스크린과 관객의 얼굴: 포스트-시네마 시대의 영화의 포토제니적 경험

Abstract

This paper aims to reexamine the theory of photogénie, which established the theory of film spectator by examining the relationship between cinema and screen in classical film theory, and the filmic experience in terms of the post-cinema era, in which the components surrounding cinema are rapidly changing. In the age of classical cinema, theorists such as Jean Epstein, Béla Balázs, Sergei Eisenstein, and Walter Benjamin considered potentials of cinema as the liberation of human perception through the power of the camera, exemplified by Balázs’s physiognomie and Epstein’s photogénie that take the close-up as the aesthetic essence of cinema. Balázs proposes the concept of physiognomie as the ‘appearance and face of things, beings and places, and as the window to their souls.’ The theory of photogénie is a concept that originated from the French Impressionist film criticism in the 1920s, referring to an inexpressible, additional thing that transcends language and which constitutes the essence of cinematic specificity. Initially developed by Louis Delluc, who emphasized the aesthetics of light, and Epstein, who paid attention to the spirituality of the film image, the idea of photogénie was elevated into the discourse of cinephila in the auteur theory of the 1950s and 1960s, a discourse on the ideal spectator attentive to cinema’s revelatory capacity. Recent studies on the screen, visual culture, and spectatorship in the post-cinema era suggest insightful perspectives that go beyond the history of faces reproduced on the screen in the era of classical cinema, as well as the photogenic experience that it offered. Beyond the normative exploration of ‘faces in the cinema’, this study examines the topic of ‘screens and the faces of spectators’ from the post-cinematic perspective in the era of ubiquitous screens due to the enlargement of the screen size and the dramatic increase in the amount of screens. To this end, it analyzes several contemporary films that question and reconstruct the boundaries of cinema while raising three issues, namely, changes in the mode of perception method and cinematic textuality, and the viewing space.