#1: Cell Phone Cinema
Instructed by Professor Karl Bardosh at New York University
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All institutions of higher education allow students to learn from experts in their fields. But few offer students the opportunity to learn from an instructor who has pioneered a new industry firsthand.
At NYU, students enrolled within Karl Bardosh’s Cell Phone Cinema course learn the art of mobile filmmaking from a man who has launched a series of international festivals, conceptualized multiple film competitions, and who serves as the namesake — and juror–– for two filmmaking awards at the illustrious Cannes Film Festival.
Oh– and students who participate in the class are guaranteed to become filmmakers in their own right. Their final class projects are submitted for entrance within a widely-attended festival in the heart of New York City: the NYC Indian Film Festival.
#1: Cell Phone Cinema
School: NYU
Course: Cell Phone Cinema
Instructor: Professor Karl Bardosh
Course Description:
Hollywood in your palm. That is what this combination of lectures, screenings, demonstrations and practical production workshop will offer to the students in this course.
In addition to the historical and critical overview of the emergence and exponential growth of global cell phone cinema, students will shoot all footage on cell phones and download them for computerized editing. The final projects will be under three minute shorts. Projects may include all genres of film and television: news, animation, mini-documentaries, music videos and narrative shorts.
It is compulsory that students bring to the class a cell phone capable of recording video.
Completed student projects will be suitable to be posted on social media, the Internet and will be entered into domestic and international mobile phone film festivals. For example, one minute long improvisations of Bollywood Style Music Videos shot on Cell Phones by the students have been projected at the Village East Cinemas as part of the New York Indian Film Festival.
The top 10 of the students’ final projects have a chance to compete with films selected from India, China, Australia, Russia, Hungary, France, Latvia etc. countries at the International Cell Phone Festivals at the Marche du Film of the Cannes Film Festival.
Ask the Instructor: Professor Karl Bardosh
When did you begin teaching Cell Phone Cinema at NYU?
I’ve taught at NYU for 26 years. I began to offer Cell Phone Cinema in 2009 — over ten years ago now – when mobile phones were very different than they are today. Nokia was the leading brand back then.
Cell Phone Cinema was the first course of its kind, and still is today.
What was your intention behind offering the course?
I’m a film educator. I believe that the language of film is a universal language that must be taught everywhere. I grew up in Hungary, where understanding film as a medium is taught through Formalist Film Theory– a theory proposed by the great Hungarian film critic of the 1920s, Béla Balázs. In 1968, I introduced the teaching of film to Hungary by creating a class that examined films that were commonly broadcast on the country’s single national television network. This television series as a class on film aesthetics was broadcast in high schools all around the country in the same time slot.
How is Cell Phone Cinema, as a class, structured?
Students shoot and edit a film each week, submitting their film when we meet for class. The first week, we focus on just one frame: the composition and the framing. Then we move on to cell phone videos. We explore different technical and thematic concepts of film throughout the semester. And of course, everything is shot and edited on the students’ cell phones.
Since 2010, students in Cell Phone Cinema have participated in the NYC Indian Film Festival. The festival, which is one of the largest in New York City, is held annually at the Village East Cinema. We have a half hour show within the festival dedicated solely to student films that are made in the class — it’s a category called NYU Mobile Bollywood.
For this assignment, I have the students create a one-minute long video based upon a pre-existing Bollywood film’s song. Some students make music videos, some choreograph and film dance routines, and some write dramatic scripts. Cell Phone Cinema is the only course in America where a class assignment is guaranteed to show within a festival.
How has the Bollywood community responded to this assignment?
I’m somewhat known in the Indian film industry as in 1992, I made the very first documentary on Bollywood that was broadcast on our PBS for 3 years in prime time. At the festival, even a few years ago I had great Bollywood stars, producers, and directors ask me: “you are telling us that these films on the big screen are shot on phones? But we can’t tell the difference!”
“That’s the point,” I answered.
Your Cell Phone Cinema project has expanded to the global stage, thanks to a series of international festivals that you helped launch. Can you speak about that experience?
