{"id":8734,"date":"2020-04-07T09:39:29","date_gmt":"2020-04-07T16:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/?p=8734"},"modified":"2021-02-22T07:51:31","modified_gmt":"2021-02-22T15:51:31","slug":"from-the-archives-out-of-sight","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/2020\/04\/07\/from-the-archives-out-of-sight\/","title":{"rendered":"From the Archives: Out of Sight"},"content":{"rendered":"

Editor’s Note:\u00a0 As a way to respond and attempt to make sense of life in the coronavirus era, Film Quarterly<\/em> is introducing “From the Archives,” a curated selection of FQ<\/em> articles made newly relevant by the present moment.\u00a0 In the Winter 2011 edition, FQ<\/em> columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott explored the limits of visibility in Stephen Soderbergh’s Contagion<\/em>, a film that begins with a wan-looking Gwyneth Paltrow coughing into her peanuts at an airport bar, unknowingly spreading a deadly disease–a horror image for our time. — Rebecca Prime<\/p>\n

Caetlin Benson-Allott<\/p>\n

From Film Quarterly, Winter 2011, Volume 65, Number 2<\/a><\/p>\n

Contagion<\/strong><\/em> (Steven Soderbergh, 2011)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Since Marey’s motion studies at the end of the nineteenth century, film has been a tool for providing visual evidence, a record of things seen.\u00a0 The development of digital imaging technology over the last twenty years has transformed that original empirical function.\u00a0 Advancements in CGI enable convincing depictions of things impossible to see in everyday life: dinosaurs, hobbits, viruses.\u00a0 It has become necessary to speak of “hypervisibility” to describe the way movies can realistically render such previously hard-to-envision phenomena.\u00a0 Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion<\/em> tries to contest this prevailing logic by insisting on the limits of visibility.<\/p>\n

Contagion\u00a0<\/em>begins with a black screen and a cough; someone somewhere is sick–and spreading it–but we cannot see who.\u00a0 Characters spend much of the rest of the film staring into monitors, feverishly studying computer-generated models of the mysterious virus or digital video of its victims, but however hard they look, their screens reveal only biological explanations for the epidemic.\u00a0 They inevitably exclude macroeconomic and social forces, which are even harder to picture than the microscopic disease but causally every bit as important.\u00a0 To represent the limits of visual inquiry, Soderbergh’s movie keeps its computer-generated models on monitors and within frames.\u00a0 By separating digital video aids from the rest of the characters’ environments, Contagion<\/em> indicates that seeing the virus–or even the moment of its transmission–can never fully explain the catalysts behind the epidemic.\u00a0 Digital models may help halt the spread of an outbreak, but they cannot convey why the virus entered the population.\u00a0 Ironically, Soderbergh does try to show us the forces behind these images, but in doing so, he runs into the same explanatory limitations as his characters.<\/p>\n

\"Contagion\"<\/p>\n

The article can be read in its entirety here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Contagion\u00a0begins with a black screen and a cough; someone somewhere is sick–and spreading it–but we cannot see who.\u00a0 Characters spend much of the rest of the film staring into monitors, feverishly studying computer-generated models of the mysterious virus or digital video of its victims, but however hard they look, their screens reveal only biological explanations for the epidemic.\u00a0 They inevitably exclude macroeconomic and social forces, which are even harder to picture than the microscopic disease but causally every bit as important.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":113945551,"featured_media":8740,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"FQ columnist Caetlin Benson-Allott explores the limits of visibility in Steven Soderbergh's Contagion.","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"_wpas_customize_per_network":false},"categories":[91401],"tags":[162500719,334552],"class_list":["post-8734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-from-the-archives","tag-caetlin-benson-allott","tag-steven-soderbergh"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/04\/contagion-2011.jpg?fit=1998%2C1332&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p87utL-2gS","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/113945551"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8734"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8734\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11110,"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8734\/revisions\/11110"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/filmquarterly.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}