영화와 기술 그리고 ‘사회적인 것’의 구성

Cinema, Technology, and the ‘Social’: From Kino-Eye to Multiplex

Today’s movie audiences enjoy watching films that are composed of 48frames per second. Cinema, which first emerged as a new paradigm for visual experiences through a technical medium, has, one century later,unveiled yet another visual experience. The act of watching movies is a perceptive activity by humans, achieved in the process of detecting the motions of light emitted by a projector. In this sense, films can be considered the first medium in which a machine became involved in the process of human perception. If films can be defined in terms of film-making, the understanding of films must also accept the importance of the entire process and all that it generates, including the camera,projector, theater, and human eyes. This study attempts to reconceptualize the context of understanding cinema by focusing on the technology deeply embedded throughout the process, from the generation of movies and operation of the medium to the acceptance of perceptual information. In order to consider the technologies that play a central role in the process of ‘social’ composition of movies, this study selected as its analytical framework the Actor-Network-Theory(ANT), which has recently opened new directions in Science and Technology Studies. According to ANT,cinema is not simply an art genre invented by the Lumière brothers and having a history marked by famous films such as those of Hitchcock or the <Star Wars> series. Rather, it is “the collective of humans and 383오 은 경nonhumans,” meaning it is the combination of the Lumière brothers,cameras, projectors, and theaters. At the same time, it is the result of the editing that began with the network composed in the film studio of Méliès. Based on the perspective of ANT, this study explains the association between technology and cinema, using computer graphics, 3D movies, and multiplex cinemas as examples. In the last chapter of this study, another example of the association between cinema and technology is presented: the case of Alexander Kluge, the director who produced ‘movies’ for television. Society is no longer composed only of humans. It has become impossible to understand society without considering the various technical innovations that have proliferated in the modern era. This opinion must be further considered in the understanding of films,which is a technical medium. The camera technology that is integrated with the human eye in Kino-Eye composes something ‘social’ in Multiplex, the complex form of actor-network.