A Sense of Freedom: Filmmaker and Teacher Bart Weiss Talks About his Book “Smartphone Cinema” | Interviews

Bart Weiss is a longtime North Texas filmmaker, film programmer, teacher (at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he just recently retired), and all around source of wisdom about everything related to cinema. He just published his first book, titled Smartphone Cinema: Making Great Films with Your Mobile Phone.

I got to know Bart when I was a young film critic in Dallas back in the 1990s. He was the founder and artistic director of The Dallas Video Festival, which ran for 35 years and showcased a staggering amount of notable and new video art. He also produces the independent filmmaking showcase “Frame of Mind” on the local public TV station KERA TV, hosts the podcast The Fog of Truth, is an Apple distinguished educator, and has an MFA from Columbia University.

He has a lot of knowledge to impart, so I met him for lunch at NorthPark Mall in Dallas and talked to him about smartphones, the evolution of filmmaking technology, the usefulness of film festivals, and a lot of other things.

An edited transcript is below.

​​Interestingly, this book is about mobile phone filmmaking, but it’s also about how to make a good movie, period.

There’s a chapter in the book that is, like, not specifically about mobile. It’s just about how to make a film. If you’ve never made a film before, this part of the book sort of gets you into it, and if you have made a film, you can just skip that chapter. But there are some nice diagrams and graphics in there. 

What are some of the challenges of making movies with mobile phones?

One is sound. The phone is based around getting a good picture. They spent all of their engineering efforts to give us the best possible looking picture, but it has problematic sound. The distance between the voice of the subject and the device that’s recording the sound is critical. The further back you get, the exponentially more noise you get. Fortunately, there’s this whole universe of gear that helps with mobile filmmaking, and one of the sort of major subsets of that is sound. Lights are another problem, but there are some very nice portable lights that you can get. 

The hard drive is the other big problem. These are really fat files if you’re shooting [professional resolution] and your phone will fill up pretty quickly. If you have a recent Apple phone or Android, they have USB ports on them, so you can plug a drive into the port. A thumb drive will work really nicely.

Were you always an early adopter of new technology?

I’ve always been interested in what’s new and different. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, that I’m never satisfied with what’s in front of me! There’s always been a natural curiosity, whether it’s for traditional filmmaking with film or trying something new and something different and something interesting.

But beyond the kind of curiosity of newness, two other things were important for me. One was smaller, lighter things. The other is something I go into in the book: the democratization of media. 

So you know, as long as there’s been media, there’s been cheaper media, right? When you had 35mm films, Kodak came out with 16mm film for amateurs. There’s always been this sense of the expensive, professional media, versus the things that are made meant for other people. 

Like 16mm giving way to Super 8mm?

Yeah, and just regular 8mm before that. And what happens is that artists and political activists use this portable, inexpensive media to create original works in a different kind of way. There’s always this system that evolves in this consumer media, this nonprofessional media, that has been going on for years and years and years. 

What’s happened now with the mobile phone is that the quality that the phone can get, when done the right way, can rival what’s being done with an expensive camera. The whole history of the moving image has reached a point where there’s something viable. You don’t have to make an excuse for the work and say, “Oh, it was done on the phone,” because you can make it look as good as something that’s been done with professional equipment. That’s just amazing. 

There was what was called a prosumer movement in filmmaking in Northern Europe about 30 years ago, somewhere between professionalism and amateurism, that included the so-called Dogme 95 principles, where filmmakers were resolving to only shoot on video or 16mm, and use real locations, and do other things that would distinguish them from Hollywood. What did you think of that at the time?  

I love technology because it allows for a sense of freedom to do many kinds of things, but with Dogme 95, that freedom was done with this aesthetic set of principles to use filmmaking in a unique way. Dogme 95 had some resonance with the French New Wave and many other movements from the past. But you know, in every generation, there is a group of people that revolts against the art of Hollywood in a different kind of way. Dogme 95 created those sorts of rules, which of course they all broke in some way!

