Micro Cinema

The release of Edward Burns' latest film Purple Violets on iTunes is a story about a small victory for Apple. It also illustrates the fate of an establishment Hollywood director who continues to pretend, to himself and to us, that he's still an independent filmmaker. Finally, the story is about the continuing evolution of the means of cinematic distribution and viewership.

As a concept and a business venture, the e-movie theater lags behind the e-book, itself a very slowly developing phenomenon. The first online premier of a feature-length film is an important milestone on the way to a dead end. It still seems improbable that hand-held devices will ever become a viable outlet for feature films until hardware manufacturers like Apple come to realize that they're working with the wrong metaphor. A portable viewing device isn't a Walkman, a container for a text. Rather, it's a way of seeing.

Until  movie glasses go mass market, and stop looking incredibly dorky,  the iPod and other hand-held viewing devices will be limited to short films and YouTube videos. The headphone is the weak link in the iPod system, and it's precisely in this repressed aspect of portable technology that needs the most work. It's interesting that for all the cognitive labor that goes into MP3 players so that they can be carried around, engineers and marketers largely ignore the point at which these devices make contact with the body. We'll have a truly portable cinema when movie glasses ever reach the point at which they become as ubiquitous and as functional as white earbuds. We will have also realized, in spectatorship if not filmmaking itself, Dziga Vertov's ideal of the kino-eye, a purely visual cinema that reveals "the poetry of machines." Vertov saw the kino-eye as the next step in evolution  "from the bungling citizen to the perfect electronic man." A cinema purged of phony psychological trappings will "bring people into closer kinship with machines" and "foster new people." One thing is for certain, though: No new cinema can emerge on a three-inch screen.