Directors on Cinema and COVID

We wanted to close this section by quoting some of our favorite directors, as they contemplate the relationship between cinema, COVID-19, their daily life, and the future.

To quote the director Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s letter has spent his quarantine life in Chingmai, Thailand, Apichatpong Weerasethakul in Chiang Mai, 2020

This morning I was thinking about a word, ‘journey,’ and how we have related to it. When we were young on a road trip, our restless mind prompted us to repeat: ‘Are we there yet?’, ‘When are we going to arrive?’ As we grew older we paid more attention to the passing scenery. We observed the trees, the houses, the signs, the other vehicles. We trained ourselves to be calm on a journey. We knew there was a destination. A movie itself is a journey. It drives us towards different dramatic points. Along the way to the points are fillers that function like mini-destinations. The more seamless a filmmaker fills the path and makes the audience forget about time, the closer he or she is to the ‘art’ of filmmaking. At the core, the costumer, the make-up artist, the boom man, the lighting team, the editor, the musician, and so on, all work hard to propel the audience to the destinations. Unlike a movie, this Covid-19 journey’s destination is vague. Unlike a road trip, we are not moving. Most of us stay put in our homes. We look out of our windows to the same scenery and… we keep looking.

We feel the vulnerability of our mind and body. We are aware of our clocks – internal and external. My morning routine has become established. I remember each step I take as I prepare breakfast. I remember what the sun’s direction is outside at any particular time. To keep our sanity, some of us have embraced mindfulness techniques. We try to observe our surroundings, emotions, actions, time, impermanence. When the future is uncertain, the now becomes valuable. After we have defeated the virus, when the cinema industry has woken up from its stupor, this new group, as moviegoers, wouldn’t want to take the same old cinema journey. They have mastered the art of looking; at the neighbors, at the rooftops, at the computer screens. They have trained through countless video calls with friends, through group dinners captured in one continuous camera angle. They need a cinema that is closer to real life, in real time. They want the cinema of Now which possesses no fillers nor destination. Then they will be introduced to the films of Béla Tarr, Tsai Ming-Liang, Lucrecia Martel, maybe Apichatpong and Pedro Costa, among others. For a period of time, these obscure filmmakers would become millionaires from a surge of ticket sales. They would acquire new sunglasses and troops of security guards. They would buy mansions and cars and cigarette factories and stop making films. But soon the audience would accuse this slow cinema of being too fast. Protest signs would appear, reading: “We demand zero plots, no camera movement, no cuts, no music, nothing.” A Covid-19 Cinema Manifesto (CCM) would be drawn up for cinema to liberate itself from its structure and its own journey. “Our cinema has no place for psychological gratifications. The perpetual destination is the audience, the enlightened.” In the dark halls in major cities, people would stare at the pure white light. The next film might be a little less bright. Some movie would be so dim that in the theater there is barely a visible trace of the viewers’ heads. However, there’s a buzz of total-awareness energy that has been exchanged between the people and the screen. It’s like what Jia described in his letter: “…sitting together, shoulder to shoulder.” And yes, “this is the most beautiful gesture of mankind.”

As I could remember, when I started filmmaking in the late 1990’s, audiovisual media was videotape, then shifted to VCD, DVD, until it came into the age of internet. Now is the time of mobile internet. Technology development has constantly been breaking us up from gathering. The invention of the motion picture gathered people together, but the new media do the opposite. The current pandemic has dispersed every individual from social agglomerations, isolating each of us from cinemas, coffee bars, offices and stadiums. We are grounded by the virus. We used to say, from a historical point of view, there are two kinds of directors in the world: those who have been to the war, and those who have not. The different experience would lead to a different understanding of human nature and of society. Maybe after many years, we could say: there are two kinds of directors in the world, those who have lived through the COVID-19 pandemic, and those who have not. We’ve been living through the days, when thousands of millions of people were self-imprisoned in their homes while international flights were cut off and country borders were closed down. We’ve been living through the time, when we anxiously followed the death toll every day while separated from our friends and loved ones. We’ve been going through anxiety, anger, grief and helplessness, and we are going into recession ahead, and suffering a crisis of trust. It made me think that we shall stand up to this pandemic, still walking forward for the sake of the trying time we’ve lived through, thus, to face the world honestly and with courage. I am hoping that we could go back to cinema early, sitting together, shoulder to shoulder. This is the most beautiful gesture of mankind.

The current reality is easier to understand as a fantasy fiction than as a realist story. The new global and viral situation seems to come out of a ‘50s Sci-Fi story, the Cold War years. Horror films with the crudest anti-Communist propaganda. American B films, generally superb (especially those based on Richard Matheson’s novels, “The Incredible Shrinking Man,” “I Am Legend,” “The Twilight Zone”) despite the wicked intentions of their producers. As well as the abovementioned, I’m also thinking about “The Day Earth Stood Still,” “D.O.A.,” “Forbidden Planet,” “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” and any other film with Martians in it. Evil always came from the outside (communists, refugees, Martians) and it served as an argument for the crudest populism (nevertheless, I ardently recommend all the films I’ve mentioned; they are still excellent). In fact, Trump already makes sure that the situation we are enduring sounds like a ‘50s horror film, calling the virus “the Chinese virus.” Trump, another of the great illnesses of our times.