I got a train last night from Cork to Dublin. Usually I would listen to some podcasts such as This American Life which intermingles stories that are true and some which are fictitious. Last night I decided to watch Control (2007 Anton Corbijn) on a 2 inch square monitor - sacrilege! David Lynch (a priest of cinema) believes that

'..you will never in a trillion years experience the film - you think you will have experienced it - but you will be cheated - its such a saddness...'

This quote is from the iphone ad (see below) in relation to watching a film on an iphone - here I am applying it to my ipod, who's screen is even smaller than an iphone. In Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century there was over 30 cinemas on O' Connell St. People went to the cinema religiously - at a guess around 3 times a week (now there is only 1 cinema on O Connell Street). Going to the cinema was built into people's everyday lives, now we frequent the cinema if we really feel a film is deserving of such an environment. Technology brought this change - Video and DVD's made it easier for people to simply stay at home. Subsequently, we have Apple products which are now defining how we watch films.

Control is a beautifully photographed film and I am actually saddened that I did not see it when it was screening in cinemas. However, my experience of watching it on an ipod and on a moving train, brought a strange sense of intimacy between me, what I was watching and what I was holding. You can wholly participate in a film through the sound of it - hearing Sam Reily (Ian Curtis) recite some of his poems was quite beautiful and this was embelished through the wearing of headphones. At one point in the film Sam Reily recounts a love letter from Ian Curtis to Annik Honoré (Alexandra Maria Lara) - something distracted me and I looked out the window. The lights of an empty funfair had caught my eye - I wondered where I was. Beside the fun fair was a flood lit stadium with a group of men striding in unison up and down the pitch - all at the same time i was listening to this poem. A kind of surreal moment but something I would not experience in the cinema - everyday life actually intertwining with a film. I may have escaped visually from the screen but what i was seeing outside seemed to fit in with what I was listening to.

Lynch does have a point, however, in my opinion there are obviously new methods of engaging with film. In the future, it is likely that we will see ground breaking film stemming from the generation that have an inborn connection to their hi-end MP3 Players.