10.54103/2036-461X/17772
This contribution will examine different communicative and narrative strategies adopted by some documentary productions in order to visualize something invisible, like the virus and its effects. Through the case studies I will take into account, my intent is to reflect upon the pandemic narration, which replaces or alternates the photographic realism of the images of pain and suffering, intended as scientific and incontrovertible proof of the virus manifestation, with a modernist narrative, mixing interviews with infographic material, maps, dashboards, photomicrographs, and computer graphics animations. Despite their profound mediation by software that makes pictures out of numbers, these informatic images, reported daily in news channels and broadcasts as well, besides shaping the relationships between scientific research, documentary, and its explanatory and pedagogical power to narrate, reconfigure the collective imagination of the pandemic in a bioinformation era.
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2036-461X
17772
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Samuel Antichi
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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
Disaster Media
Visualizing the Virus. The Use of Data Visualizations in COVID-19 Documentaries
Text.Serial.Journal
https://riviste.unimi.it/index.php/cinemaetcie
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Thematic issue / Section thématique
2023-01-24
2022-04-29
2023-01-24
2023-01-24
115-124
Cinéma & Cie
Samuel Antichi
2022
10.54103/2036-461X/17772
115
University of Calabria
2036-461X
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Disaster Media
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Visualizing the Virus. The Use of Data Visualizations in COVID-19 Documentaries
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                                                                                       Visualizing the Virus.
                                                                                       The Use of Data Visualizations in
                                                                                       COVID-19 Documentaries
                                                                                       Samuel Antichi, University of Calabria




                                                                                       This contribution will examine different communicative and narrative strategies adop-                  Keywords
                                                                                       ted by some documentary productions in order to visualize something invisible, like                 Documentary
                                                                                       the virus and its effects. Through the case studies I will take into account, my intent is
                                                                                       to reflect upon the pandemic narration, which replaces or alternates the photographic
                                                                                                                                                                                      Covid-19 Pandemic
                                                                                       realism of the images of pain and suffering, intended as scientific and incontroverti-            Trauma studies
                                                                                       ble proof of the virus manifestation, with a modernist narrative, mixing interviews with             Infographics
                                                                                       infographic material, maps, dashboards, photomicrographs, and computer graphics                    Disaster Media
                                                                                       animations. Despite their profound mediation by software that makes pictures out of                          DOI
                                                                                       numbers, these informatic images, reported daily in news channels and broadcasts as                  https://doi.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License




                                                                                       well, besides shaping the relationships between scientific research, documentary, and        org/10.54103/2036-
                                                                                       its explanatory and pedagogical power to narrate, reconfigure the collective imagination
                                                                                                                                                                                            461X/17772
                                                                                       of the pandemic in a bioinformation era.




                                                                                       DISASTER MEDIA AND THE VIRUS IMAGERY
                                                                                         Even if it cannot be considered as a unique and unrepeatable mass-mediated
                                                                                       event, a single and circumscribed traumatic experience, the SARS-CoV-2
                                                                                       pandemic (COVID-19) has led to a reconfiguration of the relationship between
                                                                                       the event itself and its mediated representation. The COVID-19 pandemic and
                                                                                       the health crisis have deeply affected the visual world, conditioning cinematic
                                                                                       narratives of trauma as well as its imagery radically.
                                                                                         This contribution will examine different communicative and narrative
                                                                                       strategies adopted by some documentary productions in order to visualize
                                                                                       something invisible, like the virus and its effects. Through the case studies
                                                                                       I will take into account, my intent is to reflect upon the pandemic narration,
                                                                                       which replaces or alternates the photographic realism of the images of pain
                                                                                       and suffering, intended as scientific and incontrovertible proof of the virus
                                                                                       manifestation, with a modernist narrative, mixing interviews with infographic
                                                                                       material, maps, dashboards, photomicrographs, and computer graphics
                                                                                       animations. Despite their profound mediation by software that makes pictures
                                                                                       out of numbers, these informatic images, reported daily in news channels


