Ways of Seeing: Movies on Mobile Devices

By David Rosen

David Lynch generated a stir earlier this year when he slammed movie viewing on the Apple’s iPod.  Lynch, director of the offbeat TV series, Twin Peaks, and such acclaimed films as Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Mullholand Drive, lambasted mobile movies. “Now, if you’re playing a movie on a telephone, you will never in a trillion years experience the film,” he insisted.  And added, “You’ll think you have experienced it, but you’ll be cheated. It’s such a sadness that you think you’ve seen a film on your fucking telephone. Get real.”

Lynch threw down the gauntlet regarding the newest movie medium:  Is a movie a movie on a mobile device?

The question is provoking an intense debate among filmmakers, academics and others.  Media theorist Mark Schubin put it most succinctly:  “Is an epic movie epic on a 2-inch iPod screen?”  Quoted in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, Elayne Rapping, professor of American studies at the University of Buffalo, concurred: "It's not the same thing watching Blade Runner or Brokeback Mountain on a computer screen, much less an iPod." Janet Murray, director of graduate studies for Georgia Tech's digital media program, also quoted in the St. Louis Post Dispatch, describes the final moments of the theatrical experience as something that cannot be duplicated by the small-screen viewing experience: “When the lights come up [in a theater], there is a moment of mutual recognition––we all just saw that together." 

David Bordwell, a film scholar at the University of Wisconsin, shares these concerns, but takes a more nuanced position. He acknowledges that “some films depend less on image scale and an insulated screening space than others.”  And warns, “I would hate to use a mobile device to watch a film by Hou [Hsiao-hsien], or [Bela] Tarr, [Yasujiro] Ozu, or David Lynch. where you really have to concentrate––to follow the story, to get into the film's mood or atmosphere, to suspend your normal  preoccupations.”

Ironically, hidden in Lynch’s rant is the unstated answer to his own challenge. Twin Peaks is a classic if stylized noir-ish tale rendered into a late-20th century Gothic weekly series, and Lynch broke the mold by embracing a classic filmic storytelling tradition while simultaneously employing the genre-shifting, ironic sensibility of the post-modern present. 

Just as Lynch transformed the nighttime soap opera into something indescribably other, there are filmmakers today adapting existing genres and stories for the world of the mobile screen. These works are not really feature films, not quite shorts, and not much like episodic television, but we have to acknowledge that they represent a new chapter in the history of the motion picture.

The new mobile movie culminates a half-century of what Bordwell calls visual (and auditory) “intensified continuity.” And rather than, like Lynch, dwell on the mobile movie’s limitations, perhaps we should focus on what it does very well. The mobile device’s micro aspect ratio (e.g., 3” x 2” for the iPhone) is uniquely suited to reinforce the twin tendencies of post-modern media making: ever-faster editing cuts and ever-tighter close-up shots.

Today’s mobile moviemakers are creating short-form movies that work in terms of both the mobile device’s limited display capacity and the demands of visual intensification. “I don‘t think the iPod is a device that wants to show two-hour movies,” comments Inventing the Movies author Scott Kirsner in Filmmaker Magazine. “I don‘t think it‘s great for that. I think it‘s more a device for a half-hour TV show or what Joss Whedon did with Doctor Horrible‘s Singalong Blog, where it‘s storytelling in seven-minute segments, or stand-alone movies that are ten minutes long.”  

Indeed, both companies and filmmakers are beginning to discover untapped potential in short-form work. In 2006, for example, Nokia partnered with Sundance and promoted a short-form mobile movie project, the Mobile Bollywood Initiative Global Short Film Project.  There were five winners, each filmmaker having previously premiered a movie at the Sundance festival. They included Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris (of Little Miss Sunshine) for A Slip In Time and Maria Maggenti (Puccini for Beginners) for Los Viajes de King Tiny.  Short-form mobile movie festivals, like the online-based ShortsNonStop are popping up to help legitimize this new medium.  Similarly, talent hailing from traditional outlets is beginning to experiment with the mobile movie. For example, the aforementioned Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer developed his latest series, Doctor Horrible’s Sing-along Blog, for distribution on iTunes. A campy mixture of superhero adventure and romantic musical, each episode lasts about ten minutes and is more freewheeling and casual in its storytelling than a network development process would allow.

Los Viajes de King Tiny

 

The logic of 20th century movies making is clear.  It begins with the immediacy of the Lumière brothers’ 50-second black & white short, L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat, that freaked out Parisian in 1895.  It matures to the majesty of David Lean’s 1962 70mm epic, Lawrence of Arabia. It then extends to the hand-held, consumer-video-era populism of the 1999 Blair Witch Project by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, which was mostly shot on video but with occasional 16mm clips and then blown up to 35mm. Each of these films defines a transformative moment of filmic art: the intersection of filmmaker’s creativity with the technology of their time. 

L'Arrivée d'un train en gare de La Ciotat

 

So, rather than bemoan the ways in which the small screen of the iPod, PSP and movie phone is an inelegant viewing surface for the large-scale movies of the past 120 years, let us sidestep Lynch’s argument and look instead for the new filmmakers who will create the seminal micro-movies of the 21st century.

David Rosen is a writer and business-development consultant living in New York City. He is author of Off-Hollywood: The Making & Marketing of Independent Films (Grove), originally commissioned by the IFP and Sundance Institute, and, most recently, The Next Telecom War: Moving from Net neutrality to infrastructure common carriage, Filmmaker Magazine, Summer 2008.  He was also part of the management teams that took two high-tech companies public.  He can be reached at drosen@ix.netcom.com.