근대 기계적 지각과 영화 매체－짐멜, 베르그손, 벤야민의 이론을 중심으로

Abstract

This paper attempts to look into the concept of “Mechanical Perception” in Early film theory, specifically focusing on the theory of Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin and Jean Epstein. For Simmel, moving through the traffic of a big city involves the individual in a series of shocks and collisions. At dangerous intersections, nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.” Thus, technology has subjected the human sensorium to a complex kind of training. It is precisely this potential for retraining human perception and responses that explains the importance that Benjamin attaches to the experience of shocks and therefore to the processes of mechanization and technology-including cinema-that are its basis.

In several essays, Bergson employs what he calls the “cinematographical apparatus” as an analogy for how the intellect approaches reality. According to Bergson, the intellect is by nature a spatializing mechanism, which means that to acquire knowledge it employs concepts, symbols, abstraction, analysis, and fragmentation. The camera begins with a real movement, breaks it down mechanically into a series of static single frames and then returns the movement through the projecting apparatus. The movement that we see is a reconstituted illusion. We may sum up that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.

Benjamin argues that the collective mass, one example of which can be found in the crowds of the modern city, is defined not only by its diffusion,but by its constant and unconscious appropriation of images. Indeed, the mass state of distraction is defined by its ability to take up these images in much the same way that the film apparatus does. For Benjamin, this diffused,unconscious appropriation is also figured as a bodily, tactile absorption. This collectivity is a kind of diffused, technologized body that, as it continually absorbs the stimuli, the images, that jolt it (and that alter its perceptions and responses), can no longer be entirely separated from the space of images. This is not simply a body affected by moving images, but a truly cinematic body in which, or through which, images move. Here, there is no longer a fixed boundary between the perceiving subject and images, for these images have become part of this dispersed body’s tactile experience.