                                                                                       Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                        115
      and broadcasts as well, besides shaping the relationships between scientific
      research, documentary, and its explanatory and pedagogical power to narrate,
      reconfigure the collective imagination of the pandemic in a bioinformation era.
        However, it is certainly true that it is possible to frame these modernist forms
      within ‘the larger transformations of documentary objects and media that
      have occurred with the advance and proliferations of digital technologies in
      the 21st century’,1 as Jihoon Kim points out. The scholar proposes the concept
      of ‘expanded documentary’ to indicate non-fiction media practices which
      reconfigure a standardized aesthetic form as well as involve a different mode
      of spectatorship, ‘incorporating new consciousness, behaviors, and cultural
      or political climate affected by the digital technologies for production and
      postproduction of images and the non-theatrical experiential platforms, such as
      VR interfaces, interactive websites, and social media’.2
        As I have mentioned before, media content, practice, and aesthetic change
      radically during crisis, as the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, in informing and
      educating the audience about the scientific facts and government responses to
      the health crisis, how to stay safe, how to protect themselves, showing graphs
      and maps about infection rates, keeping viewers constantly updated about its
      spread.3
        Scholars draw attention to the concept of disaster media, referring to how
      ‘media are both complicit in the amplification of disastrous occurrence and helpful
      in the provision of reckoning and relief, support and succor’.4 Cinema, as a media
      form, gives shape and meaning to disasters themselves, conditioning the ways
      in which they are imagined, experienced, and felt, promoting the construction
      of a cultural trauma.5 Recently, several studies have focused on how cinema
      and media reflect upon and convey catastrophic events,6 accidents,7 ecological
      and environmental disasters8 or migration as crisis.9 Atrocities and disasters,
      testing the ‘threshold of the visible’,10 could provoke a reconceptualization of
      the cinematic visualization practices and aesthetics.
        Taking into account, through a media-archeological perspective, the
      relationship between historical moments and the emergence of a new audiovisual
      lexicon, Akira Lippit, in her text Atomic Light, for instance, focuses on how
      traumatic events have induced new film and media theories of optics, acoustics,
      and haptics which challenge the representability of the experience. The nuclear
      blast, and the atomic radiation, for instance, signaled a transformation of visual
      representation, as well as the conditions of visuality as such, like the X-rays,
      which disclosed the inside of the body. Lippit retraces the formation of a mode
      of avisuality, a secret visuality, ‘not as a form of invisibility, in the sense of an
      absent or negated visibility: not as the antithesis of the visible but as a specific
      mode of impossible, unimaginable visuality’.11
        Documentary cinema adopts similar visual aesthetics and narratives of data
      visualization widely adopted by the disaster media during the pandemic. The
      spectacle of pain with strong emotional impact, which historically characterizes
      the narrative of documentary cinema in portraying situations of crisis, war
      or natural disaster, changes significantly in the cases I intend to examine,



116                                                          Antichi, Visualizing the Virus
establishing a different relationship with reality and visual. What we can
consider as a pre-existing media convention of crisis, namely the spectacular
and sensationalistic images depicting human suffering, in this case, is often
replaced by data visualizations and infographic material.



DATA VISUALIZATIONS
IN COVID-19 DOCUMENTARIES
  The first case I want to take into account is Totally Under Control (Alex
Gibney, Ophelia Harutyunyan, and Suzanne Hillinger, 2020), produced by Hulu
and realized during the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic. The film basically
depicts Trump administration’s response to the health crisis in the United
States, retracing a timeline for the events, starting with the first documented
case in Seattle back in January 2020 and then examining the spread of the
virus over the following nine months. The documentary highlights the Trump
administration’s incompetence, corruption, and denial in the face of the global
pandemic, often comparing the American response to that of South Korea.
Alex Gibney with the co-directors Ophelia Harutyunyan and Suzanne Hillinger
take an investigative path, focusing on how the President and his team in the
White House put their personal power and political advantage above mitigating
the spread of the virus. The film collects several zoom interviews, which are
part of the pandemic imagery, of course, with scientists, healthcare reporters,
correspondents from Asia, the ex-Secretary of Health and Human Services as
well as the ex-CDC director, in order to provide a scientific counter narration,
highlighting how the situation was not ‘totally under control’, as Trump affirmed,
and the film title recalls.
  In addition to that, the documentary adopts infographic material as digital
storytelling tools in order to visualize the pandemic curve, the number of
deceases and the spread of the virus, enabling viewers to comprehend
complex information and to counterstrike the COVID infodemic.12 Infographics,
dashboards, 3D simulations, graphs and curves or graphical maps are widely
adopted in documentary productions, because they make difficult information
easily accessible even to non-experts, from a scientific point of view,13 as well
as for the storytelling potential of data visualization narratives.14 The film refers,
for instance, to one of the most reliable monitoring systems of the pandemic,
which is the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard, launched by the Center for
Systems Science and Engineering at the University, for providing ‘researchers,
public health authorities, and the general public with a user-friendly tool to
track the outbreak as it unfolds’.15
  Referring to Ann Kaplan’s study of trauma and its cultural politics, she
differentiates a range of responses to traumatic events. Considering the war
photographs of Rwanda and Iraq, Kaplan coins the term ‘empty empathy’,
meaning ‘the empathy elicited by images of suffering provided without any