Yes, inevitably! And I am also reminded by what you’re saying that the word “grainy” as it is pejoratively used in reviews started to pop up in the 1960s and ‘70s, when the French New Wave filmmakers and the Americans who emulated them were shooting on 16mm and blowing it up to 35mm to show in theaters. 

Well, 16mm, if you exposed the image correctly and you blew up to 35mm, it would look okay, but if you were, like, a stop under-exposed, there would be grain. When you’re blowing things up, all of the slight imperfections become more noticeable. Then came Super 16mm, which was then specifically invented to make better blow-ups. Instead of having sprocket holes on both sides of the film, they removed one row of the sprocket holes, allowing you to have more picture and make a blow-up look a little better.

All of this history of the medium is fascinating to me. And it’s so funny that nowadays shooting on Super 16mm film is considered a luxury, yeah? People, people talk about it like it’s like an unthinkable indulgence.  

I love the movie “The Featherweight,” which was shot on Super 16mm film to try to emulate that Cinema Verite look that documentaries had in the 1960s. But there are now ways to add grain to stuff you shot with your phone. You can sort of “dial-in” the look of a certain film stock. I can have that look if you want it to look like Ektachrome 7242 film. If I want it to look like black-and-white high-contrast or low-contrast film, I can dial in that look. That’s pretty amazing. 

What it comes back to is the idea that when you hold this in your hand [holds up his own iPhone], you’re holding this history that started with 16mm film, the first consumer format for filmmakers. You’re holding the whole evolution of doing films in a consumer way, but also having good quality. And it’s not just that it’s easier to do it now, and less expensive to do it, but also that there are things you can do with the phone that you can’t do with anything else.

Can you give me an example?

A big thing is, you can be more intimate with your subject. If I’m shooting an interview with you right now, and I’ve got a big camera right here [indicates a large area to his right] I’ve got a boom [microphone] on you [he mimes a boom operator holding a boom pole over his head] and I’ve got some lights on you, and we’re talking, I can get a good interview with you? Yeah. I can look in your eyes and get something substantial. But if I’m talking to you like this and all I have is this [holds his phone beside his head], I can access a different emotional space. 

Every week after I teach my class, I interview the musician Carl Finch from Brave Combo so I can finish this film about them. I have lots of hours of interviews with Carl, but the interviews I get with just the phone are substantially better. They’re more interesting. Now, from a narrative filmmaking point of view, imagine if you have less crew and you’re working on a very deep, emotional scene with an actor; it’s gonna be completely different with a phone than it would be with a whole crew. Think about the still from “High Flying Bird” with Soderbergh with an actor and a phone on a tripod in a gym. Just imagine, from an actor’s point of view, what you can do, the places emotionally you can get to, when all the other stuff has gone away, and it’s just two or three of you in a room. 

One of the assignments I have my students do is “the intimate video.” I ask them to interview somebody in their family. I got a mother talking about how she was abused by her parents. Imagine that being done with a larger crew. Possibilities open up with the phone that are not available otherwise. 

Why do you think there’s been this countervailing push to reestablish cinema as a thing that happens in a theater?

The other night I saw “Gladiator II” in IMAX. If I can see something in IMAX, I would definitely choose to do that. Seeing a print of a Stanley Kubrick film is something that I would drive to go to see. It’s more visceral. There’s something amazing about having the best possible image, the best possible sound. But at the same time, how many films are being watched only on mobile devices?

The majority of them. Or on a laptop or something.

Or a tablet. So we’re in this world where cinematic storytellers connect to people in dramatically different ways. And the unfortunate reality is that the group of people that will drive to see the Kubrick film in a theater is becoming smaller and smaller, right? And part of that is because there’s less of the film culture we grew up in, where we would talk about films with our friends often. We would go see a movie, talk about it with our friends, and talk about what critics said. There was a time when people would hang out in the lobby after a movie and talk about it with each other. That happens online now, increasingly.

