한국영상문화학회

This study attempts to conceptualize the newly changing movie spectator in a contemporary post-humanist media environment where humans, machines, and networks are connected. First, I critically review the theory of the spectatorship of the mainstream anglophone film theory. In particular, with the help of Rancier’s concept of the “emancipated spectator”, I criticize the dichotomous distinction between the spectator's passivity and activism, which is the premise of the Screen Theory. Contemporary spectators, who do not fit the dichotomous distinction between passive and active, are theoretically developed based on Deleuzian spectatorship. Deleuze did not explicitly present the spectatorship, but we can reconstruct his spectatorship within his film philosophy system. For Deleuze, the spectator, like other film images, is an image and a component of the film. The audience cannot exist prior to watching a film in Deleuze’s film philosophy. Therefore, his spectatorship is passive. I propose the concept of ‘spectator-images’ that imply the discussion above, and this concept is more concretized in the spiritual automaton concept and series of images. According to Deleuze, cinematic automatons work differently in movement-image and time-image films, creating different thoughts. I propose the spectator-images as the becoming of people to come in the series by deducing the series of images from the thoughts of the time-image. Upon this theoretical base, this study shows how the film spectators can be expanded beyond the cinema theater in the post-humanist environment.