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                        117
      context or background knowledge’.16 To reflect upon the aesthetic strategies
      which produce traumatic effects on the viewers, she brings up Susan Sontag’s
      description of her initial reaction to photographs of concentration camps
      victims,17 which provides ‘a clear example of vicarious image-induced trauma’.18
      According to Kaplan, Sontag and other scholars, such as John Berger,19 for
      instance, it is necessary to re-approach the images of suffering, standing
      back and thinking, paying attention, re-conceptualizing other strategies for
      communicating, representing and understanding trauma. Ethical witnessing
      stands as a new level of responsibility, differentiating itself ‘from vicarious
      trauma, from voyeurism/sensationalism, and from melodramatic attempts to
      close the wound as in Hollywood treatments of historical trauma’.20 Besides
      leading to a broader understanding of the pandemic situation, rendering the
      scientific information real, accurate, and credible through a powerful narrative
      impact and emotional appeal, and stimulating a pro-social behavior, persuading
      viewers to take action and change their health behaviors accordingly, data
      visualizations as the substitution for photographic images of the phenomenal
      world reflect upon a reconceptualization of indexicality, realism, and evidence as
      well as of the representability of traumatic events. Data visualization narratives
      adopted in the documentary challenge ‘the precedence of lens-based imagery
      as the privileged component of non-fiction filmic practice’, shifting the reference
      status.21
        In addition to that, even if it determines an experience of seeing without
      ever offering a concrete image, data visualization, as a rhetorical form that
      visualizes ‘a relationship between the material world and its particular form
      of representation’,22 acts as a metaphorical authorial voice recalling the Bill
      Nichols’s ‘voice of God’ concept.23 Data visualization’s narrative voice claims
      objective knowledge. It plays a key role in several scientific and educational
      documentaries such as National Geographic’s production, Mission Possible:
      The Race for a Vaccine (Jesse Sweet, 2021), or the documentary limited series
      Covid, Explained (2020), which premiered on Netflix in April 26, 2020. The three
      episodes series, which is narrated by J.K. Simmons, Laura Linney, and Idris
      Elba, looks at how the virus grew and spread around the globe, the race to
      develop vaccines as well as the mechanisms for coping with the stress of the
      pandemic, and a global lockdown.
        As Lisa Parks and Janet Walker point out, taking into account disaster media
      narration, infographic material concerning COVID-19 recalls data visualization
      referred to the global warming curve. The Hockey stick graphs, presenting
      the global or hemispherical temperature, have been used, for instance, in An
      Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006), the documentary centered on the
      climate activism of former US vice president Al Gore. The film’s global warming
      graph, depicting a dramatic climate shift, projecting an imminent catastrophe,
      tries to promote a collective action on climate change. In the age of big data
      and the current pandemic, graphs and curves dominate the mediascape and
      media imagery, through a collective image-building, insomuch as scientists
      and viewers are engaging with similar looking charts both for COVID-19 and



118                                                         Antichi, Visualizing the Virus
global warming. The disaster media heuristic, according to Parks and Walker,
‘encourages us to reflect upon the coronavirus and global warming graphs
together and in relation to other audiovisual mediations, which, as we argue
throughout, co-produce the material realities they may seem only to depict’.24



