As part of a university symposium on the use of mobile phones as an alternative for audiovisual production, Joseph Morder presented his film I Would Like to Share Spring with Someone at the Cinémathèque of Nice.
“The equipment was imperfect, but that’s what interested me, I wanted to play with that,” reveals Joseph Morder. In 2007, the director was already considered one of the most prolific filmmakers in cinema. That’s when he received an unprecedented commission for the Pocket Films Festival. He had carte blanche to make a film with no theme or duration limits. His only constraint: use only the camera of a mobile phone. The device in question was a Nokia with visual and audio quality light years away from our current smartphones, a true witness of its time.
So, in the vein of the work he had been doing since he was 18, he decided to make a filmed journal. A format he had long shot in Super 8. Avant-garde, he thought it was possible that the mobile phone would suit the genre of the filmed diary. In this sense, from February to May 2007, he discovered and embraced this miniature camera that was lent to him, with a certain innocence and openness. With it, he captured three months of his life through a series of personal and public events. He titled his documentary I Would Like to Share Spring with Someone.
A Lot of Silence and Pixels
Joseph Morder then became one of the first to create a feature film released in theaters with this small recording tool at a time when making movies with a mobile phone was still experimental. “I ventured into absolutely uncharted territory!” he contextualizes. During the screening, the viewer suspects nothing as they are immersed in the personal, while in reality, it is a fake documentary, a staging. “For me, cinema is about being fooled,” he shares, explaining the idea behind this fake journal that looks real.
“There is something in this film that makes me feel young because I rediscovered the excitement and enthusiasms of my beginnings,” he confides to the audience at the Cinémathèque of Nice. He is proposing a new cinematic language here, a language with a lot of silence and even more pixels. He is aware that he is doing something for the first time and suspects it will not last. He absolutely doesn’t know how to use this phone, and that’s precisely what drives him. Everything was to be discovered. “For me, it was a bit like the transition from silent films to talking films“, he concludes.
