영화이미지의 인용불가능성, 또는 어떻게 ‘콧수염’은 신화가 되었는가?

Abstract

Cinema images are sensible materials that are always out of reality, and since no words can substitute the cinematic experience, Raymond Bellour calls the film ‘unattainable text’ and insists on the impossibility of quotating it. This study examines the unquotability of cinema images, the way it resonates with the modernity of cinema as an aesthetic regime. In Jacques Ranciere’s argument, film image makes the capacity of expression engraved on the surface of the object as its own. ‘Passiveness’ of cinema machine that engraves images from nature is now identified with ‘active dialectics’ that creates its own cinematic world, i.e. diegesis. Which is the dramaturgie of cinema that makes film understood between ‘myth’ of classical representation and ‘fable’ of truth-telling in the form of fiction. In this process, the relationship between fiction and reality, and the copy and the original, is mixed, eventually creating a world of cinema that is ‘unquotable’. Andre Bazin also describes the inseparability between fiction and truth revealed in the film in terms of quotation. He argues that it is impossible to distinguish between the fundamental and the afterlife in the film image: for example, the character of Chaplin is imitated in history and annulled by “the ontological robbery” by Hitler. Chaplin’s mustache, which has been imitated numerous times, oscillates between farce and tragedy, which comes from the ambivalence of cinematic image. This is due to the ontology of cinematic medium, which is unquotable but therefore constantly (re)appropriable. In conclusion, this study argues that the film cannot be quoted, but it is not because they consist of their own unique images. It is impossible to extract the original from film because the constituent images of the film are always already combinations of materials and expressions. This study, through the discussion of Ranciere’s film fable and Bazin’s discussion of unquotableness, will eventually imply that the film completes a new myth of eternal life through cloning and imitation. However, the important thing is that this irreplaceable myth points not to the essence or the existence of soul but to the remnants of the real which are never captured by meaning.