THE ICONIC IMAGE OF THE VIRUS
   Alongside the data visualization narratives, the 3D image of the coronavirus
particle remains the most iconic symbol of the current pandemic imagery, its
signature. Through this process of visualizing microbial entities, produced by
sophisticated optical technologies and computational processes, it has been
possible to give the virus an identity, a representation, a form, making tangible
something invisible with the naked eye.25 The iconic image of SARS-CoV-2 has
been created by Alissa Eckert and Dan Higgins, medical illustrators at the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. As Higgins affirms in an interview,
they decide to create ‘a realistic virus that people can envision when walking
into public places or coming in close contact with strangers, something that says
this virus is real, and it’s to be taken seriously’.26 ‘Something to grab the public
attention’, Eckert states, a ‘beauty shot’, a detailed, solo close-up.27 Working
alongside scientists at CDC, in order to understand the microscopic virion, visible
only through an electron microscope, the Coronavirus particle resembles ‘a grey
blob surrounded by a blurry haze of protein spikes’.28 Even if they had a basic
morphology of the structure, Eckert and Higgins wanted to present something
that has no visual reference. Consequently, they made a series of design decisions
and interventions, adding form, color, texture, and shadow for communicating the
virus more clearly to the public as well as for provoking an emotional and visual
impact. The color palette adds a feeling of danger, alarm, through the contrast
between the bold red of the S proteins and the gray of the viral wall, for instance.29
   Scientific images can be, of course, a powerful rhetorical expression in
documentary cinema, for understanding the biopolitics of molecular life itself
as well as, in this particular case, for reflecting upon the representability of the
traumatic experience. It is certainly true that we can retrace an indissoluble
link related to scientific and medical practice between documentary cinema
and the microbiological world, since the early twentieth century. Techniques
for filming radically transformed many scientific fields, including biology.30 The
first scientific film, Fertilization and Development of the Sea Urchin Egg (Julius
Ries, 1907), capturing images of living, moving cells in a format that could be
projected for teaching to medical students, adopts Marey’s chronophotographic
technique, exploring new possibilities through a dynamic medium instead of a
static representation. Ries realized the first time-lapse film of cell development
by condensing a 14-hour process in two-minutes, instead of presenting it
through a series of still images.31 Furthermore, the moving picture camera,
which became necessary in scientific research since it has been commercially
available in Europe, succeeds in depicting the microscopic world, making visible



Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                        119
      the otherwise unimaginable, like the process of embryogenesis.32 In the recent
      days, in the bioinformatic era, there has been an increasing shift from the analog
      depiction of biological processes to the digital renderings as, for instance, in The
      Inner Life of the Cell (2006),33 which illustrates the leukocyte extravasation for
      defending the body against disease, through a computer-generated animation.
         The conversion of hard data into animated images, as a modernist form of
      representation, challenges the production of documentary realism. Even if it
      refers to indexical qualities of medical imaging, data animated visualization
      is mediated and produced by algorithmic software that makes pictures out of
      numbers. However, these informatic images take on the status of evidence,
      functioning as bioinformatic media, producing new forms of biomedical
      knowledge. Reflecting upon the role that computers have played in transforming
      our conceptions of documentary evidence, Kirsten Ostherr affirms that ‘these
      visualizations claim to document an unseen reality, and in doing so, they bring
      that very reality into being’.34
         The iconic image of SARS-CoV-2 has been extensively used in the
      documentaries I have already mentioned, as well as in other productions,
      whose purpose was not strictly educational or scientific, such as in In the Same
      Breath (Nanfu Wang, 2021). In a similar way as Totally under Control, the HBO
      documentary focuses on the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, retracing
      how the Chinese and American governments reacted to the outbreak. Wang
      assembled a team of cinematographers, producers and field researchers to
      film and document what was unfolding in Wuhan and then in the U.S. after
      the spread of misinformation. The film intends to defy the obfuscation and
      disinformation which has characterized the COVID-19 crisis, highlighting the
      responsibilities of the governments and how their lies have affected the lives of
      ordinary people. Analogously to her previous film, One Child Nation (2019), Wang
      explores how the governments and, consequently, the state-run media create
      political narratives out of tragedy, highlighting similar signs of propaganda
      and censorship effects both in China and in the U.S. However, in a different
      way compared to the previous film analyzed, In the Same Breath depicts more
      personal and intimate moments rather than addressing scientists, virologists
      and infographic material for educational purpose, through vlogs and video-
      dairies. It has been evident, indeed, how the impact of media technologies on
      users’ daily lives, the new conditions of life under quarantine and the limitation
      of mobility have influenced collective and individual social narratives in the
      form of personal and intimate diaries written during the lockdown as well as
      the documentary lexicon. Collecting first-person self-documentation from who
      have filmed and published their life online under pandemic, In the Same Breath
      conveys an affective experience of fear and uncertainty. We meet several
      American healthcare workers traumatized by all the illness and death they have
      witnessed, who cannot speak about it because they have been warned by their
      own employers, as happened in China. The dramatic intimacy of these moments,
      as a man who has to decide whether his mother should be left to die at home
      or taken to die at an overcrowded hospital, or Wang’s personal experience,



