Episode 16 - Pandemics in Film with Robert Alpert

<p>Robert Alpert (Fordham and Hunter College) discusses pandemics in film as a form of popular culture. After an introduction of how to analyze film and whose perspective it conveys, the conversation focuses on two films, <em>Outbreak</em> (1995) and <em>Contagion</em> (2011), and the shifting ways in which each represented its fictional pandemic. Alpert points out the differences and similarities between the movies and our contemporary experience of COVID-19, explains why zombie movies should be considered pandemic films, and explains why he believes movies should not be disregarded because they are “unrealistic”.</p>