I started the Cell Phone Cinema option in 2004, in my homeland of Hungary. The effort was supported by the greatest directors of Hungary who won awards Cannes Film Festival. At the time I was serving as the Artistic Director of a new, DIGI24, competition: participants had twenty-four hours to film and edit a three-minute film using digital cameras. One film that was created for the competition actually went on to be accepted and win awards at other international festivals, too.
Also in 2007, I launched Cell Phone Cinema in India at Sandeep Marwah’s Asian Academy of Film and Television. They now have an annual festival with over 500 film entrants. In 2011, I brought Cell Phone Cinema to Australia, then to Latin America at the Global Film Festival in Santo Domingo and then at the Sochi Film Awards in Russia.
Three years ago we launched Cell Phone Cinema in China, last year in Hungary and, more recently, I introduced the festival in Riga, Latvia.
Last May, two well-known competitions at the Marche du Film of the Cannes Film Festival allowed me to introduce new award categories that were based on my Cell Phone Cinema project. Within the Global Short Film Awards, they offered a new Mobile Phone Filmmaking Award. Each country which holds their own Cell Phone Cinema Festival submits 10 films for consideration, which are juried, shown and celebrated at Cannes.
Another one is the World Peace and Tolerance Initiative at the Marche du Film that also launched a competition for mobile-made films which focus specifically on humanitarian issues. These entries were shown at the World Peace & Tolerance Gala, and the winners received the Karl Bardosh Humanitarian Cell Phone Cinema Award- handed out at the American Pavilion.
What has the global response been to these new innovations in mobile filmmaking?
In the beginning, a lot of people in the industry ridiculed me – “are you nuts? Making films on phones?”. Of course, no one is laughing now.
Initially, advocating for films being shot entirely on mobile phones was a very controversial thing to do. There were concerns that I was over-saturating the industry with unprofessionals. My response has always been, “well, don’t writers need their audience to know how to read?”.
So you’re saying that providing a wider audience with the ability to produce films of their own, using their mobile devices, actually improves how audiences understand film?
That’s right. The first thing that I tell my students, who come from a variety of backgrounds, is: throughout their lives, they will need to create videos and presentations. Conducting interviews, recording places, collecting articles — all of these things can be accomplished using their cell phone. Cell phones are a research tool.
In this day and age, cell phones are a universal truth. I was once at Cannes with a mobile provider executive, who told me that “the real importance of the smartphone is that they are the cheapest computers available to impoverished people all around the world”.
And that’s true. I was once in India, in a village with no electricity. A truck came to the village once a day to recharge the villagers’ cellphones. Later I was in Delhi, watching a beggar seek money. Then his cell phone started to ring.
As media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said: the medium is the message. The medium of the cellphone has changed our lives far more than chatting on the phone itself has. Cell phones have become our lifelines, our butlers, our assistants. We say: “I entrust my life, my contacts, and my schedule to this phone”. They are an extension of our human faculties. Radio is extension of hearing, photographs are extension of vision. Computers, cell phones, and the internet — those are extensions of the human brain, predicted McLuhan decades ago, in the 1960s.
How do you think technology will continue to change the way that university professors instruct, and the way that films are made?
An alumnus of NYU Film School, Sean Baker, (not from my class but aware of Cell Phone Cinema) produced a film three years ago called Tangerine. He shot it using several iPhones. The Duplass Brothers approached Sean to executive produce the film, which was then purchased and distributed by Magnolia Pictures. It received commercial and critical acclaim.
Two years ago, Hollywood filmmaker Steven Soderbergh released a film called Unsane, which was also shot entirely on an iPhone. So we’ve seen the direct effect of mobile cinema upon the culture of Hollywood.
I do think that the phone itself is a transitive device. You still must hold a cellphone within one hand, while your other hand works with it. I think that in the future, technologies like the originally experimental Google Glass will be instrumental for the next generation of video recording. There’s far greater freedom when recording with a glasses-like device. Of course, people have concerns with the ramifications of privacy issues surrounding such devices.
Still, I believe that wearable technologies are the future of filmmaking, instruction, and of humanity. We’re becoming a new kind of human — the digital human.
Supplemental Readings
This is the end of our series highlighting seventeen of the most innovative university courses offered this academic year.
For the full list of courses we’ve selected to highlight, click here.
Innovative courses deserve innovative instruction technologies.
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