120                                                         Antichi, Visualizing the Virus
are juxtaposed with the data visualization narratives. The photographic realism
of the images of pain and suffering are alternated with other scientific and
incontrovertible proof of the virus manifestation, as the infographic material
and the iconic image of SARS-CoV-2, recalling the collective pandemic imagery.
  Reconceptualizing the images of suffering through different strategies
and forms of representation for communicating and understanding trauma,
the film suggests ethical witnessing, referring to Kaplan’s notion. Biological
digital renderings and data visualizations stand as modernist forms of
representation, as techniques and practices increasingly used in contemporary
documentary cinema like re-enactment, found footage, animation, which bring
to a reconceptualization of indexicality, realism, and evidence as well as of the
representability of traumatic events.
  Moreover, In the Same Breath recurs to another visual element which plays
a key role in the cultural trauma narration concerning the pandemic, as the
drone footage of unusually desolate cities, in a post-apocalyptic scenario. In
early February 2020, evocative assemblage of drone sequences captured firstly
in the city of Wuhan, then across the world, invaded all over the networks and
social media platforms, standing for the iconic symbol of social distancing. The
pandemic drone imagery evokes a spectral situation, the aftermath of war,
that Teresa Castro proposes to read ‘against the background of our current
ecological crisis’.35 She highlights the connections between drone footage
realized during the pandemic and aerial footage of wild animals taking over
empty cities around the world, as the nature takes back its proper space, as
well as images of anti-racist protests, referring especially to Black Lives Matter
movement. ‘The iconic symbol of distance tech produces the imagery of social
distancing’, as Caren Kaplan affirms, referring to the drone footages produced
during the pandemic, which represent ‘a haunting, melancholic nostalgia for
what has been lost’.36 Focusing almost completely on urban landscapes, and
their material and environmental empty infrastructure, drone imagery depicts
a modernity in peril, with ‘an increasing non-human agency in the production
of visibility’, challenging the human fantasy of optical mastery over the earth.37
Even from above it is impossible to see where the virus is. Ai Weiwei’s Coronation
(2020) extensively uses drone footage in order to depict the lockdown in Wuhan.
Filmed against a dull grey sky, the city resembles a sci-fi dystopian movie set
with skyscrapers empty of people, railways without trains, highways without
cars. However, drone imagery, intensified by a soundtrack that sounds like
atmospheric electronics and ghostly screams put through a vocoder, alongside
footage representing survival situations like an unemployed man living out of
his car or anonymous patients hospitalized in the intensive care unit offer a
sensationalistic narration and form of representation. With no data visualizations,
infographics, onscreen titles, or interviews but through fragmented images of
individual pain, the film seems to arouse ‘empty empathy’, following Kaplan’s
concept, which could maybe provide an initial shock in the viewer rather than
stimulating a pro-social behavior or a critical thinking. That’s the risk films as
76 Days (Hao Wu and Weixi Chen, 2020) or The First Wave (Matthew Heineman,


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                     121
      2021), for instance, can run into, focusing mainly on sensationalistic images of
      human suffering in intensive care units.



