The Mobile Phone and the Flow of Things

Abstract

This chapter investigates how the mobile phone film rewrites the way in which time and space are represented by the moving image. Bernard Stiegler’s ideas around technics are central to the analysis. The experimental documentary film, Moscow Diary (2010) will form the basis for exploration of the technical and aesthetic production of the moving image. Walter Benjamin, the German essayist and cultural commentator, wrote Moscow Diary in 1926–1927. Based on the diary, the film is an urban journey through Moscow, contrasting two very different historical periods. Made on a mobile phone, it explores the social and political changes between Benjamin’s view of 1920’s Moscow and contemporary Moscow. The film focuses attention on the production of the image itself as well as the way in which mobile phone films enhance the spatiality of the moving image.