or: ‘When Art imitates Life imitates Art’….

Welcome to The Plague Pit

This issue – number 34 – has a touch of Hollywood sparkle about it. Guest contributor Ben Hughes is an old friend who works as a Producer and First  Assistant Director on feature films, commercials, TV dramas and documentaries. He has filmed all over the world, from the Himalayas to the Rocky Mountains.

Once or twice, Ben has been foolish enough to ask my opinion on a proposed cinematic depiction of emergency medical treatment. I suspect any advice I gave was a great deal less well-researched than the excellent article that follows. Ben is a member of BAFTA and of the Norfolk Beekeepers Association.

While the world remains in the grip of a Coronavirus Pandemic, cinema continues to provide comfort and entertainment, or at least a distraction from the grim realities of the world at large. Although visits to cinemas are currently banned, most populations in the developed world have access to movies through various online platforms, numerous Freeview channels or even via the old fashioned television broadcasters. There they will find any film to suit their mood, even it is fearful, but will they be watching anything so close to the truth as a film called Pandemic? Quite possibly.

Like those that preceded it, the 7th Art, Cinema, has, since its inception, held a mirror up to audiences who have been entertained, and sometimes informed, by gathering in darkened rooms and watching images being projected on to a screen (a lot of what follows also applies to it’s younger cousin, home cinema or television, where the cinematic experience is similar but does necessitate an audience larger than one).

Although a long time in development during the 19th century, Cinema truly came into its own at the beginning of the 20th. Before 1902, various short films of boxing matches, trains, coronations and parades of horses had been made and exhibited. But they were never more than novelty entertainments.

The first great director of narrative filmed entertainment, albeit no film ever longer than 20 minutes, was, arguably, Frenchman Georges Méliès (1861-1938). The most memorable and first internationally acclaimed of his films is La Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) of 1902, a fantastical surreal story of a group of astronomers’ journey to, and exploration of, the moon. It was the first science fiction film and was huge a ‘boxoffice’ hit.

Among the 37 (yes, thirty seven) short films that he released in 1903 was Faust in Hell, not the only death related film that played with audiences’ fears. Since then, the entertainment that cinema provides has catered to every human emotion. As the houselights dim, audiences settle back and are taken on journeys limited only by the film makers’ imaginations. And if a film is to touch it’s audience emotionally it must also reflect universal human truths, hopes and fears.

Emotions such as excitement, happiness, tenderness, sadness, anger and fear can all be experienced depending on which movie has been chosen. A Romantic Comedy will amuse. A War film raises the adrenalin and offers relief as the heroes come through unscathed. A Love film will arouse passion, while a film set in space will take audiences out of this world. Audiences can vicariously experience a life of long ago in an historical drama; if watching a thriller, they’ll be thrilled or if a horror movie they’ll be gripped by terror and scream as ‘the creature’ bursts out of the ground and devours the family pet. In many ways, this is no different to humans’ engagement with other art forms.

Cinema was first referred to as the Seventh Art as long ago as 1911 [1] – the others being, in no particular order, music, sculpture, painting, literature, drama (including dance) and architecture.

All of these arts have at some point been inspired by, or responded to, plague and the fear instilled by Pandemics. The Black Death in Europe during the 14th Century inspired morality plays, paintings, friezes and woodcuts depicting Death. Often, death in the form of a skeleton takes people as they go about their daily lives and leads them, in a dance, towards the grave.

In a far more pious age when life expectancy was around 47 years, such images used fear to remind viewers of the inevitably of Death and that they should lead better lives to avoid punishment in the afterlife.

However, possibly the most famous painting inspired by a Pandemic is Bonaparte visiting the Plague Victims of Jaffa, currently in the Louvre in Paris. Presaging the cult of personality that such totalitarian leaders tend to engage in, it was commissioned by Napoleon himself from the artist Antoine-Jean Gros in 1804, and depicts him fearlessly visiting sick soldiers (with no ‘social distancing’) while on campaign in the Near East. Heroic stuff.

