영화관객 연구: 인터넷 시대의 관객 능동성

Studying Film Audiences: The Activeness of Audience in the Age of Internet: The Case of 'Old Partner'

This paper is about actual film audiences. As we know, the audience is an essential part of the film. There is no film which makes not to be shown to audiences. But in the historical approaches of film, audience, as a key concept, remains problematic as we can never really know. The semiotic and psychoanalytic screen theory represented a particular development of the spectatorship in accordance with its text-centered convention. In screen theory, there can be no struggle at the site of the interface between subject(audience) and text(film). From a film business perspective, audiences need to be measured. They are treated just as a target for the film marketing business. So far, film audiences are considered as passive, absent-minded people. Therefore, the status of the film audience is low. But the contemporary phenomenon of convergence transforms the audience relationship with the film. The media industries are undergoing another paradigm shift. New media was going to push aside old media. For instance, the Internet was going to change the network environment, and this would enable consumers to more easily access media content that was personally meaningful to them. Walter Benjamin argued that the ability to mass-produce and mass-circulate images would have a profoundly democratic impact. He also argued that a new form of popular expertise would emerge. Today we would perceive that his expectation comes true. In the case of <Old Partner>, I could find audiences' participation via the Internet, and it has the power of making a syndrome. <Old partner> which is the independent documentary film has surprisingly become a big hit. Without the audiences' active participation via the Internet, <Old Partner> could not be that kind of issues in 2009. The political effects of these audiences' activeness come not only through the critical reading of films but also through access to collaboration and participation. Audiences will be getting more powerful in the age of the Internet. Now we should reconsider the status of film audience.