Digital is now at the center of all discussions within the film industry. How does digital change the means of producing and directing films? What new opportunities does it offer to filmmakers? What business models does it imply? And will digital 3D become the norm? It also focuses the essential issues in theoretical discussions. Does digital radically change the identity of cinema, or does it merely push to the limit the combinatory logic that was present from the outset? Does it modify the ontological relationship of film to the world and to humanity? Does it lead to a loss of the indexical relationship? What does it change at the level of directing and viewing films? Does film theory as it was constructed account for what is happening, or do we need a new approach, which would merge film theory into media theory? We are even witnessing the reappearance of that old theme of the death of cinema.

What is striking in all these debates is that they take very little account (if they take any at all) of a phenomenon that seems to me of very great importance for the consequences it entails: this is the potential that now exists on the vast majority of mobile phones to view and make films (77% of mobiles today are equipped with a mobile video application).The purpose of this chapter is to try to identify what changes mobile telephones have brought for the film viewer.

Following my usual semio-pragmatic approach, I propose to address this issue in terms of communication space. By communication space, I mean a construction made by the theorist, a heuristic tool to reveal differences between the lived experiences of various communicative situations.

Identifying a communication space as a theoretical construct allows me to avoid entering the intractable debates raised by the famous question, “what is cinema?,” while allowing the reader to know what I mean when I talk about film's communication space.