PANDEMIC

Reading the novel Essay on Blindness by José Saramago captivated me from the beginning due to the parallelism with John Wyndham's novel The Day of the Triffids. Both works touch on the subject of a pandemic. On the one hand, Saramago writes about a pandemic that infects people with vision loss. On the other hand in the work of John Wyndham the pandemic is caused by the Triffids, hybrids between plants and animals, apparently produced in Soviet laboratories that have the autonomy to be able to move freely infecting at a high speed. Unlike this last work of science fiction of the early fifties, Saramago's novel does not specify the cause or origin of the plague and focuses only on the personal and group existence of characters without names, increasingly amplifying the intrigue and timelessness of events. Released in 1995, it was adapted into a film with the same title in 2008. For the work of John Wyndham, two adaptations were made, one for a film in 1962, directed by Steven Sekely and Freddie Francis, and another in 1981 for a BBC television series in which the blindness of the humanity was caused by a rain of meteorites. My remix belongs to this adaptation. There is a third adaptation of the TV Triffids in 2009. For the rest of the footage I opted for Wolf Rilla's 1960 film Village of the Damned, also an adaptation of John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos. Despite the difference between this two films and despite not having been captivated by these films, I was interested in their elegant black and white scenes with a small camera traveling and filming the extras on the floor, which I then transformed by dyeing the scenes in blue and red. From John Carpenter's remake of Village of the Damned, I recovered some scenes and small shots that I then later digitally modified. Finally, in the final part I used scenes from the movie Blindness.