Individuated Production, Public Sharing and Mobile Phone Film

View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by White Rose E-theses Online Cell/ular Cinema: Individuated Production, Public Sharing and Mobile Phone Film Exhibition Gavin Wilson Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds York St John University Faculty of Arts September 2014 - ii - The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. The right of Gavin Wilson to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. © 2014 The University of Leeds and Gavin Wilson - iii - Acknowledgements I am indebted to a great many people over several years for their support, encouragement and wise council throughout the research project and writing this thesis. I would particularly like to thank my supervisors in the Faculty of Arts at York St John University, where I have been proud to hold a Studentship in Film Studies between 2010 and 2013. Foremost among these has been my supervisor Steve Rawle, whose apparently limitless time and patience I have been privileged to receive during my research. His depth of knowledge and clarity of critical argument have only been surpassed by his generosity with important suggestions at the perfect moment, and his readiness to read a great deal of work-in progress from me at extremely short notice. I would like to thank Gary Peters for his support and for reading early drafts of this thesis, and to Rob Edgar-Hunt for his kind and helpful suggestions in the latter stages. My thanks are also due to John Rule and Jill Graham for their help and guidance throughout. My heartfelt thanks are due to my colleagues and friends in the Graduate Centre at York St John University. Your kindness, cheerfulness and intelligence has continually buoyed my spirits up, and kept me smiling when there has occasionally been little good cause to do so. You have taught me many things, including friendship. Many friends and family members have, sometimes unknowingly, been of enormous support and reassurance as I have made my wobbly way to this point, and I want to record my gratitude for your all that you have done and continue to do for me. There are many of you, but I will hopefully thank you all personally in due course. From earlier times, even before embarking on this research proper, I would like to acknowledge Lance Pettitt, who had belief in my abilities to undertake this project and new direction in my life. I thank you for being one of the brave and far- seeing people who dared me to do this, so that I could also believe in great things. - iv - Further back and longer ago, I received vital and long-lasting encouragement, guidance and friendship from Heiner Jacob, who I wish was still around to read this. However, the majority of my gratitude and love will go to my mother Kath and father Bill. You are wonderful and are the reason I am who I am and that anything is possible, and I know in my absolute centre that you are reading this right now Mum. - v - Abstract This thesis investigates the articulation between filmmaking using the cameras of personal mobile phones, and the distribution and exhibition of filmmaking at film festivals devised to support and promote its development. Covering a research period between 2010 and 2013, I analyse an emergent phenomenon using a mixed methodology over five major chapters. Following a discussion of the ontology of phone filmmaking and its historical situatedness, I establish terminology for each major element of cell cinema. Bridging features of contemporary digital filmmaking with the entertainment spectacles of early cinema history, the phone film privileges visual immediacy, urging genred and experimental presentations of limited narrative complexity. Notably, the thesis indicates that phone films incorporate technologically innovative aspects of autobiography by filmmakers. What are characterised as the ambulatory and movie selfie categories evidence contemporary representations of movement within phone filmmaking. By updating Walter Benjamin’s (1936) ideas of the flâneur, and Michel de Certeau’s (1984) writing about the physicality of walking, the thesis draws on the socio-cultural use of mobile technologies and physical, participatory engagement with the filmmaking process. Incorporating an ethnographic study of international cell cinema film festivals, the thesis interrogates phenomenological aspects of interrelated phenomena. I discuss how phone filmmakers, spectators and others experience their participation in the construction and dissemination of intercultural, shared discourse. Cell cinema’s cultural signifiers cross or subvert perceived geographical and economic boundaries, urging a reassessment of Western or Euro-centric philosophical traditions. The thesis investigates how cell cinema enables expressions of the self, delineates notions of identity, and communicates various aspects of socially determined meaning. Therefore, cell cinema engagement incorporates the sharing of gifts of phone films that foreground bodily movement and the ‘everyday aesthetic’ of the cell - vi - cinema gaze, involving the engagement with ‘knowledge communities’, and ‘culturalising events’ within festival environments. - vii - Table of Contents Acknowledgements.....................................................................................iii Abstract.........................................................................................................v Table of Contents .......................................................................................vii Introduction .................................................................................................ix Literature Review .....................................................................................xvii Chapter 1. Phone Film Production: Filmmaking Post-2G 1 1.1 Historicizing the Phone Film 7 1.2 The Cinema of Instants, Reprised 15 1.3 Object, Image, Artefact 19 1.4 Mistakes, Accidents or Amateurism? 34 Concluding Remarks 37 Chapter 2. A Social Semiotics of Phone Films 39 2.1 Phone Filmic Discourse 45 2.2 Group A Phone Films 47 2.2.1 Dialogical 47 2.2.2 Music Phone Video 50 2.2.3 Professionalist 57 2.3 Group B Phone Films 59 2.3.1 Ambulatory 59 2.3.2 Movie Selfie 63 2.3.3 Autobiographical 76 Concluding Remarks 78 Chapter 3. Towards an Intercultural Philosophy of Cell Cinema Discourse 81 - viii - 3.1 Cell Cinema: Transnational and/or Intercultural? 86 3.1.1 National/Transnational Distinctions 90 3.2 The Rhizomatic Screen 105 3.3 Thinking the Narrative 115 3.4 A phenomenology of the Cell Cinema Body 122 Concluding Remarks 132 Chapter 4. Showing, Sharing, Exhibiting 135 4.1 Space, Place, Location 148 4.2 Cell Cinema Festivals and Cinephilia 159 4.3 Participatory Knowledge Community 177 4.4 The Culturalising Event 184 Concluding Remarks 189 Chapter 5. Cell Cinema Play Becomes Enunciative Productivity 191 5.1 The Politics of Cell Cinema Disruption 195 5.2 New Medium or Mode of Engagement 201 5.3 A Hybrid Cultural Form 209 5.4 The Enunciating Gift 214 Concluding Remarks 226 Conclusion 228 Bibliography 232 Appendix A: Phone Films Referenced 248 Appendix B: Abbreviations 251 - ix - Introduction Making films, let alone watching them, using the video cameras built into mobile phones has been, until recently, an unusual thing to do. After seeing a film on the screen of a mobile phone for the first time, Thomas Elsaesser wrote to ask where in the ‘culture shock or tragicomic incongruity is the point at which something new that is already a practice becomes visible before theory catches up with it’ (Elsaesser, 2003, p. 122). When Elsaesser wrote these words, technology had not yet caught up with our feelings of pervasive culture shock, as another spectacle is presented for us to grapple with. This thesis is, in major part, an attempt to catch up with this discrepancy between theory and the practice of making short films using the cameras built into mobile phones, which I call phone filmmaking. I aim to make a contribution to the scholarly enquiry that is, inevitably in Elsaesser’s view, continually about to catch up with phenomena and events. The thesis investigates the emergent phenomenon of using the mobile phone as a platform for both the making and showing of creative moving images, which I abbreviate to cell cinema. This notionally cellular aspect describes novel or unusual qualities of film production on mobile phones, almost uniformly undertaken by individuals, but who nonetheless, attend film festivals to engage with films made with the cameras of mobile phones. Therefore, a major theme and purpose of the project as a whole has been to investigate, with a view to eventually understand, the various perceptual and experiential events that go to make up the cell/ular cinema phenomenon. The thesis establishes various terms and compound phrases as a terminology and taxonomy, which are adapted from existing academic practice or common parlance, and applied with consistency throughout the thesis. Over the course of my research I have investigated the sometimes transient, and occasionally significant nature of individual filmmakers’ work. I have observed and gathered data as the

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