Text(ing) on Screen: Cinema’s smartphone as intertitle, endophasia, and “mystic writing-pad”

Abstract

The incorporation of text on screen through cell phone imagery has been steadily increasing since its mainstream introduction in the TV show Sherlock (2010). Though text message as a form of narrative storytelling has become almost ubiquitous in film, the strategy is greatly understudied, especially with respect to its place in film history. Building narrative through text is nothing new; intertitles in the silent era took the place of dialogue, and they relied on the audience’s willingness to read text as a supplementary, or even guiding, narrative device. Many filmmakers of the silent era were creative in their use of text, using techniques like expressive graphism and broken verbal flow to imbue text with emotion. In the current era, the texting narrative device has turned our films silent again, with emotional tenor similarly derived from punctuation, textual tempo, and reaction shots. This paper identifies several functions of the modern “text-intertitle”: (1) Texting creates in the audience an endophasia, or an internalized reading voice, quite removed from the film’s externally imposed dialogue; (2) Text pacing created through line breaks, punctuation, and ellipses is an effective driver of narrative suspense; (3) Lastly, some films use the cell phone as a Freudian “mystic writing pad”, a writing apparatus that is not beholden to the spoken word but is rather presented to the audience as a communal psyche, ghostly realm, or abstract plane.