<아메리칸 뷰티>(1999)에 나타난 다매체 재현전략

Abstract

This article is to explain the remediation in multiple-representation cinema in 1990s that consists of the multimedia images, for example, not only 35mm film but video, animation, computer image etc. Despite of the introduction of CGI-technology and daily using the digital technology in 1990s, the cinema at that time is not the digital cinema yet. This period is the twilight years of celluloid film’s age and on the other hand the dawning of the digital cinema. But several films with multiple-representation style is connected with the cinematic specificity that is well known to the characteristic of the digital technology era, i.e. a work for a new cinematic specificity in the way to the digital cinema. I am going to analyze American Beauty by Samuel Alexander Mendes in 1999, the visual style is unique due to the multiple-representation strategy, namely a mixed composition between 35mm film and camcorder image. The crude video images dominate the film from beginning to end and remind the audience of the medium itself, Therefore this visual style works first hypermediacy. But the immediate transparency occurs with the crude immediacy visual image. Namely, the recipient stands not against a image, but gets into a image and with the object on the screen. The crude immediate images paradoxically create ‘the sense of presence’ to the audience. The recipient feels immersive and these images turn into a spectacle phenomenon. In spite of and with rough shaking image by handheld shot, the logic of transparent immediacy works and a medium seems disappear: ‘the sense of presence’. Furthermore, this cinematic strategy in American Beauty shows a special cinematic tendency that offers a cinematic experience to the recipient, i.e. the sensitive perception with optical tactility. This study try to understand the cinematic development to the digital cinema, not the discontinuity between celluloid and digital cinema “in order to overcome the opposition between “old” and “new” media “.”(Th. Elsaesser)