Rethinking Rancière’s Film Theory: Focusing on the Concepts of Fiction and Image

Abstract

This paper aims to reconsider Rancière’s film theory by examining the meaning of image and fiction in Rancière’s aesthetic art regime. Rancière renews the traditional definitions of image and fiction. What Rancière defines as image and fiction is the action of connecting words and objects in a specific form on the basis of community, connecting individuals and groups and creating a common sense. In the aesthetic art regime since Romanticism, which reflects the equality established between thought and non-thought, consciousness and unconsciousness, active and passive, art and non-art, the image of art constitutes a unique dual system. Within a single image, meaning is produced and withdrawn, and perception, action, and emotion are simultaneously connected and dissolved. This dual system of images is manifested in cinematic art in the disfigurations and contradictory dramaturgy of classicist and romantic allegory.