Hello class,
This prompt is tricky – how to tell the story of a nurse during Covid without the visual representation of her workplace. I suppose the first thing that needs to be done is finding a story. Because film is a visual medium we need to rely on visual evidence to express our story. Of course, the straightforward version of the story would be: As COVID patients flood through the doors of the hospital, a nurse (or nurses) struggles to maintain her health and mental sanity amidst an abundance of dying patients and a chaotic workplace. However, in this story, one of the major characters becomes the hospital itself and without that location, the story doesn’t work. So we must adapt the story.
I lean towards telling a more personal story, in which the nurse’s personal life is a major feature. Her personal life is manifest on screen by her interactions with her husband, and children. And it takes place in the home. We perhaps begin with life before the pandemic. Showing a happy, bright home that is full of life: children running around, good food cooking in the chicken, close contact between the family members, and maybe a movie night. Of course, all of this is with the nurse as our subject (relative to her point of view). This visual evidence sets up the audience’s expectations for a happy domestic lifestyle.
But now we need conflict. Hampe gives us a good example of how to do this in his essay. He tells us to imagine how to visually show a smart boy crossing the street in one shot. His conclusion is, “You can’t. You need to scenes in sequence”. Using an adapted version of this principle we can introduce conflict by breaking down the expectations we set up earlier by juxtaposing the previous sequence with one that depicts a sad and neglected domestic situation. Lingering shots of silent rooms, the kids lounging rather than running around, the family wearing masks and distancing from each other (in case their mother brings back the virus), on the stove is a pot of ramen which one of the children stirs unenthusiastically, the mother is there only briefly before she rushes through the door to go to work.
That’s my take on the story and how to show it visually.
-Luca Wagner