The great flu pandemic of 1889-90, the last of the 19th century, known as the “Russian Flu” and which killed around 1 million people worldwide, provoked this response published in the Parisian satirical magazine in January 1890. It seems that fear was partly hidden by satire.

 It is now thought that this Pandemic was not caused by influenza but by a coronavirus.

A later Pandemic, the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu, inspired the painting below by Edvard Munch(1863- 1944), entitled Self Portrait with the Spanish Flu, 1919.

Many composers have also been inspired by plagues. August Normiger (1560-1613) wrote Mattasin oder Toden Tanz in 1598. More recently Mussorgsky (1839-1881), Schoenberg (1874-1951) and Britten (1913-1976) have made contributions to the canon.

A near contemporary of Munch, the French composer Camille Saint-Saens (1835-1921) was inspired by these Dances of Death (Danse Macabre or Totentanz) when he wrote Danse Macabre in 1874, perhaps the most well known piece on the subject of Death (if we leave aside Beethoven’s magnificent Funeral March).

Literature has also been inspired by Pandemics, and the perceived threat to humankind, from Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron and Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, both written against the backdrop of the 14th Century Great Plague, through Mary Shelley’s The Last Man (1826) which describes a plague spreading across Europe, to Michael Crichton’s The Andromeda Strain(1969), written against the background of the Cold War, in which a life threatening infection arrives from outer space.

In John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951) an extra-planetary species of plant starts attacking humans. This was made into the 1963 movie, a couple of tv mini-series and is currently rumoured to be in development, again. Many such novels have been adapted and have been made in to frightening, sometimes comical, films.

A very recent novel published in 2014, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, describes a dystopian post-Pandemic world which sees humanity reduced to small isolated communities. Will this miss out on being adapted because it is too close to what is feared might be the result of the current SARS-CoV-2 Pandemic?

Cinema, like the others arts, has often been inspired by the fear-inducing idea that some enemy, in the form of an alien creature, an evil regime or an invisible viral Pandemic is about to destroy humanity. Realising that audiences appear to enjoy experiencing fear (albeit only for the duration of the movie), they often describe terrifying events in the very near future.

Are these films, which are ostensibly made to entertain, also made as allegorical warnings? Perhaps a bit of both, but what is undeniable is that audiences enjoy the feeling of fear, whether it is fear of what lurks beneath the surface (Jaws, 1975) or fear of giant ants (Them!, 1954).

As well as being adapted from novels or based on historical plagues, original films have often been made on the subject of a Pandemic itself. But, unlike a ‘real’ global Pandemic the outcome of which is unknown and over which humanity ultimately has little or no control, a fictional filmed Pandemic needs to be ‘entertaining’ as well as frightening and, with a few exceptions, will inevitably conclude with an uplifting finale, accompanied by a soaring score.

Since the current Pandemic began, according to the website IMDB 6 films with the word ‘Pandemic’ included in their titles have been slated as being in development, in production or are in post-production.

However during the preceding decades, while there were many fear-inducing films [such as Psycho (1960), The Exorcist (1976), Deliverance (1972), Fright Night (1985), Event Horizon (1997), Let The Right One In (2008)] very few, if any, involved disease.

In 1937 Hugo Haas directed Skeleton on Horseback (it’s Czech title Bila Nemoc meaning White Disease gained a reference to one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in translation) “a deadly leprosy-like disease that mainly infects people older than 50 years, ravages the world… a reclusive physician who has devoted his life to the poor, finds a cure… but he refuses to share his cure unless his condition of eternal peace among nations is met…”

In the 1950 Film Noir Panic in the Streets, directed by Elia Kazan, “a doctor and a policeman in New Orleans have only 48 hours to locate a killer infected with pneumonic plague”.

In 1975, the BBC produced a series called Survivors. The basic premise of which was: “A community of survivors struggle to stay alive in the wake of a global pandemic known as the Death that wiped out 99.98% of humanity.”

