A conversation with Benoît Labourdette

9 September 2023. Published by Benoît Labourdette.

8 min

The film theorist Roger Odin (1939-2023) saw in the arrival of video in cell phones “for the first time in the history of cinema, the establishment of cinematic language as ordinary language”. He interviewed me about this in 2010.

As early as 1990, Roger Odin had asked me to join his research group on “private cinema”, and we collaborated regularly thereafter, especially after I founded the Pocket Films Festival (with the Forum des images) in 2005. In 2010, he asked me to do a five-year review of the festival, and here it is. I’m sharing it today to pay tribute to Roger Odin, who has just passed away.

How did you come to create the Pocket Film festival, the first festival dedicated to films shot on cell phones?

At the end of 2004, cell phone operators launched a new network to replace the 2G network: the 3G broadband network. The 3G network enables operators to sell new services (videotelephony, MMS, mobile Internet, etc.), but this presupposes the launch of phones capable of connecting to the new antennas. What interests me here is that a 3G phone is necessarily equipped with a camera and a video screen. Since there will soon be no more 2G networks, we can predict that, in the near future, all phones will be equipped with cameras. As a result, the day is not far off when we’ll all have a camera in our pocket, permanently at hand, capable of filming at any time, whether indoors or outdoors, at home or in public spaces. In fact, this is hardly anticipation: already, the vast majority of phones sold today have this built-in camera. We can then ask ourselves what this changes (or is going to change) to our lives in terms of the relationship between private and public space, in terms of the relationship to lived time and memory, in terms of the relationship to others, in terms of identity, and so on. This psycho-sociological question was the starting point for the creation of the Pocket Films Festival in 2005. The Pocket Films Festival aims to accompany the deployment of the cell phone and all that it implies in society by mobilizing the role of discoverer, defricteur, eyeopener of Art. The idea is to invite artists (filmmakers, visual artists, writers, musicians, etc.), film and art students, and anyone else who so desires, to seize the camera phone as a means of engaging in an act of creation.

What is the concept of cinema and films shot on cell phones that this festival seeks to promote?

In a nutshell, it’s about films that couldn’t be made with a camera, but only with a phone.

For me, there are two main filmmaking devices:

the direction system: we write a script and assemble the necessary elements (technical tools, sets, props, actors, etc.) for the production. This system works equally well in fiction and documentary. From this point of view, making a film is a collective effort.
the writing device: to borrow Alexandre Astruc’s famous phrase, the camera is used here like a pen; it is activated by a single person who is above all working on his or her view of the reality around them. Viewed in this way, the cell phone is essentially a writing device. What is the purpose of this device? To say, to give, to exchange. It’s anything but a voyeur’s eye. Moreover, there is no eye behind the lens of a camera-phone, since the phone is at the tip of the hand. With the phone, the camera is the eye. A mechanical eye that captures and moves between people. The relationship between filmer and filmed is no longer the same.
What’s really new about these cell phone productions that can’t be found in films shot with a camera?

The term “new” is a tricky one, because it’s almost a media imperative: you always need something new. I believe that what’s new every day, for each and every one of us, is to make our own words a little more our own. The camera phone is a new tool, of course, but cinema itself, if you look at its history, has only ever been made up of new technological tools, not to mention its current transition to digital. In short, I’d say different rather than new.

I’d like to emphasize two features:

