Pioneering Cell Phone Cinema: Q&A With João Krefer

At the Hong Kong Mobile Film Festival Awards, the Brazilian short Julho, shown above, unexpectedly triumphed as the second best drama among the ten finalists. Previously shown at Brazil’s Arte.Mov Festival in 2010, João Krefer’s short can be best categorized as video poetry. The film does not deal directly with issues of mobility and interactive communication—instead, it seems to find it’s power in a low-resolution device whose camera turns inward in order to look outside.

Krefer’s videos seem explore the city’s less obvious features. In Oscar 07 (below), his documentary about the Eye Museum, designed by Oscar Niemeyer and located in Krefer’s native city of Curitiba, it's not the architectural structure that forms the film, but closely-recorded colors and reflections, revealing textures and movements that take shape within the frame. As the architect unabashedly says in the film’s opening, “Life is more important than architecture”—and technology, too.

As a student, with only two short films behind him, it's difficult to speak about Krefer’s “work,” or even identify his films with any aesthetic that goes beyond movement and the young artist’s subjective and emotional relationship to his city. What we see are their effects. But Julho’s recognition in a festival in which films with more objective and conventional narrative forms typically dominate, reveal a certain cinematographic look that fits very well into the small screen—and maybe even a big screen. We spoke to João Krefer about Julho and the possibilities of video language on mobile devices.

The Creators Project: What is Julho?
João Krefer: Julho is the result of an ambiguous feeling I get from Curitiba, where I was born and have always lived. For a variety of reasons, I can't wait to get out of there, but I cannot deny that I have established a home there, in the broadest sense of the term. The cold weather that lurks in the city has become an aesthetic issue for me. It's part of my identity, even if only in an antithetical sense. Curitiba is a bipolar city, it has no middle ground. Bringing this idea to the movies I want to make, gets to a point where I start to see beauty in the contemplation of inertia, the dilution of the tangible world to the detriment of a world composed mainly of light in motion. This is all reflected in Julho, within a first person perspective, simultaneously anxious and conforming for a change. The very way the character looks at the city lies between two poles. On one hand, there's a very jaded aspect–there have already been countless images made about the look-at-the-world-through-the-window perspective—on the other hand, there's an important detail to me, which is the fact that the rain on the window serves as a filter between the observer and the world. I would even say that Julho is not a film about looking through the window, but looking at the window, the city out there as a backdrop for the morbid tranquility of the individual. This for me is the perfect synthesis of Curitiba.

The film stood out among the other finalists to bring the genre closer to video art and video poetry. What do you think about this?
I cannot deny that I was surprised with the selection of Julho among the top ten finalists. After all, every other movie worked, to a greater or lesser extent, within a certain narrative functionality that I was definitely not concerned about. Perhaps this was part of the event’s goals: eclecticism typical of people who are probing for a specific approach.

What became clearer to me was that the industry still doesn't know what to do with a small screen. Everyone there has this awareness that we need to think about content designed specifically to be viewed on mobile devices, but they haven't yet concluded whether it's better to sell short films, movie jokes, video poetry or whatnot. I honestly don't care for it because I have no desire to enter this industry, unless they accept my work without restrictions, which is what happened with Julho in that particular moment. It was great to go to the festival, both for the life experience and for the importance it has in my early professional career, but I have to confess that the space I really want to conquer is not quite that one.

Is there a difference for you between making movies and making movies for mobile devices?
In terms of quality, I see no difference. I would never say a fresco is above a drawing, a symphony above a study, or a conventional feature film above a short to be watched in the palm of your hand. A single category doesn't make an artwork. But there are differences in terms of language, differences arising from the different display contexts. For example, when you talk about a film to be viewed as mobile media, one should take into account that the viewer will not be in a darkened room, isolated from the world around them, suspending their daily lives to watch a movie for a few hours. Displaying films as mobile media demand a more immediate assessment directly linked to the flow of life, because the viewer is not “stopping everything they are doing” to “sit back and watch the film calmly.” In that sense, I like to think of what many call “pocket films”, which are short in duration, use more expressive and less detailed images, and synthesized ideas. For me, a haiku is a kind of an audiovisual experience, which also is reflected in the poems of Basho that I inserted in Julho.

What is the value of working with the mobile format in this case?
Like I said before, mobile media works more directly in the immediate day-to-day life. You don't have the spectator thrown toward the images, but the opposite. Conventional cinema sometimes manages to establish a sacred relationship with the viewer, and I have had some of the best times of my life watching some movies, as if I was in contact with God. That's very beautiful, and I also want to make films that operate in this way, but lately I have been increasingly interested in more dynamic, less mystified images. I see many people drowning in a filmic universe where life and cinema no longer have a straight link, and such results reflect on “exquisite” critics who basically justify a film based on other films, transforming cinema into a kind of an exchange practice. Perhaps an iconoclastic way out of this cinephilic masturbation is in the immediate and instinctive release of mobile media images—of course, as long as you use mobile media as a support to display small artworks, not advertising vignettes or something like that.

Some recent examples of these “small works” to which I refer, and which I really like are: Orawa by Felipe Barros, made for mobile media, and O Mundo É Belo (“The World Is Beautiful”) by Luiz Pretti, also made with mobile media. I also strongly support the way Godard used cell phone cameras in some moments of Film Socialisme, giving a political dimension to the pixel.