Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
Summary
I belong to the blank generation and I can take it or leave it each time
(Richard Hell and the Voidoids, ‘Blank Generation’)We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. The great war is a spiritual war. The great depression is our lives.
(Tyler Durden, Fight Club)An advertisement for the Samsung VM-A680 video-phone, featuring a beautiful woman standing beneath a movie marquee that reads ‘We All Have a Movie Within. What's Yours?’ offers a promise of the phone as movie-camera, and the user as star:
You already have drama in your life. All you need now is a phone that lets you capture it. Enter Samsung's VM-A680 video phone. It allows you to record up to 15 seconds of digital video and audio as you walk down along the red carpet of your life. You can save it, play it, email it, and send it to your friends.
The advertisement ends with the phrases ‘Your life. Now showing’, giving new meaning to Andy Warhol's prediction that, in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes. And the digital film festival, Resfest 2004, offers a section on ‘Handheld Cinema’: ‘After years of hype, finally PDAs, mobile phones and portable entertainment devices can play short films … [T]here's already a group of inspired filmmakers pushing the boundaries and crafting unique moving images just right for the micro-screen’ (RES Magazine 2004:9).
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- New Punk Cinema , pp. 1 - 18Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2005