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Movies for the very small screen celebrated in Paris festival
(AFP)
Updated: 2005-10-10 09:36
France is the country that gave birth to cinema, and this weekend it pushed
the seventh art a creative and technological step forward by hosting a film
festival dedicated to movies shot entirely with mobile telephones.
 Several months ago the Forum des Images, the Paris film centre hosting
the event, handed out 100 third-generation (3G) phones to film-makers, writers,
musicians, and other creative types and told them to go off and experiment.
The Pocket Film Festival, which sought to both showcase an emerging art form
and ponder what effect it might have on mainstream moviemaking, this weekend
screened their works.
These included thrillers, mini soap operas and parody science fiction and
ranged from 30-second shorts to a full-length feature set in Rome.
Some of the works were little more than fun films anyone fooling around with
a mobile phone might have produced. "Pendulum," for example, was entertainingly
odd but consisted of nothing more than a pendulum swinging back and forth,
revealing in a reflection a man filming it with a phone camera.
But most of the films displayed greater talent and better use of the phone
camera, and many had a freshness and intimacy that harked back to the days of
grainy Super 8 home movies.
"Bump," by Antonia Frichte, was a poetic, almost abstract work in which a
camera roams very slowly over Paris rooftops to the accompaniment of vocal
chamber music, while "The Revenge of Dr Follenberg" was a parody, complete with
flying saucers zapping earthlings, of movies such as the recent Hollywood
blockbuster "The War of the Worlds."
Wladimir Anselme, one of the film-makers showcased in the three-day festival
that began Friday, said that the reduced capacity of the mobile phone drove him
to be more creative.
"Whatever tool you use gives you creativity, you have to
overcome its limitations," Anselme, who is also a musician and cabaret artist,
told AFP.
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