The fact that the camera is always with you. We’re such slaves to our phones that we always have them with us, and therefore our cameras too. The cell phone is a camera that you don’t even decide to take with you; that changes everything. It’s impossible to have such a relationship with a normal camera. From now on, the act of filming can happen at any time, imposing itself on us and on others at any moment in our lives. This can have serious consequences in terms of privacy. More generally, it raises ethical and legal issues. But it also offers an almost extreme potential for audiovisual creativity, in a true, sincere and sensitive encounter with reality.
The fact that we almost never frame with our eyes anymore. Before, we had a technical object in front of us, forming an image on a frosted glass, which our eye analyzed to produce the frame. Today, the telephone is so embedded in our bodies that we hold it at arm’s length, over our heads, during a concert, for example, to film the scene. We’ve acquired an unconscious skill that allows us to frame directly with our bodies. It’s really like an extra eye that’s been grafted onto us, one that produces images in a different space and time from our biological eyes. This radically alters the act of filming, and in particular the relationship to the subject being filmed: there is no longer a viewer, no longer a filmer, there is only the gaze that circulates between people, at once completely abstract and perfectly concrete, since the images do exist.
I know that you organize educational workshops alongside the Festival; can you tell me how they work and what their purpose is?

While half of our work at the Festival consists in initiating projects and putting telephones in the hands of artists and students, the other half consists in sowing seeds through educational workshops throughout the year, to encourage invention, discovery, intimate and social investigation, and above all awareness of the power of images, which I feel is so essential today, since we are all producers of images. In short, creation and citizenship. In educational workshops in particular, there’s an almost intrinsic link between creation and citizenship.

I’ve run a lot of workshops myself, then trained people, and it’s a practice that’s developing more and more. As far as aiming is concerned, I can talk about my personal conception of these workshops. Now that the camera phone is in almost every teenager’s pocket, and social networks are a very important modality of human exchange, people are producing more and more images, and especially videos, with their cell phones; they then broadcast them on their Facebook “wall”, or simply on Youtube or Myspace to share with their friends. When you produce an image with your phone, and broadcast it immediately, the act of image production - and this is totally new - is neither preceded nor followed by words (no script, of course, not even a work plan; no feedback on the shot to modify or comment on it). The image is born spontaneously, rather like words and phrases in a conversation. The act of producing images is a real language act. At school, we learn to read, write and count. A society in which people talk to each other but can’t read or write cannot be a democratic society. I believe that, in the same way, a society in which everyone creates, manipulates and distributes images without being master of their “grammar” and therefore of their power, cannot be a democratic society. It therefore seems essential to me to teach the language of images at school. How can this be done? In my opinion, we need to focus on creativity. In my workshops, by proposing acts of creation with this camera-that-we-all-the-time-have-in-our-pocket, by proposing to use it to express oneself, by making the effort to put images into shape, I try to teach participants to master this language and to make it their own.

My pedagogical proposal is quite simple: I ask young people to make a film, i.e. a production that has nothing to do with the memories we capture and share, such as home movies or the little videos we take and send each other on our cell phones, which only make sense in their context, which are just snippets of captured reality. What I’m proposing is to design a genuine audiovisual form, one that can function not just for oneself or for the group to which one belongs (family, group of friends), but for recipients other, outside the small relational network in which one is accustomed to communicating. In short, I suggest building an organized system of signs designed to communicate, in other words, one that takes its spectator into account. It’s a radically different experience of image production from the everyday use of the camera phone.

What’s more, I propose that the young people work in small groups, which gives a collective dimension to the process of reflection prior to shooting, a way of doing things that is not at all the same as in everyday practice.

Finally, and this is very important to me, I include the dimension of distribution in the workshop work (young people are used to distributing their images on the web). To do this, I propose to recreate, with great care, a small cinema room (even when we’re in a classroom): I ask that it be dark, that we have a video-projector to allow us to see a large image, I insist on good sound, that there be silence during the projection, etc. In short, I refabricate the cinema room. In short, I re-create the ritual of cinema, and it’s in this setting conducive to concentration that we watch the short films made by the young people. The aim is to give these images real importance. Apart from the fact that it’s very rewarding for young people, it seems to me that all too often today, making images is considered unimportant ... In short, my aim is quite simply to get people to take images seriously, because if we don’t take care of images, images will take care of us... That’s the civic dimension of these courses.

What influence did the festival have?

