Every global crisis has a beginning and an end, before one era and after another era, the crisis, whether political, economic, social or health, is a temporary situation in which the world enters into a critical and special situation affecting the institutions of any state, and is forced to change the way it works in order to continue to protect Society and its service, and the latter volunteers its members to change their behavior patterns to adapt to the crisis.
Crises change everything from eternity, because man does not want to repeat the mistakes of the past, and thus anything that does not change after a crisis becomes out of context or unrealistic. Cinema is a reflection of life and what happens in it, and it changes with changing reality.
Corona's new epidemic (Covid-19) is very expected to change cinema, as it is the first epidemic to close its halls in this manner all over the world. Films that are parallel to real life will be produced, either they are ironic or bleak, with a dark meaning that reflects the cruelty of the reality that people have gone through, and death or the victory of the will of life is a major issue in it.
How have cosmic crises affected and changed cinema? In order to extrapolate the future, we must look at the history of cinema and understand its nature, because the world is actually living in a crisis that is a global war, and all the effects of "corona" that we are witnessing have occurred in the first and second world wars.
World War I: The masses did not want to watch movies about the war due to the gloom of the situation, but they turned to comedy. The war returned to the cinema as a topic beginning in 1925 and this was in two waves, the first focused on social and political realities, self-criticism and national identity, while the second focused on the political propaganda of the victorious countries, such as the United States, or which were defeated during the war, such as France and Belgium.
Films rolled on both sides of the Atlantic, the most prominent of which was "Wings", which won the first Oscar in 1927, and the first silent film to win the award. A political wave of anti-German films appeared in Hollywood, the most important of which was the Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front in 1931. When Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933, he suppressed these films and described them as defeatism, and stressed the importance of producing films that highlight the German soldier's heroism.
One of the results of this war was the removal of Germany from the throne of cinema, the rise of Hollywood and the inauguration of a queen on the industry, and the retreat of Europe, where a very important cinematic art movement called the German Expression Movement arose and became an integral part of the history of the seventh art.
Technically, the German expression movement emerged before the war to inspire filmmakers after it, and dominated European cinema, and she was apprenticed by cinematic legends, most notably Alfred Hitchcock, who went to Germany in 1924 to study it before proceeding to making his films. It is interesting that World War I films, according to cinema historians, avoided as far as possible portraying the course of the war on the ground because of the atrocities and massacres that occurred, the most important of which was trench warfare, and focused more on air force battles. Or I focused on relations between soldiers away from the front, or about love stories that occurred during the war.
World War II: several waves emerged after this cosmic war, most notably the new realism in Italy, the most important of which are Bicycle Thieves, Roma Open City, Stromboli and Ossessione, and the obscure American movie “Noire”, which mainly formed from the blending of the German expressive school with crime films in Hollywood, an indirect reflection of this war.
The movie “Noire” has its roots in the Great Depression in the late 1920s, a period in which Hollywood focused on making gang movies and bank robberies, affected by the economic crisis at the time.
In the early 1940s, a wave of detective films appeared, the most important of which was the "Maltese Falcon" of John Houston, who placed the Hollywood legend Humphrey Bogart on the list of the most important movie stars in the world. The era was also marked by masterpieces such as Double Indemnity, The Big Sleep, Touch of Evil, and The Asphalt Jungle.
Investigator films continued until the late 1950s, and for information, in many films the investigator was a soldier in World War II. The cinema in Europe was completely stopped by that war, and after the war ended, the Europeans watched the investigator's films despite the end of their American shows years ago. European cinema critics were impressed by the magnificence of these films, and their elaborate use of terror elements inspired by the German Expressionist School, to reflect the crime style, and to reflect the psychology of the investigator and the criminal's motives. In 1946, French investigator Nino Frank and his colleague John Pierre Chartier called the movie "Noire". The name turned into a cinematic term, and Hollywood did not arrive until the 1970s, when the second (colorful) detective wave of films appeared in 1974 with Roman Polasinki's "China Town". Here Hollywood divided history into the era of the first wave (black and white) Noire movie 1940-1958, and the colorful wave that receded at the beginning of the 21st century. In other words, Hollywood until the early 1970s did not know the meaning of the term.
Vietnam and the Gulf Wars: The Vietnam War films caused a complexity for the American character, due to the defeats that the American forces suffered in the jungles of those countries, and their films were characterized by severe depression or Hollywood's hostility to the American political and military establishment. Notable among them are Platoon, Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Full Metal Jacket. In the 1980s, films called Conciliatory with the Vietnam Node appeared, focusing on limited victories for the US military there, and their makers and representatives were affiliated with the Republican Party, and boomed due to the popularity of late President Ronald Reagan, the most important of which was the series Rambo, Commando, and Missing in Action.
This wave reached the peak of its popularity after the occupation of the sister state of Saddam Hussein, the former President Saddam Hussein, in 1990, and the resulting global coalition led by the late Washington, George Bush Senior. The films of that war are also two waves, either starring the American soldier or suffering from PTSD. The most important films are "Courage Under Fire." September strikes and the war on terror and the invasion of Iraq: a cinematic exception, as people stopped watching movies about these events that divided the world in time in 2001, after the September terrorist strikes, and most of the films that dealt with any of them failed.
But, on the other hand, television succeeded in making better use of the war on terrorism, and produced powerful series, most notably (24), in the decade before the past, which exploited the factor of the American character's fear of terrorism, regardless of religion and color, in a way unprecedented in the history of television.
Another example is the “Homeland” series, which looks at the consequences of Washington’s war and its destructive effects, and is inspired by an Israeli series entitled “Prisoners of War,” which deals with the war on terror from the perspective of the Hebrew state.
All of the above directly affected the cinema and made it focus on reality, and the films became stigmatized with the words before and after the crisis, and today we are living in the golden age of fantasy cinema, on top of which is the superhero. Will it stop after the epidemic of "Covid 19"? Yes, it will recede, but not directly. People will be exhausted after this crisis, and they want something far from reality that will amuse them.
Over time, people will realize that the true heroes who fought the epidemic deserve actions that praise their efforts, and this will lead directly to the reconsideration of the superhero as a character very far from reality, and everything that is so ridiculous, because he was simply not present at the time of the crisis, and did not save the planet as He does in his world.
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The true heroes who fought the epidemic deserve actions that praise their efforts, and this will directly lead to a re-examination of the superhero as a figure very out of touch, because he was simply not present at the time of the crisis and did not save the planet.
After World War I, the masses did not want to watch movies about the war, given the gloom of the situation, but they turned to comedy.