillance is a known meth- on of survival dramas also seems to have put od of tracking, monitoring and manipulating forth a definition viruses are attached to. As citizens, told in George Orwell’s novel pub- studies suggest, viruses are either non-living lished in 1949, later adapted for a dystopian chemical units or living organisms: so they sci-fi by filmmaker Michael Radford also -ti are neither alive nor dead in the usual sense tled as 1984. Now ‘under the skin’ surveil- of these terms, they are a kind of living dead. lance technology is developing at breakneck This ‘living dead’ is a popular subject for the speed – biometric monitoring may soon be a horror film genre: likePandemic , where there reality that would make individuals to register are level 1 to 5 occurring in the human body not only health data but also compromise at when infected by the virus and people with ideological level while toeing the dictates of level 1 infection are taken into the facility for the all-powerful state.