Moving image... Robert Redford (centre) views a trailer on a mobile screen at the launch of the Sundance Institute's deal with the GSM Association. Photograph: Louis Lanzano/AP
Robert Redford and the Sundance Institute have commissioned six film directors to make shorts specifically for mobile phones, sponsored by the GSM Association. Before I go any further I should probably state that if Mr Redford happened to ask me to do one, I'm not sure I'd be able to refuse. But since he hasn't, I'm happy to tell you why the news makes me slightly uneasy.
Speaking as a director, I'd prefer to make films for a huge silver screen watched communally, rather than for a tiny pixelated one watched alone, probably in small interrupted bits. It's fairly obvious why. Everything that speaks to me of the cinema - being hurled into another space-time, becoming immersed in a character's reality, the creation of icons and stars - requires size. Big screen cinema acts via our physiology, for which size does matter.
Cross-platform entertainment is a fact, and convergence is inevitable. Like it or not, films of various kinds will get made, and will be watched on all kinds of devices, including mobiles. It's happening anyway, so isn't it better that Mr Redford at least obtains a bite of the action for us indie film-makers? It would be churlish of me, wouldn't it, to look down on the scheme.
But when Redford says it will "help artists develop and grow", why do I find myself thinking, "Yes, just like the tumours to which mobile devices may or may not contribute"? Perhaps my cynicism is brought on by hearing indie doyen Redford so fluently speak the language of corporatism we're all having to become expert in. Or perhaps it's just the queasiness I feel when the word "artist" is used in the same sentence as "customer". Is it naive to hope that self-proclaimed bastions of independence ought not to take quite such overt delight in helping telecoms multinationals access these "customers"?
Redford with one breath condemns our contemporary culture where cinema audiences are now "shoved in and out... like cattle", and with the next, tells us mobile shorts will "suit people in transit with little time to spare". Or to put it another way: the cattle trucks, tubes, and buses of my transit await, but I'll be able to numb the crushing presence of my fellow customers by staring at a small flashing blob of plastic.
My ideal is that cinema is the opposite of this experience, an antidote to it in fact. Instead of using image and sound to blot people out, the shared spectacle brings people together. The cinema has always been the church of the moving image. But in our media-saturated world, that crazy magic of being collectively hurled into times and spaces that are not our own is becoming defiled.
Don't get me wrong. I don't fear that cinema is about to die; in fact attendance is up year on year in the UK. And the democratisation of the moving image through new, more personal and portable technologies may yet prove a good thing. And yes, doubtless, this democratisation needs infrastructure, which means someone to pay for it on a global scale, just as traditional film distribution was equally costly to arrange.
All the same, if we're talking about the "independent spirit", there's a big difference between, say, YouTube and Orange. Mobile service providers make you pay for content, hence their loud and frequent sponsoring of things cinematic. Whereas YouTube doesn't sponsor anyone, because it is free, and hence is a more genuinely independent distribution network - at least for now.
It's all a question of degree in what is necessarily one of the most market-compromised art forms of all. Still, whether our cinematic church is a high one of transcendental art cinema, or a low one of irreverence and populism, or a mixture, we should always hope for films made with genuine independence from concept to financing through to distribution.
