French cineastes see big trend in pocket-sized moviemaking

(c) AFP

For many of us, the latest mobile telephones on the market are simply cool gadgets for making calls, with a few nifty electronic extras -- MP3, agenda, e-mail, image capture - tacked on.

But for a tiny yet growing number of artists and filmmakers, they are in fact amazingly small, cheap cameras - a tool that might herald the start of a new revolution in digital-video moviemaking.

"Something is definitely happening with these. I was as surprised as anyone when I saw what I could do with one," said Jean-Claude Taki, an experienced French director who has taken the new technology and run with it.

He was one of 80 directors, students and artists showing what movies can be made with 3rd-generation mobiles in an unusual Paris film festival on the weekend dedicated to the format.

Aptly titled the Pocket Film Festival, the event showcased works that included animation, artsy flair and narrative fiction, with 14 of the best movies being projected in a competition.

The limitations of using a mobile phone camera were evident on the big screen -- mushy sound, a blurry or pixellated image and weird motion effects.

But at the same time, those deficiencies were less marked than expected. It was clear that the very latest camera phones, such as those loaned to the entrants in the festival, were rapidly narrowing the gap with the bulkier and more expensive proper digital video cameras.

The festival's artistic director, Benoit Labourdette, acknowledged as much.

Last year's Pocket Films Festival -- the inaugural event -- had been dogged by technical handicaps in getting pint-sized images on to the big screen.

A year later, those problems were disappearing. "The images now produced are four times bigger than those shown last year," Labourdette said.

It also helped that the artists using the mobile format often deliberately played up some of the shortcomings to achieve a desired effect.

One director, for instance, filmed undressed women in a hammam -- but made the image so blurry and fragmented that it resembled more a moving impressionist's painting than video.

Another entrant, film and art student Margeurite Lantz, 29, filmed her own transformation from contemporary Parisian to a near-exact likeness of "The Girl With the Pearl Earring", the celebrated 17th-century painting by the Dutch artist Johannes Vermeer.

"I wanted to go through that painting and take her place," she said, adding that the unobtrusiveness and accessibility of using a mobile camera had opened up a whole new realm of art making to her.

Another short film was a haiku-like animation of a cowboy (actually a "crow-boy" given the protagonist's inexplicable beak) who, upon settling down to sleep in the desert, is left by his bored horse and awakes heartbroken.

Taki's own film was an ambitious project made in his spare time while working on a documentary shoot in Kazakhstan.

Full of haunting images and benefiting from his professional sound engineering talents, it told the tale of a French scientist who commits suicide while in Russia after he learns of the death of the girl he was in love with there. The story parallels the scientist's work in quantum physics and the idea that two particles, once they cross, leave indelible traces on each other.

Taki, 44, said working with his mobile phone was more natural than using a digital camera, and allowed him to amass hours of effective images he happened across which were then whittled down to his 24-minute work.

"It's a lot like making a sculpture," he said.

The ubiquity of mobile telephones and the increasingly sophisticated technology they contain mean more and more people who feel they have a filmmaker's gene in them will be turning to them, he predicted.

"I don't know if this tool will turn out to be a revolution. But I do know it's not just a passing trend," he said.

Taki film:


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