Introducing pandemic cinema in central and eastern europe

Abstract

Although movies representing pandemics can be tracked at least to Die Pest in Florenz/The Pest of Florence (Otto Rippert, 1919, Germany), discussion of pandemic movies as a (sub)genre of its own are quite recent. Moreover, the academic work that does exist has mostly seen pandemic movies narrowly, usually as subgenres of existing categories like horror or science fiction. And even when researchers treated the films as genres, they almost exclusively focused on English-language productions despite the international status of the phenomenon. The introduction, therefore, agitates for a need to expand the analysis to other countries and offers the special issue as an early response in that direction.