      CONCLUSION
         To conclude, in the present contribution I have examined different communicative
      and narrative strategies adopted by some documentary productions in order to
      visualize something invisible, like the virus and its effects. Infographics used
      to communicate complex quantitative or qualitative information in a visually
      engaging manner, in the age of big data and the current pandemic, tend to
      dominate the mediascape, signaling, consequently, a transformation of visual
      representation in documentaries as well. Even if it is difficult to historicize a
      current event as the COVID-19 pandemic, to locate a single prevailing trend in
      these pandemic non-fiction productions, or to propose a new categorization, it
      is possible to retrace new forms of imaginary geographies and visual devices in
      order to shape and construct the pandemic as historical agent of cultural trauma.
      The way of representing a pandemic has been very different considering, for
      instance, HIV, which, obviously, promoted documentary activism of the epidemic
      era, through films that criticize the social and political causes of the disease and
      mourn the huge losses within largely invisible communities.38
         Nevertheless, a documentary concerning emerging viruses such as Ebola or
      SARS, like, for instance, Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak (2020), adopts a
      deeply different audiovisual lexicon and forms of visualization compared to the
      cases I have taken into account. The six episodes documentary series, released
      on Netflix in January 2022, just before the COVID-19 was beginning its rampage
      all over the world, covers a range of specific issues concerning the possibility of
      an influenza pandemic, the search for a universal vaccine or anti-vax movement.
      It is possible to retrace an educational purpose since the series aims to explain
      how to prevent and contain a potentially global outbreak, even if the narration,
      structured like an espionage thriller, mainly focuses on sensationalistic rhetoric
      of contagion, from the deadly ramifications of the 1918 Spanish flu to the current
      days. Depicting a crowded animal market or a run-down farm as a possible
      center of contagion as well as focusing the attention on seriously ill people are
      explicative intents for conveying a sensationalistic sense of disaster.
         On the other hand, mixing interviews with infographic material, maps,
      dashboards, photomicrographs, and computer graphics animations, some of
      the COVID documentaries I have taken into account reconfigure the collective
      imagination of the pandemic in a bioinformation era. The invisibility of the virus
      has led to a series of indirect and abstract images. Data visualization, using
      different kinds of elements like images, lists, graphs, charts, attractive color
      schemes, descriptive headings, and subheadings, going beyond an educational
      purpose and its explanatory and pedagogical power to narrate, can be considered
      a modernist form of representation, a new audiovisual lexicon to reconceptualize
      the images of suffering and the traumatic event.



122                                                         Antichi, Visualizing the Virus
Notes
 1
    Jihoon Kim, ‘Data Visualizations, Vlogs, Drone Imagery: Expanded Documentary Forms in the COVID-19
Emergency’, Film Criticism, 45.1 (2021), <https://journals.publishing.umich.edu/fc/article/id/1060/>
[accessed 15 July 2022]
  2
    Ibidem, 3.
  3
     COVID-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Responses, ed. by John C. Pollock and Douglas A.
Vakoch (London, New York: Routledge, 2022).
  4
     Lisa Parks and Janet Walker, ‘Disaster Media: Bending the Curve of Ecological Disruption and Moving
toward Social Justice’, Media+Environment, 2.1 (2020), 4, <https://mediaenviron.org/article/13474-
disaster-media-bending-the-curve-of-ecological-disruption-and-moving-toward-social-justice> [accessed
27 April 2022]
  5
     Ron Eyerman, ‘Cultural Trauma and the Transmission of Traumatic Experience’, Social Research: An
International Quarterly, 87.3 (2020), 679–705 (679).
  6
     See, for instance, Kirsten Ostherr, Cinematic Prophyaxis: Globalization and Contagion in the Discourse
of World Health (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Nikita Mathias, Disaster Cinema in Historical
Perspective Mediations of the Sublime (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020); Defining Disaster:
Disciplines and Domains, ed. by Marie Aronsson-Storrier and Rasmus Dahlberg (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar
Publishing, 2022).
  7
    Karen Redrobe Beckman, Crash: Cinema and the Politics of Speed and Stasis (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2010); Greg Siegel, Forensic Media: Reconstructing Accidents in Accelerated Modernity (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2014).
  8
    Ann Kaplan, Climate Trauma: Forseeing the Future in Dystopian Film and Fiction: Foreseeing the Future
in Dystopian Film and Fiction (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Eco-Trauma Cinema, ed. by
Anil Narine (London, New York: Routledge, 2014).
  9
    T.J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2013); Moving Images: Mediating Migration as Crisis, ed. by Krista Geneviève Lynes, Tyler
Morgenstern, and Ian Alan Paul (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
  10
     Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (London, New York: Routledge, 1995).
  11
     Akira Mizuta Lippit, Atomic Light: Shadow Optics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 32.
  12
     The term infodemic, from information and epidemic, refers to a situation where ‘a few facts, mixed with
fear, speculation, and rumor, amplified, and relayed swiftly worldwide by modern information technologies’
affect economies, politics and security. The term has been coined by the journalist and political scientist
David Rothkopf in 2003 in connection with SARS. David J. Rothkopf, ‘When the Buzz Bites Back’, The
Washington Post, 11 May 2003, <https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/2003/05/11/when-
the-buzz-bites-back/bc8cd84f-cab6-4648-bf58-0277261af6cd/> [accessed 27 April 2022]
  13
     Florian Hoof, ‘Media of Trust: Visualizing the Pandemic’, in Pandemic Media: Preliminary Notes Toward
an Inventory, ed. by Philipp Dominik Keidl, Philipp Dominik Keidl and others, (Lüneburg: Meson Press, 2020),
231–242. Hoof’s study on different data visualizations about the virus and the pandemic as a trustworthy
form, since the society is acquainted with this specific visual culture, has been the starting point of my
research.
  14
     Deborah Toschi, ‘Bodies and maps, display the habitat of the contagion’, Visual Culture Studies, 2 (2021),
97–114.
  15
     Ensheng Dong, Hongru Du, and Lauren Gardner, ‘An Interactive Web-based Dashboard to Track COVID-19
in Real Time’, The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 26.5 (2020), 533–534 (533).
  16
      Ann Kaplan, Trauma Culture. The Politics of Terror and Loss in Media and Literature (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2005), 93.
  17
     Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Straus and Giroux, 1977).
  18
     Kaplan, 91.
  19
     John Berger, ‘Photographs of Agony’, in About Looking (New York: Vintage Books, 1980), 41–44.
  20
     Kaplan, 22.
  21
     Kim, 6.
  22
     Tess Takahashi, ‘Data Visualization as Documentary Form: The Murmur of Digital Magnitude’, Discourse,


