When the Phone Calls

Even when cinema was still silent, the telephone was already ringing in various of its films. More than a simple prop or icon of modernity, this device had major implications in the field of cinema (as it had already in literature and theatre). If parallel editing had already suggested the simultaneity of actions in distinct spaces to the spectator’s eye, the telephone line made it possible for distant characters to interact, synchronised in time.

In Suspense (Lois Weber and Phillips Smalley, 1913), a woman in distress calls her husband, who is stuck in his office. Both share the same situation, but are separated by space. It is in that distance, in that gap between knowing and not being able to act, that suspense is installed — a suspense that cinema would thrive upon. Decades later, Scream (Wes Craven, 1996) would sardonically reference the phone’s by then extensive use within genre cinema, and reuse the same device as Weber and Smalley but invert its function: the phone no longer a means of rescue, but one of threat. From the silence of Suspense to the scream of Scream, the telephone remained at the centre of the scene, a catalyst for panic and terror.

And if the disembodied nature of the voice served to trigger fear, the telephone also became a mechanism to explore the relationship between sound, image, and narrative, bringing the off-screen into the frame. It is in this territory that films such as Intercepted (Oksana Karpovych, 2024) or Le navire Night (Marguerite Duras, 1979) operate. In the first, we hear Russian soldiers’ phone calls home, superimposed over images of Ukrainian civilian life interrupted by war — a confrontation between domestic banality and devastation. In the second, Duras extends her reflection on the disjunction between word and image, accompanying two strangers — she, ill and reclusive; he, insomniac and distant — who use clandestine lines, installed during the German occupation of Paris, to resist the emptiness of modern life.

Through its (dis)articulations of time and space, body and voice, the telephone also gave cinema different tools to interrogate intimacy and deception. In Uma Voz na Noite (Solveig Nordlund, 1994), two strangers discover, in the fragility of anonymity, an unlikely moment of proximity. In Pillow Talk (Michael Gordon, 1959), a romantic comedy inspired by party lines — a post-war telephone system in which several households shared the same number — Rock Hudson takes advantage of his telephonic cloak of invisibility to assume another identity and seduce his neighbor Doris Day. In Tomorrow Everything Will Be Alright (Akram Zaatari, 2010), a reunion with a former lover is staged through instant messages, the language of the digital age, but typed out on a typewriter — an anachronistic gesture that gives a nostalgic intensity to what would otherwise be a fleeting online flirtation.

If within these films the telephone serves mainly to frighten, connect or disconnect either sound from image or characters from one another, Dušan Makavejev, in Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (1967), uses it as a metaphor for the transition to modernity and its corresponding political and gender transformations. It is estimated that, in the USA in the mid-20th century, one in every thirteen working women was a telephone operator. It was an omnipresent profession in cinema, especially in Hollywood, where the operator often appeared in romantic comedies. Makavejev subverts this stereotype, intertwining the discourse of a sexologist with the romantic struggles of an emancipated young worker, turning the telephone into a symbol of the tensions between individual emancipation and social oppression.

If, in Makavejev, the telephone points to the modernisation of labor, in The World (Jia Zhangke, 2004) it becomes a metaphor for globalisation. Released a year before the landmark after which more than half the world’s population would live in cities, the film portrays a China in transformation, through the stage of a theme park of global monuments where rural migrants dailyly enact the illusory promise of mobility. The animated SMS messages that appear on screen condense desires and dreams, whilst reminding us these messages can travel much more easily than the precarious bodies that send them. In one of the film’s final scenes, a businessman shows off his new camera phone, a harbinger of the technological revolution that would soon transform both the world and ways of making cinema.

Such was underlined in 2015, when Sean Baker, using three iPhone 5s (one of which is now in the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures), filmed Tangerine, consecrating the mobile phone movie as a legitimate aesthetic and, above all, as a political gesture: bringing marginalised bodies and stories to the center of the scene. This potential continues in The Pixelated Revolution (Rabih Mroué, 2012) and The Uprising (Peter Snowdon, 2013), where the camera is treated as an extension of the body (in one case of the arm, in the other of the eye), becoming a weapon of civilian resistance.

While Mroué and Snowdon demand a “sufficient resolution” for the faces of oppressors to be captured, Alexandre Koberidze, in Let the Summer Never Come Again (2017), pushes the opposite possibility to the limit: pursuing an absence of definition, dramatised to the point of abstraction. Filmed with a modest Sony Ericsson W595, the film demonstrates how technical precarity can engender an unexpected poetic alchemy: the digital noise of the image and the small cameraphone’s mobility open space for a cinema of wonder, in which each shot oscillates between observation and reverie. No less intriguing, though travelling a very different path, is No Place for Fools (Oleg Mavromatti, 2014). Assembled from the protagonist’s vlog, the film begins as a portrait of Sergey Astakhov — a gay man who, after conversion therapy, becomes a pro-regime Orthodox activist — but quickly slips into a surprising game of contradictions that, more than fixing the singularity of an individual, develops into an acerbic essay on the ambiguities and paradoxes of contemporary Russia.

The program concludes with American Reflexxx (Alli Coates, 2015) and Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn (Radu Jude, 2021), works that expose the darker side of this weapon we all carry in our pockets. In the first, a faceless woman is assaulted by the crowd for straying from the norm; in the second, a teacher finds herself condemned after the public exposure of an intimate video whose publication she did not consent to.

Almost 150 years after Alexander Graham Bell uttered the famous phrase “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” — words that changed the world and without which there would be no “E.T. phone home” — and in the precise year the iPhone turns 18 and comes of age, When the Telephone Calls proposes a game of crossed lines between analog telephones, digital devices, and cinema, to listen to how the past and the present still converse.