News Summary

• Cameras are more accessible than ever: smaller, cheaper, more portable and powerful.
• Over the past decade the phone has assumed prominence as a tool of feature filmmaking.
• Phone cameras are compact and relatively affordable, but they also flatten the filmmaker’s range of visual options.
• They rely on algorithmic processes that smooth and sharpen the image, in effect enforcing a default contemporary aesthetic that favors smoothness and sharpness.
• “We cannot improve the making of our eyes but we can endlessly perfect the camera,” the Soviet revolutionary filmmaker Dziga Vertov wrote over a century ago.