[Suwan News = Reporter Kim Dong-ju] A film is not simply a sequence of scenes strung together; rather, it is the result of a director selecting the best shots from a vast amount of footage, reconstructing them, and creating a cinematic space and time that allows the audience to become fully immersed. Superhero movies featuring spectacular action and explosive CGI, as well as films packed with tear-jerking and moving stories, garner public empathy and popularity.
Every year, audiences watch and experience countless films, TV dramas, and other works, while those who create films—directors, writers, actors, and others—experience a mix of joy and sorrow as they watch the works they’ve been involved in rise and fall in the box office rankings. However, behind the glitz of the screen, there are figures invisible to the public. Trapped within digital files and unable to step into the outside world, they have been marginalized from the public’s attention.
"The Green Poltergeist" recalls the figures sacrificed by the editing process—regardless of the film’s direction—and presents them to the audience through a theatrical stage. Through a theatrical stage, it conveys the stories of those who have vanished from the film—that is, Jacques Rancière’s “les sans-part” (those without a share).
In *The Discomfort of Aesthetics* and *The Division of the Sensible*, Rancière develops his argument by dividing art into three broad dimensions. First, from a Platonic perspective, he distinguishes an ethical system not by the independence of art itself, but by whether it contributes to the community’s ethos and truth. He assessed the value of art based on whether the image was beneficial to the community and whether it was true. In the representational system, from an Aristotelian perspective, art is linked to social and political hierarchies, and there are rules governing “what should be depicted and how.” While this system acknowledges a certain degree of artistic autonomy, it projects a hierarchy—such as the notion that kings should appear in tragedies and commoners in comedies. In the aesthetic system, from a Kantian/Schillerian perspective, the autonomy of art is declared; it views art as a state of detachment and liberation, free from fixed laws or social hierarchies, where anything can become art and anyone can enjoy it—thus representing a state in which hierarchies and laws have collapsed. In other words, the autonomy of art and its freedom from general laws signify the democratic nature of the aesthetic system. Art is no longer a tool for moral instruction, nor is it the exclusive domain of a specific class or a technique confined by the rules of a particular genre; rather, it forms a realm of experience unique in and of itself. Furthermore, while rules such as “tragedy must be noble” or “a painting must faithfully resemble its subject” once governed art, the traditional emotional hierarchy has dissolved within the modern aesthetic system—more precisely, since the advent of postmodernism. Consequently, the protagonist of a novel does not necessarily have to be a great hero; there is now room for the emergence of complex, dual-natured characters—such as a villain who has no choice but to act as one, or a hero who occasionally exhibits villainous traits. In other words, whereas in the past the lines between good and evil were distinct and the distinction between heroes and villains was clear-cut, characters in works today are portrayed in a more multidimensional way. This allows the audience not to unconditionally side with the hero, but to understand the situation to some extent from the villain’s perspective as well.
In an aesthetic system where the hierarchy of art has been dismantled, because it rejects the dichotomous distinction that “this is art and that is noise,” the nameless individuals, trivial objects, and meaningless moments—which would likely have been cut out during the editing process—that were excluded from past systems can now take center stage and attain the status of art in their own right.
For Rancière, an aesthetic experience is an experience of existing as a human being free from established social statuses or roles (public order).
Rather than relying on flashy cinematic direction, the play uses an actor dressed in a green chroma key costume, illuminated by bright lights on a stark stage, to starkly illustrate the actor’s current predicament. Normally, he would have made a stylish entrance on the screen, and the audience would have watched him from the comfortable seats of a movie theater rather than from uncomfortable chairs; however, the discomfort created by these mutually incongruous settings leads the audience to realize that the character the actor is portraying on stage is a “person without a place” in the society of “Arche.”
By placing erased beings outside the traditional realm of visibility (the screen) and telling their stories, the film subverts cinematic arché. In Rancière’s philosophy, the “Police” enforces the arché that each person has a proper place and must speak only from that place. Similarly, while the general law of cinema presupposes that a story must be concluded within the screen, theater subverts the cinematic arché by placing erased beings on the theatrical stage—a space the cinema never anticipated. Thus, when those without a share appear in places other than their designated spots, the existing dominant order begins to crack. However, this crack does not signify a negation of social order; rather, it enables them to transform—no longer mere consumables confined to the screen, but subjects capable of reconfiguring the entire space.
In Rancière’s aesthetic system, art operates not through the harmony of the senses but through their discord. When a presence erased from the screen speaks to the audience in a real-world space or through another medium, the audience experiences a dissonance of the senses. In particular, by asking, “Why is a presence that should be on the screen here (on the theater stage)?” the audience can empathize with the reality and anguish faced by the actor. Furthermore, the significance of this question lies not merely in conveying information to the audience through media, but in the fact that it suggests the discovery of a new arena for expression where beings who were previously invisible (and had no voice) can reveal their own presence.
Furthermore, when the audience does not merely stare at the screen but sets out to discover the narratives of erased beings situated in other spaces, they experience the moment when they transform from passive recipients into active interpreters. The play achieves aesthetic equality by dismantling the hierarchy between the protagonist (the center) on the screen and the erased beings (the periphery), allowing every space to possess an equal narrative layer. Furthermore, by positioning the stage and screen in such a way that the erased figures are intentionally illuminated through the camera, the production visually reveals how they existed as expendable elements on film sets and within the films themselves.
Kim Dong-ju, Reporter
