A Phenomenology of Reciprocal Sensation in the Moving Body Experience of Mobile Phone Films

Abstract

The screening of films made on mobile phones to spectators, either on a mobile phone or projected before an audience, significantly affects the material instrumentality of the phone film, with profound consequences for its reception and the ontological truth that results from such kinds of audience engagement.

In the transformative process between the capture of real events and the reception of representational moving images by the spectator, the phone film transitions from a particularised kind of audio-visual artefact recording a filmmaker’s personal experience, to become the material component of a potentially innovative discourse that foregrounds the body as central to an understanding of how we experience images on the screen of a mobile phone.
Drawing on notions of a physical, quasi-biological interaction between filmmaker and spectator that implies a particular kind of cellular connectivity, this article reaches back through a Deleuzeian-Guattarian concept of the rhizome to the philosophy of Bergson, and back to the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Sobchack that underpin it. Reception of the phone film is thus located within phenomenological experience, revealing the act of seeing screened representations of the body as contingent on objective thought about sensation and interconnected movement within the world.