The Metaphysics of Film Beyond Materiality and Representation

초록

According to Hegel, as art denotes the sensible realization of an idea and, that is to say, the term “art” refers to something in which spiritual ideology displays itself through sensible matter, art has been historically transferred from an area centering on the material to a field focusing on the spiritual. Practically, the leading art form since the Renaissance was paintings that assumed more spirituality in terms of not only the resolution of three dimensions onto a two dimensional space but also the comparative rareness of their material as compared to that of architecture and sculpture; furthermore, sounds in music hardly have materiality, and in poetry, in terms of escaping from materiality, art employs concepts and language like those of philosophy. Similarly, in film, projected images are released from the restriction of the material and then reach immateriality. Therefore, although film actually exists within non-artistic materials, such as celluloid films, tapes, discs, and data, as it presents their aesthetic expression to audiences through immaterial elements, such as virtual images that resolve three-dimensional actuality into two-dimensions, sounds, which are fundamentally non-materialistic, and narrative that consists of concept and language, film as a conceptual art finally brings to realization the idea of immortality through immateriality. Accordingly, this paper explores the connection between Hegel’s discussion of art in relation to spirit and matter and his ideas on materiality and immateriality. Building on this framework, it examines the idiosyncrasies of films as immaterial figurations that overwhelm its materiality in terms of the reciprocal relation between reality and virtuality, materiality and conceptuality, as well as the tension between film’s practical existence and its virtual recognition by its audience. Furthermore, in an effort to highlight the film’s status as an anti-representational art form that surpasses material constraints, this paper draws upon Heidegger’s consideration of the relationship between creation and reception, as well as Deleuze’s metaphysical concepts of a temporal identity, which extends the film’s images beyond their material existence.

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