Art Films From Cellphones and Web Cams

Saddam Hussein’s hanging, the Sichuan earthquake and Afghan children as casualties of war — all were seen by people all over the world, thanks to digital video.

But news events, personal diaries or baby footage (some of it streaming and some of it on YouTube) are giving way to a new use, as some see a new artistic medium in those ephemeral videos.

Last year, Carlton M. Evans and Eric Slatkin solicited films made with Flip cams, Web cams, cellphone cameras and still cameras.

The result was the Disposable Film Fest, a selection of short videos first shown in San Francisco in January, which will be shown at the Anthology Film Archives on Thursday, Nov 6. (The shorts can also be seen on Vimeo.)

Paired with those selections is a movie, “Buttons” by Red Bucket Films, a collection of docu-vignettes, which the producers say is the first feature-length film shot using casual digital video.

Largely assembled from short clips shot in New York City, “Buttons” feels almost like a moving photo album with its intimate portraits of the subway musicians, children in strollers, police officers and bored street vendors.

The project started when the young filmmakers in Red Bucket Films began carrying small digital cameras, capturing images surreptitiously as they moved around the city. “We carry a little camera on our belt, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no matter where we are,” said Alex Kalman, who worked with Josh Safdie and Benny Safdie in shooting most of the video in the film. “We embrace the spontaneity and beauty of that which is normally unnoticed.”

The exercise started just as practice for larger projects by Red Buckets, like “The Pleasure of Being Robbed,” which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. The original perspective on the vignettes was that it “could be our kind of sketchbook for filmmaking.”

But as the filmmakers began putting the video clips on their Web site one by one, the vision for the project began to evolve. “It makes sense if we could string them together into an album, and sort of curate them,” he said. The result was “Buttons,” volume 1.

The small Canon cameras were discreet enough to capture scenes that larger video cameras — which naturally incur more suspicion — fail to capture.

“It’s camouflaged,” Mr. Kalman said. “They think you are just taking a snapshot, but really you are discovering this really intimate moment, which is packed with beautiful emotions.”

Among the startling effects in “Buttons”: swirling images as cameras fall back to earth after filmmakers tie them to helium balloons or throw them into the air. (Though after the initial impression, the novelty of such techniques can wear thin for lack of narrative arc.)

One key problem with the small cameras: sound. But the lower quality helps define a particular aesthetic, Mr. Kalman argued. “Just with the chunkiness of the color, the audio distortion is part of it. It gives it a Scotch-tape, handmade quality.” Many of the Disposable Film Fest selections feature music-only sound tracks, voice-overs, or a lot of silence.

In collecting submissions for next year’s film festival, Mr. Evans and Mr. Slatkin said they were already seeing a jump in quality, number and range compared with last year. So far they have submissions from 30 countries, which range from experimental to documentary to narrative. As people see what others have done with ephemeral video, they build upon it.

“When we finish the screening,” Mr. Evans said, “everyone feels empowered that they, too, can make a film.”