The 2009 remake described: “An unknown virus pandemic kills more than 90% of the world’s population. Those immune must strive to survive and overcome the difficulties of this new world order, hoping that the virus will not mutate.”

Between 1975 and 2003, no significant fictional movie or mini-series on the theme of Pandemic was made until Angels in America (dir. Tony Kushner) which was much more about the politics of the A.I.D.S. crisis during the 1980s.

Only recently since the beginning of the 21st century, does there appear to have been a shift towards films about viral Pandemics and the storylines show extraordinary prescience. Did this reflect a long held, deeply buried existential fear?

It is worth looking at how the frequency of such films has been increasing and at how similar the story lines are compared to how events have so far unfolded in 2020 and the fear of what might be in store. The synopses offer alternative suggestions on how the world might have found itself in the current state. Here a few: -2002 movie 28 Days Later (dir. Danny Boyle): “Four weeks after a mysterious, incurable virus spreads throughout the UK, a handful of survivors try to find sanctuary.”

2007 tv mini series Pandemic (dir. Armand Mastroianni): “The bird flu virus spreads through Los Angeles as a doctor races to find a vaccine”

2009 movie Pandemic (dir: Jason Connery): “A veterinarian finds herself in the midst of a horrifying pandemic where humans and animals are stricken with a horrible, contagious disease. She must pair up with an eccentric conspiracy theorist to discover the true source of the threat”.

2009 movie Carriers (dir. Alex Pastor) “As a lethal virus spreads globally, four friends seek a reputed plague-free haven. But while avoiding the infected, the travellers turn on one another.”

2009 movie Pandemic (dir: Takahisa Zeze): “a doctor at a Tokyo hospital, misdiagnoses a patient’s disease as a common cold. But after the patient’s sudden death, he realizes that it’s very serious disease, which can make a population extinct…”

2013 movie Flu (dir: Sung-su Kim): “Chaos ensues when a lethal, airborne virus infects the population of a South Korean city less than 20 kilometers from Seoul.”

2016 movie Pandemic (dir. John Suits): “A New York doctor travels with her team to Los Angeles to find survivors of a worldwide pandemic.”

And lastly, we must recognise the great Pandemic genre that is the Zombie movie. Korean director Sang-ho Yeon gave us Seoul Station in 2016: “Several groups of people try to survive a zombie pandemic that unleashes itself in downtown Seoul.”

Even South Park got in on the act with two episodes in season 12: ep10 Pandemic and ep11 Pandemic 2, although fear was probably not at the forefront of the creators minds!

What can we conclude from the rise of PANDEMIC films, if anything? It is probably not a coincidence that the increase in Pandemic themed films has followed the significant viral outbreaks in 2002-2004 (SARS), 2009 (H1N1 influenza), 2012 (MERS), 2013 (A(H7N) influenza) and 2014-2016 (Ebola). These all had the potential to reach Pandemic levels and awareness of them no doubt inspired the film makers.

While fear has been, or needs to be, one of the key emotional drivers of a Pandemic film, has the reaction to the arrival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus been one of fear because of the films or in spite of the films? Do the films merely reflect reality or do they influence reality?

Perhaps Cinema, in the time honoured way of all Arts, merely continues to hold that mirror up to audiences in the hope that they can recognise themselves, learn from what they see and take away positives from their 90 minutes of entertainment, even if subliminally.

Having now had to live through the reality of a Pandemic, will audiences be done with Pandemic movies? Perhaps we’ll see instead a rise in uplifting stories. Whatever happens, there’ll always be an audience seeking distraction and enjoyment, and even fear, in movie theatres.

Ben Hughes

[1] Ricciotto Canudo in his Manifesto “The Birth of the Sixth Art” in 1911. He later added dance to the previous arts making cinema the seventh

Other references include: (a) www.screendaily.com (b) The Story of Art by Ernst Gombrich, published by Phaidon (c) www.imdbpro.com.