Films and Embodied Metaphors of Emotion

RaAM 12, 2018

Dorothea Horst, Cornelia Müller, Christina Schmitt, and Thomas Scherer. Theory How do we make meaning with audiovisual images? Ever since McLuhan’s radical insight that the ‘medium is the message’ and not the ‘information encoded’ (McLuhan 1964, 23-35), communication and media studies have taken this assumption more or less for granted, yet, and most surprisingly, without taking the media characteristics as a serious starting point for theories and analyses of film, television, and other media. A position, which has influenced current research on metaphors in audiovisual media (see the ed. volumes by Coëgnarts/Kravanja 2015; Fahlenbrach 2016; Forceville/Urios-Aparisi 2009). Cinematic metaphor, in turn, takes the media-character of audiovisual images as starting point. It suggests a model that is based in the process of film-viewing, i.e., in the situated embodied meaning-making processes that take place in the communication of audiovisual images (Kappelhoff/Müller 2011 and forthcoming; Greifenstein forthcoming; Horst forthcoming; Schmitt 2017). It is grounded in a perspective of use and accounts for the specificity of audiovisual images as movement images. This is achieved by bringing together film studies’ theories on cinematic expressivity, perception, and meaning making (Sobchack 1992; Kappelhoff 2004) with dynamic models of metaphor as discourse activities (Cameron 2011; Müller 2008). With experience, affectivity and temporality as core characteristics, cinematic metaphor addresses an embodied thinking in images – a semiotic process modeled by the aesthetic organisation of perception. It accounts for the intertwinings of dynamic imagery by which audiovisual images communicate with their spectators as an aesthetic experience in the first place. Thus, audiovisual images are considered as concrete communicative contexts. From a point of view of Cinematic Metaphor, the construction of metaphors is at issue not the instantiation of pre-hoc existing concepts. Hands-on Analyses After having introduced the transdisciplinary theoretical basis of cinematic metaphor, hands-on analyses will be offered to illustrate how such a position affects the methodological procedure (cf., Müller/Schmitt 2015). Note, however, that although the notion of cinematic metaphor was first developed in the context of film theory, we argue that it captures the media character of audiovisual images as ‘movement images’ more generally. We thus consider it a genuine feature of audiovisual images across various media formats, which is reflected in the material we use in our hands-on analyses: political journalism and political campaigns. We will draw specific attention on how metaphorization processes play out in these two exemplary formats. Resonating with the theme of RaAM12 we will involve the audience in an interactive manner to explore and experience our methodological approach to cinematic metaphor. In practical terms, this means that we are going to show a news feature from a German political TV magazine and a Polish campaign commercial and will start the hands-on analyses by collecting people’s remarks on what they think might play a role for the metaphorization process. The objective here is to engage participants in the reflection on the material by bringing in their own observations instead of exposing them to a finalized analysis. We expect the audience to be primed to attending to the experiential, affective, and dynamic aspects of cinematic metaphor (as an effect of the preceding theoretical introduction) and to therefore observe things they would not have paid attention to otherwise. For the presenters, in turn, this opens up the opportunity to engage with the insights from the audience and reflect upon their own analyses in that light. Due to such mutual openness, the analytical session is intended at facilitating a vibrant exchange of ideas and perspectives between presenters and audience, and serves as a productive transition to the panel’s subsequent methodological part. Methods In the third section of the panel, we will present the methodological framework of cinematic metaphors. Analyses of the material discussed before will serve to illustrate how we analyze audiovisual images from the point of view of dynamic and embodied viewer experiences, and not as text or as representation of ‘contents that move’. Our methodological take on multimodal and audiovisual metaphor or – more generally to metaphor in audiovisual images – is based on eMAEX, i.e., the electronically-based media analysis of (cinematic) expressive movements (Kappelhoff/Bakels 2011). It takes a dynamic and multimodal perspective on audiovisual images and conceives of film as time-based and expressive medium(Kappelhoff 2004; Scherer/Greifenstein/Kappelhoff 2014). From this vantage point, audiovisual media can be segmented, described, and captured through an analysis of how the perception of viewers is shaped by the aesthetic composition of camera and actor movement, montage, visual composition, colour, light, sounds, and music. Hence, this film-analytical view provides a systematic mode of describing the interplay of the various audiovisual articulatory modalities as joint movement gestalts: temporal patterns that create sensory and affective experiences. In the analysis of cinematic metaphor, this description and affective qualification of the temporal patterns of interacting expressive modalities is connected with a reconstruction of the emergence and temporal unfolding of metaphoric meaning in multimodal interaction (Metaphor Foregrounding Analysis MFA, Müller 2008; Müller/Tag 2010). Metaphors are not conceived as isolated linguistic instantiations, but as emergent and dynamic processes of establishing metaphoricity from the interplay between what is being said and how this is being staged audiovisually. Thereby, verbal metaphors can become vitally experienced ‘waking’ as embodied and dynamic conceptualizations. Reconstructing this activation process of metaphoricity over the course of time, provides insight into the flow of metaphoric meaning making throughout a film, a news report, or a campaign commercial. For the analytic process itself, this transdisciplinary approach to the analysis of cinematic metaphor (Müller/Schmitt 2015) entails a reciprocal perspective between different modalities that is not schematic: sometimes we start from verbal metaphor and its activation and then turn to the expressive movement, sometimes, we start from the staging of cinematic expressive movement and describe how metaphoricities emerge from them. This methodological flexibility allows for making cinematic metaphorizing describable in its varieties across different media contexts. REFERENCES Cameron, Lynne (2011): Metaphor and reconciliation. The discourse dynamics of empathy in post-conflict conversations. New York: Routledge. Coëgnarts, Maarten/Kravanja, Peter (Ed.) (2015): Embodied Cognition and Cinema. Leuven: Leuven University Press. Fahlenbrach, Katrin (Ed.) (2016). Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games: Cognitive Approaches. London/New York: Routledge. Forceville, Charles J./Urios-Aparisi, Eduardo (Ed.) (2009): Multimodal metaphor. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Greifenstein, Sarah (forthcoming): Tempi der Bewegung – Modi des Gefühls. Expressivität, heitere Affekte und die Screwball Comedy, Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Horst, Dorothea (forthcoming): Meaning Making and Political Campaign Advertising. A Cognitive-linguistic and Film-analytical Perspective on Audiovisual Figurativity. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Kappelhoff, Hermann (2004): Matrix der Gefühle. Das Kino, das Melodrama und das Theater der Empfindsamkeit. Berlin: Vorwerk 8. Kappelhoff, Hermann/Bakels, Jan-Hendrik (2011): Das Zuschauergefühl. Möglichkeiten qualitativer Medienanalyse. Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft 5.2, pp. 78–95. Kappelhoff, Hermann/Müller, Cornelia (2011): Embodied meaning construction. Multimodal metaphor and expressive movement in speech, gesture, and feature film. Metaphor and the Social World 1.2, pp. 121–153. Kappelhoff, Hermann/Müller, Cornelia (forthcoming): Cinematic metaphor. Experience, affectivity, temporality. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter. McLuhan, Marshall (1964): Understanding media. The extensions of man. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill. Müller, Cornelia (2008): Metaphors dead and alive, sleeping and waking. A dynamic view. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Müller, Cornelia/Alan Cienki (Ed.) (2008): Metaphor and Gesture. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Müller, Cornelia/Schmitt, Christina (2015): Audio-visual metaphors of the financial crisis: meaning making and the flow of experience. Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada/Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics 15.2 (Special Issue: Metaphor and metonymy in social practices, ed. by Raymond W. Gibbs Jr. and Luciane Corrêa Ferreira), pp. 311–341. Müller, Cornelia/Tag, Susanne (2010): The dynamics of metaphor. Foregrounding and activation of metaphoricity in conversational interaction. Cognitive Semiotics 10.6, pp. 85–120. Scherer, Thomas/Greifenstein, Sarah/Kappelhoff, Hermann (2014): Expressive movements in audiovisual media: Modulating affective experience In: Body – Language – Communication. An international handbook on multimodality in human interaction, Vol. 2. Ed. by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, et al. Berlin, New York: De Gruyter Mouton, pp. 2081–2092. Schmitt, Christina (2017): Wahrnehmen, fühlen, verstehen: Metaphorisieren in der Kommunikation audiovisueller Bilder, Freie Universität Berlin (PhD Dissertation). Sobchack, Vivian (1992): The address of the eye. A phenomenology of film experience. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University.

