Wahrnehmen, fühlen, verstehen

Film theory has always regarded metaphor as relevant for both constituting and understanding cinematic meaning. With its theses on embodied thought, the cognitive-linguistic theory of conceptual metaphors has initiated an upswing in research on metaphor and audiovisuality across disciplines.

By engaging with these premises, this book develops a transdisciplinary perspective on audiovisual images, metaphor, and cinematic meaning that is at the interface between linguistic metaphor research oriented towards language use and the theory of audiovisual media as movement-images developed in film studies. It positions itself critically towards works that take up a semiotic-linguistic approach or are influenced by cognitive film theory, and that are caught up in the code-model of the sender-receiver paradigm of communication. A universal in-depth semantics that disregards cinematic dynamics is hereby countered by the idea of metaphorizing as a spectatorial activity: a dynamic process of perceiving, feeling, and understanding modelled by the movement figurations of audiovisual images.

Through detailed analyses of diverse cinematic formats – from Hollywood films to political reports – this monograph shows that, and how, metaphorizing is a mode of cinematic thinking structured by the performativity of audiovisual images.