The Pandemic-Image: Semiotic-Political Assemblages of Cinema and Television in Video Calls

Abstract

This work analyzes some films and series made during the Covid-19 pandemic through an audiovisual genre that consists of matching the viewer's screen with the monitor of a character, especially in interactions by video calls. We designate as pandemic-image these fictions in monitor-form made during the health emergency, not only because they address life in quarantine and the consequences of the crisis in everyday life, but also because they suggest a pandemic of certain digital images. In the cases analyzed, we find an articulation of three axes: an audiovisual aesthetic of the monitor-form, a political theology of the internet as a spectral medium, and a digital memetics of the pandemic crisis. In addition, there is a recurring theme of people or entities that are missing or exceeding on the screen, which we interpret as a critical allusion to the political limits of the digital forms of contemporary power.