In the wake of 9/11, America was left limping after a devastating blow to its sense of invincibility and power. Film custodians frequently attribute the modern superhero craze in which ultra-righteous individuals thwart the bad guy to this injured sense of pride from a country desperately trying to tell itself that it's still on top. Because film is a product born from and made for the popular consciousnesses, films are natural reflections of the hopes and anxieties of their day. When traumatic events suddenly bend those hopes and anxieties in very large, very specific ways, film takes on recognizable traits in response. There are books full of examples of themes, genres, and styles of film surfacing or even disappearing in response to societal events. So what's film going to do with a worldwide pandemic? When friends have brought up this question to me over the last year, they've been mostly wondering if we're going to get more films about disease and lockdowns a la S...
“But isn’t it time we stopped accepting in film criticism an anti-emotional, phony rationalism which we know to be not just harmful, but absurd, in any other context? Isn’t it time we plucked up our courage and allowed our hearts as well as our heads to go the pictures?” Raymond Durgnat (Films and Feelings) 1971