In isolation there is idleness, there is the work-from-home grind, or sudden, abject poverty. There is also that looming digital fist, threatening to thrust itself into your gut if you indulge in any activity other than creation. There is guilt, and the gripping nostalgia of civilization: the merry memories of sitting in restaurants, the clink of glasses at a bar, swells of laughter shaped by unironic smiles.

In isolation, we have been stripped of nearly all social interactions. Our environment has shrunken to the bedroom and nearest grocery store; the great variety of life has been stringently limited to the barest of essentials. This all is likely to have a more profound impact on our mental and physical health than we realize. Humans, social creatures, a specie of connection and community, have been ostracized from our ways of life. To assuage this strange, and sometimes downright painful, condition, I have a suggestion (and a needlessly dense reason for it): Watch. More. Film.

Film is one of our last great links to the pre-pandemic civilization. They are analog and digital recollections of life — the real, the surreal, the futuristic, and the intimate. However, some of the most profound utilities of film are not lost in this moment. They are crucial in attuning the mind’s eye to the fragmented bits of beauty in isolation. In a deliciously dense book on film theory by Siegfreid Kracauer — writer of the Frankfurt School and mentor to Adorno — he explores the “revealing functions of film.” In essence, film is a vehicle to lower layers of reality. It allows us to absorb the ephemeral, the too big, and the too-small — the things generally unseen or overlooked in daily life. Films display emotions and events which are perhaps beyond our repertoire of experience, or too overwhelming to grasp as we live it.

With potent examinations of the intricate microcosms of human interactions, films can demonstrate how people intersect, construct, and destroy everything between the material and emotional realms. Thus, film can be a tool to understand connectivity in quarantine, the mess of feelings associated with the pandemic, and a gentle reminder to observe the greatness in things like the ever-shifting sky (an object which has, personally, absorbed my attention during lockdown).

But, film is also superficial in its ability to directly reflect physical reality. The lens cannot help but to capture what is real, what is before it, and give us a directed image of physical reality. And through those images, we can see the world. Unlike other artists who interpret physical reality, those behind the camera tend to show it. Film can be an open window, an ornate stained-glass pane, or an oracle’s magic crystal ball, but it will almost always display our material world.

Spending hours watching films can help reacquaint you with pre-pandemic modes of being. It is a recording of a world we once inhabited. This product of art and technology not only liberates the mundane, the once invisible materialities from the shadows cast by ideologies or ego, it also liberates the life we once lived from our memory. Isolation has separated us from much of our everyday surroundings, and these limits on space and action further fragment our selves from our realities. The simplicities once taken for granted of pre-pandemic life are redeemed in film.

So, please, do not let your grip on other physical realities unfetter — worlds with grabbing a stranger by the hand and shaking it, gatherings of more than ten, or aimlessly meandering through a busy city street. Until that life can resume, vicariously live it, and find new emotional depths in it, by indulging in cinema. And, perhaps come back to life with new knowledge of how to live better. So, here’s a little nugget of absolution in pandemic times — a theoretical reason to consume film, and more of it, during isolation.

Some Isolating Films for Isolation

(in no particular order)

Persona, Ingmar Bergman (1966)

After suffering a mental break, actress Elisabeth Vogel lives in seclusion with her nurse, Alma. Vogel becomes a mirror for Alma, and the two form a frustrating and complex bond defined by emotional transference.

The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1972)

The entire film chronicles a three-way lesbian love drama in one apartment.

The Shining, Stanley Kubrick (1980)

A writer takes on a job caretaking the isolated Overlook Hotel. He brings his wife and son, who has a sixth sense, with him for a secluded and scary stay.

Three Colors: Blue, Krzysztof Kieslowksi (1993)

After the death of her husband and child in a car accident, Julie copes by exiling herself from human relations and her throbbing Parisian environment.

Dogtooth, Yorgos Lanthimos (2009)

An absurd and dark tale of a father who infantilizes his adult children by trapping them on a family compound.

Ida, Pawel Pawlikowski (2014)

A young, deeply interior woman, Anna, is preparing to take her vows as a nun in Poland. Raised as an orphan in a convent, Anna’s must contend with the discover of her true identity as at the daughter of a Jewish couple killed during the Nazi occupation.

One Long Reason To Watch Films During Isolation