The Art Of Immersion

While cinemas have been irrevocably damaged by the pandemic, there’s hope yet for filmmaking and the innate comfort it provides us.

- Huw Walmsley-Evans

We knew it was going to be bad once the cinemas shut. Cinemas are part of the fabric of daily life. To see them shuttered was a stark indication that COVID had taken us into uncharted territory. When we first went into lockdown, a friend sought my counsel. He wasn’t worried about his job, or his health. “What’s going to happen with movies?” he asks. “Are we going to run out? Will there be some kind of weird gap next year where nothing comes out?”

While anyone who says that they know what the long-term effects of COVID will mean for the film industry is kidding themselves—any forecasts are, of course, hostage to the vicissitudes of the virus—I assured him that it seems unlikely that the film industry will grind to a halt. It hasn’t yet. While there have been major disruptions to production and theatrical exhibition, any work that could be done from isolation has continued: financing, casting, design work, and most obviously, writing. But even if social distancing persists, our want for movies will outweigh our want to protect the people who make them, and at any rate those folks will think of creative ways of protecting themselves. Maybe the film industry will become like the porn industry: a cloistered community where everyone is tested regularly and production shuts down immediately and contact tracing begins as soon as there’s an infection?