Reinterpretation of cinema and television through the thought of the system of objects

The cinematograph is a technical device that was traded and gained great popularity in the turn of the 20th century. The invention of this revolutionary device was considered as the birth of cinema, which fuses all the previous art forms together, and it has instantly transformed the entire world of art. Yet, the act of cinema production is still controversial about whether being a form of art or not. The whole broad effect of the cinematograph device was not just limited to the emergence of cinema movies. When the production of cinema spreaded widely, the modern society started to utilize the technical aspects of cinematograph to discover and express itself. This impact is totally natural as the humankind is the only organism that expresses its thoughts and feelings through the mediums of art. Murals, carved stones, poetry, novels or theatrical plays were all humankind's effort leaning towards the product of art, however by the birth of cinema, humankind put for the first time a technological object between itself and and the artwork, and thereof led to an indirect relationship with the art object through the optical devices. Ever since that day, it is argued that whether the cinema is an entertainment tool, a reproduction technology, ritual, magic, a new language or a new system of signification. In this sense, the cinema is maybe all of them, an inconceivable mixture, or as Bertolt Brecht stated, the act of cinema seems to be a production rooted from nothingness. In that case, it should be examined what makes cinema both a nothingness and also a meaningful mixture. Accordingly, the effort of creating the meaning in the cinema can be regarded as a play or a show between the figures and objects. Therefore, the question of whether these figures and objects should be presented as directly or indirectly emerges the differentiation of the realist and the surrealist cinema in front. In the years of 1960s and 1970s when the influence of the modern cinema rised over the society, the researches about the cinema and television also increased widely. So, the relations of the cinema art with the other disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, psychology and philosophy also questioned. At this point, the book "The System of Objects" (1968) by Jean Baudrillard, which is the basis of this thesis work, covers the sociological, anthropological dimensions of this questioning. "The System of Objects" proposed by Baudrillard shows pataphysical properties and inspects all the production-consumption fields of cultural life. Therefore, this book can be evaluated as an important source to understand the technical device 'cinematograph' and the modern art 'cinema'. In this context, the main goal of the thesis work can be summarized as the writer's partial investigation of the cinema and television universe through the simulation theorem. For this reason, especially the process related to 'the visualization of the modern consumption culture' and the impact of this extensive process on the cinema production are questioned. Therefore necessarily, the relationship settled between image production technologies (like cinematograph and video camera) and modern visual culture is considered in every chapter. Also, the research of this thesis named "Reinterpretation of Cinema and Television Through the Thought of The System of Objects" is limited within the boundaries of evaluating the cinema and television as as an indicator – object technology.