Abstract

The screening of films made on mobile phones to spectators, either on a mobile phone or projected before an audience, significantly affects the materialinstrumentality 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 thereception of representational moving images by the spectator, the phone filmtransitions from a particularised kind of audio-visual artefact recording afilmmaker’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 betweenfilmmaker and spectator that implies a particular kind of cellular connectivity, thisarticle 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 withinphenomenological experience, revealing the act of seeing screened representations of the body as contingent on objective thought about sensation and interconnected movement within the world