That’s true. One of the great things about going somewhere like the Texas Theater in Dallas, or in New York at a place like the Quad Cinemas or Metrograph or IFC Center, is that those kinds of conversations still happen in real space. Maybe that’s also a part of this pushback against cinema becoming a thing you passively consume on your phone.

At the Texas Theater, there’s a bar in the lobby where people can hang out. One of the things theaters still do really well is create a sense of community around movies. But it’s important to remember that there’s always been a difference between film and cinema.  Film is a technology. Cinema is a language.

I wonder what you think of the paradox of this technological democratization, which is that anybody can make a movie, or a thing that has cinematic properties, and then upload it to YouTube or Vimeo or somewhere, but them you have this other challenge of, how do you make people aware that it exists and get people to see it and discuss it? 

I mean, in the early days of home video, there might have been 400 movies that got a commercial release of any significance, and it was tough just to keep up with a quarter of them even if you were an absolute fiend for new movies. Now there are what, thousands of new features in a year? More? Who is watching them besides the people who made them? Is it possible that the phone solved one problem and created another?

You know, you and I both get how many emails a day about films that people made that they want people to see? It is kind of insane that so much work is being produced. There’s a lot of it. Many of these films, shot on a phone or shot inexpensively, will seen at festivals, right? And festivals, for many films, are distribution, right? Unfortunately, the distribution deals are not paying very much, if anything. You maybe get airfare to the festival. But that’s the way you find an audience, and the streamers.

There was a moment during the pandemic when streamers are buying everything, but now they are buying very little now that doesn’t have a celebrity attached to it, or that’s about crime. Places like TUBI are picking up some interesting things, and there are streamers operating outside the mainstream, but yeah, there’s more work produced than any rational person could ever see, and you as a film critic, see more of it than most people do. I know that a big part of some people’s resistance to so much mobile media is, “Oh my god, now there’s even more stuff to watch!”

And that’s the professional product or the quasi-professional product that gets picked up by a company willing to pay to promote it. But there’s also this vast sea of other stuff out there that no one’s ever gonna see. Obviously that was always true of low budget movies. More movies have always gone undistributed than gotten distributed. But I worry that the imbalance has been colossally amplified.

But let’s not forget the rule of the ratio of good to bad. It has held true forever. Most stuff is bad, and the more stuff you have, the exponentially more bad stuff is out there. What’s really important is that there’s also going to be exponentially more good stuff, as more stuff is able to be made.

And the other thing to remember is, some of the work being made with this technology is not meant to be seen on a big screen. Some people are making work that will only be shown on YouTube, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You can connect with an audience in a very powerful way online, and that’s fine. And there are people who just want to do things on TikTok. On TikTok, you can reach more people than you can ever do on an actual feature film release. 

TikTok is not a venue for long-form narrative filmmaking, though. 

True, but even if your goal is not to be popular on TikTok, there may be some value in making work for TikTok because the format requires you to make things that are very short. Learning that skill can make you a more effective filmmaker, because most people have no idea how to make a point quickly.

If you can reach a global audience by uploading something to YouTube or making it available for purchase on Vimeo or Amazon, what’s the point of a traditional film festival ?

Festivals do a few things. You can connect with other artists. I tell my students all the time, “If you go to a festival and you see an actor who’s good in a film, go up to them, get their card, call them, and have lunch with them, and then write a script for them. If you see a film that’s shot really well, get that [cinematographer].” It’s also about building a community of filmmakers. There are people who go to festivals and don’t see each other the rest of the year except at that one festival. For movies to survive, we really need to build communities of people to watch them and think about them, beyond just saying, “Oh, that was nice. What are we having for dinner?”

Festivals also provide you with an audience that you may not otherwise have. It’s really kind of a big deal, to be there and connect with an audience.

It’s also a way for critics to discover new filmmakers and new stuff. Finding the good stuff is important for critics, because it is out there! Every time that new technology becomes available to artists, somebody figures out a way to make something really special with it. That’s what this [holds up his phone] is really for.