Cinéma & Cie vol. 22 no. 39 2022 · ISSN 2036-461X                                                      123
36.3 (2017), 376–396 (376).
  23
     Bill Nichols, ‘The Voice of Documentary’, Film Quarterly, 36.3 (1983).
  24
     Parks, Walker, 13.
  25
     Caterina Martino, ‘Fotogenia del virus. Il ritratto del nemico invisibile’, in Virale. Il presente al tempo
della pandemia, ed. by Roberto De Gaetano and Angela Maiello (Cosenza: Pellegrini, 2020).
  26
     Dan Higgins in Marcus Fairs, ‘Iconic Covid-19 images designed to create “a feeling of alarm” says CDC
medical illustrator Dan Higgins’, Dezeen, 14 May 2020, https://www.dezeen.com/2020/05/14/covid-19-
images-coronavirus-cdc-medical-illustrator-dan-higgins/ [accessed 25 April 2022]
  27
     Cara Giaimo, ‘The Spiky Blob Seen Around the World How C.D.C. medical illustrators created the
coronavirus pandemic’s most iconic image’, The New York Times, 1 April 2020.
  <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/health/coronavirus-illustration-cdc.html> [accessed 25 April
2022]
  28
     Dan Higgins in Fairs.
  29
     Julia Sonnevend, ‘A virus as an icon: the 2020 pandemic in images’, American Journal of Cultural
Sociology, 8 (2020), 451–461.
  30
     Jean Painlevé, ‘Scientific Film’ (1955), in Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé, ed. by Andy
Masaki Bellows, Marina McDougall, and Brigitte Berg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), 160–169.
  31
     Kirsten Ostherr, ‘Animating Informatics: Scientific Discovery Through Documentary Film’, in A Companion
to Contemporary Documentary Film, ed. by Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow (Hoboken: John Wiley, 2015),
280–297.
  32
     Hannah Landecker, ‘Seeing Things: From Microcinematography to Live Cell Imaging’, Nature Methods,
6.10 (2009), 707–709.
  33
     The short film is commissioned by BioVisions, a multimedia collaboration based in the Department of
Molecular and Cell Biology at Harvard University and funded by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
  34
     Ostherr, 281.
  35
     Teresa Castro, ‘Of Drones and the Environmental Crisis in the Year of 2020’, in Pandemic Media, 81–90.
  36
     Caren Kaplan and Patricia R. Zimmerman, ‘Coronavirus Drone Genres: Spectacles of Distance and
Melancholia’, Film Quarterly, (April 2020), <https://filmquarterly.org/2020/04/30/coronavirus-drone-
genres-spectacles-of-distance-and-melancholia/> [accessed 15 July 2022]
  37
     Ada Akerman, ‘Covid-dronism: Pandemic Visions from Above’, in Pandemic Media, 168–169.
  38
     As far as HIV activist videos concerns see, for instance, Alex Juhasz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community and
Alternative Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).




124                                                                                Antichi, Visualizing the Virus
