영화 속 시각이미지에 나타난 ‘사유의 환유적 확장’ -영화 <설국열차>를 사례로-

Abstract

The analysis of visual images in film goes beyond revealing the hidden meanings of narratives and acts as a mechanism for new creative activities. The audience subjectively extends the meaning of narratives by analyzing the visual image and this allows the audience to get the principle of construction, which is used for the creative work. This analysis from the audience is based on the social and cultural background where the audience belongs, which has metonymic characteristics. Metonymy is a rhetoric that expresses an object by borrowing another word that has a close relationship to its attributes. Roland Barthes identifies photography as a representative form of metonymic art, because the photographic image that reproduces the object as it is could also be interpreted with various layers through individual’s consciousness. He also considered that metonymic thinking could be found in the visual images of the film and the two possible film techniques: montage and frame. Montage is based on the ‘absolute similarity’ between the object that actually exists and the ‘continuity’ of the visual images, and the frame acts as a shield between the visible and invisible screens. Barthes mentions that these cinematic features evoke Punctum that induces metonymy and finally lead to the expansion of audience’s thinking. The movie Snowpiercer can be seen as the result of metonymic expansion since most of the story and character settings have changed from the original. Different from usual adapted movies that reproduce the true original stories or recreate stories by modifying some parts from the original, the movie is based on the active intertextuality only borrowing the idea and the situation from the story. By adding the director Bong Joon-ho’s unique method of expression that visualizes the meaning in detail, the movie can have its own special value as an individual. As Snowpiercer is both popular and artistic, it allows us to experience the metonymic expansion of thoughts found in art films in genre films. Quoting Semiotic theory of Peirce, this study analyses how audience’s thinking that begins to interpret the visual images of the movie Snowpiercer develops through personal emotions and Punctum that induce metonymy. The visual image that clearly shows the characteristics of the object to be reproduced contains an appropriate amount of information about the object and is also connected to adjacent images that have a pure meaning as a raw symbol. Based on this, the audience objectively looks at the visual image while being conscious of outside of the frame and boundaries of the movie screen, and expands the thinking process in metonymy.