The press was extremely circumspect at first. But we showed journalists films, really good films, and from 2005 onwards, there were extraordinary films, films that questioned cinema, the very matter of cinema, the way images are taken, how they are shown, and even the grain of the image. And that changed everything. There was a bit of a media frenzy (on the scale of a cultural event), and a huge international press review. The Forum des images had never had such press coverage for any of its events in its history. As a result, we received a huge number of requests from festivals and cultural venues all over the world, for repeat shows, carte blanches and themed programs. Even today, this is a very important activity for us. Hardly a week goes by without a collaboration with Pocket Films somewhere in the world. This year, CNN did an entire program on “How to make a film with your phone” with us. Of course, other festivals have sprung up too. Arte has asked us to do co-productions.

This year, the event film by Locarno Festival guest of honor, director Pippo Delbono, was his feature film La Paura, which he shot at my suggestion and which I edited. In January 2008, I lent Pippo Delbono a camera phone and suggested he explore what he could do with it. We met up again six months later. He’d done a lot of filming, and given a lot of thought to what this new camera tool would enable him to produce that was different from what could be done with a normal camera. With his little phone in hand, he had gone to meet the Roma, to meet the excluded, to meet the rich too, he had captured the obscenity of television by looking at it up close, he had collected traces of racist acts to keep the memory alive, he had filmed in his intimacy... Seeing all this, I edited a first short film, Carnet de notes pour un film, and then between July 2008 and May 2009, I accompanied him in the post-production of La Paura, a very political and aesthetically strong film, which, apart from the Pocket Films Festival (2009) and the Locarno Festival, was shown at the Festival Cinéma du réel (one of the best documentary film festivals). It’s also the first film shot entirely with a cell phone to have been blown up to 35mm (in March 2010, by the Bologna Cinematheque), so that it can be distributed more widely, particularly in Italy.

What do you think are the major developments since the first festival?

Of course, the technical quality of images on telephones has changed enormously, opening up new aesthetic and thematic possibilities. There are a lot of little things (zoom, sound quality), but basically, there hasn’t been any major evolution, even if media pressure would like us to find some. A film made on a cell phone (like any film?) is successful, is strong, when you’re dealing with someone who expresses themselves.

Can you tell me a little about the films you make on your cell phone?

Before the phone, in 1999-2000, I shot a film, over a period of a year, with the smallest good-quality digital camera that existed at the time, a camera that I carried with me all the time, so as to be able to capture what was happening. I called it “film-writing”. With the phone, I experimented a lot with the visual possibilities, the plastic qualities, the flexibility of post-production, for example with a film I made entirely in the subway, shooting and even editing (you can import a little editing software on your phone).

Then I realized that all these traces I was capturing were inviting me to delve into the memory of places, which in 2007 gave rise to the feature film Triton, on the subject of the traces of the Shoah in everyday life, especially traces lost elsewhere.

At the same time, I started to work on the sequence shot, which is in fact the dominant cell phone shot. I shot one sequence every day for a month, and ended up with 30 sequences, which I posted on the quidam.fr website as I went along, in order to rediscover a kind of simplicity in the relationship between the filmmaker and the viewer. And then two years later, I put these sequence shots together: there’s a thread running between them, it tells a story and it ended up producing a film: Unaware actors. The end of the film is very open-ended. I use this film in my training courses.

Based on this work, I propose what I call a film-atelier. The film is screened in my presence, and afterwards the audience is invited to get into small groups and shoot the 31^st sequence. It’s great fun. People come back and we look at their sequence shots. It enriches the participants with a new experience, a fairly new form of exchange. It also enriches me: as the sessions progress, it makes me think a lot about the film, and I’ve been led to make a lot of changes to the editing over time. It’s also a way of showing experimental images, which isn’t so easy these days. I defend this project to some extent (in 2009, for example, it was presented at four festivals in France). It’s a way for people to get involved in the issues surrounding images today, through the practice of one-off artistic creation linked to a spectator’s practice. It’s a very powerful way of communicating and discussing how images function in society.