디지털 시대의 새로운 ‘형식’과 ‘활동’으로서 영화비평: 시네 토크, 팟캐스트, 비디오 비평을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper aims to examine new trends in contemporary Korean film criticism, in which the mode of existence of cinema and the forms of criticism are diversified and expanded due to the easy accessibility of film information and knowledge through the Internet and the changes in the media environment. The period since the mid-2000s, after the rise and fall of film magazines that began in the mid-1990s, is often perceived as one of crisis or decline in film criticism, with the disappearance of centralized film journals and the decrease of professional critics. However, the period has also witnessed the diversification of the themes and approaches of film criticism both in online and offline spaces, which is evidenced by the emergence of verbal and visual criticism beyond written language across public and personal media, as a notable new tendency of contemporary film criticism. In other words, these new forms and practices attest to the ways in which the paradigms of film criticism have been dynamically expanded and reconfigured more than ever before in dialogue with the shifting ontology of cinema. Therefore, investigating film criticism in the digital age demands attention to newly differentiated and reorganized ‘forms of criticism’ and transmedia ‘para-critical practices,’ rather than relying on discourses institutionalized or centralized through traditional methods such as the ‘idea of film criticism,’ ‘film criticism generation,’ and the ‘primacy of print media.’ This paper places importance on the expansion of critic space and the implication of amateurism of the millennial critic generation who was born digital natives and going through cinema critic's institutionalized gatekeeping, in terms of generation. Accordingly, it discusses two new trends in the forms and practices of contemporary Korean film criticism that emerged around the 2010s: talking criticism (cine talk and podcast) and video essay. While keeping in mind the essence of criticism that has been important in historical and traditional critical discourses (aesthetics, evaluation, purification, etc.), we would study the change of roles and functions of the new forms and differentiation of criticism generation, sustainable form of critic and activities related with the transformation of media and reorganization of the media industry in the view of challenges and possibilities.