길 위에서 사색하는 영화-걷기를 실천하는 예술의 논점들 -

Contemplative Cinema on the Road-Discussions of Art with Walking -

Recently, the tendency to explore the philosophical and social meaning of walking has been expanding in the discourse of humanities. Walking is a metaphysical act that extends the idea and creates the form and meaning of human society beyond the practical meaning of simply moving the body toward the destination. Modern artists such as Francis Alÿs and Situationist International are examples of thinking about the meaning of walking in the areas of philosophy and art. This research aims to find and analyze specific examples of how the film art, which first captures the temporal image of walking behavior, deals with the philosophical meaning of walking. ‘Slow cinema’, which creates “delayed rhythms” and explores the space-time margins, is a reaction against the accelerating principle of modern society that separates humans from landscapes and alienates them from life. The walking scene expressed in ‘slow cinema’ is not a way of telling a story, but a self-purpose as a story itself. Gus Van Sant’s <Elephant>, Jia Zhangke’s <Xiao Wu> and Béla Tarr’s <Sátántangó> express the duration of time with walking through the walking of characters and the movement of cameras accompanying them as an important cinematic experience. The audience begins actively thinking about life on the screen through its durational experience. The strategy of these films, which elevate the audience from mere onlookers to active participants, shares a series o f movement and tendency that have seen walking as not merely a purpose-oriented act, but as an act that elicits thought, philosophy and social participation. Scenes pay ing atte ntion to the ‘walking’ that has n ot be en fu lly addressed in f ilm a rt a nd t heory, a nd t he w ork o f disco vering a nd reconstructing its points, will help reconsider the current position of films produced in modern society, which is engaged in an infinite speed war, and provide a perspective on how film art captures one of human behaviors.