Open AccessEscaping Confinement
Author(s) -
Yago Paris
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
interactive film and media journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2564-4173
DOI - 10.32920/ifmj.v2i1.1512
Subject(s) - phone , safer , covid-19 , pandemic , movie theater , order (exchange) , key (lock) , drone , computer science , internet privacy , visual arts , art , computer security , linguistics , business , medicine , philosophy , disease , finance , pathology , biology , infectious disease (medical specialty) , genetics
One of the most representative aspects of fiction films that address the COVID-19 pandemic is the insistent appearance of electronic devices (laptops, tablets, smartphones) to allow virtual communication between the main characters of the story. I claim that, in those films, the use of these devices and the images they produce is different from those that appeared in pre-pandemic cinema, and, as such, conveys different meanings to the filmed images. In order to explore these ideas, I will first study the ontology of phone footage imagery, to establish the main traits of this type of image. Afterwards, I will signal the differences between pre-pandemic and pandemic phone footage imagery, in order to understand the key formal traits that imply different meanings for each case. Finally, by analyzing some of the most relevant commercial films about the COVID-19 pandemic that have been produced so far (Songbird (2020), Locked Down (2021), Safer at Home (2021), Host (2020), and Ctrl+Alt+Trick/treat (2020)), I will intend to prove that in these fictions phone footage (as opposed to other electronic-device footage) addresses the desire to gain certain freedom in a scenario of confinement.