Punctum, 2018

Müller and Kappelhoff’s Cinematic Metaphor: Experience – Affectivity – Temporality (2018) is the fruit of a collaboration in the Languages and Emotion project, further developed in the Cinepoetics Center for Advanced Film Studies, both based at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. It proposes a new framework for analyzing metaphor in film that is based on dissatisfaction with (1) Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) Conceptual Metaphor Theory; (2) cognitivist-oriented applications and adaptations of this theory in the field of multimodality, specifically as operating in film (e.g., Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009; Forceville 2006, 2016, 2017; Rohdin 2009; Fahlenbrach 2010, 2016; Coëgnarts and Kravanja 2012, 2015; Ortiz 2011, 2015); and (3) cognitive film scholarship (e.g., Bordwell 1985, 2013; Smith 1995; Plantinga 2009, 2013; Grodal 2009). Given the status of the authors of this monograph, its serious criticism of the aforementioned theories and approaches deserves an equally serious response. This paper can be considered as an extended review of Cinematic Metaphor.

This article offers a metaphorical and embodied examination of the representation of perception in narrative cinema. Using insights from Conceptual Metaphor Theory we argue that the perceptual states of characters can be represented cinematically via audio-visual expressions of metaphors related to the physical functioning of human bodies. More specifically, we show how a predominant pair of conceptual mappings, namely the metonymy perceptual organ stands for perception and the metaphor perception is contact between perceiver and perceived, plays a crucial role in the non-verbal representation of the characters’ perceptual experience.

In: Kathrin Fahlenbrach (ed.), Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television and Video Games: Cognitive Approaches (pp. 17-32).

Midwest Studies In Philosophy, 2010

Only recently, the broad research program of embodied cognition has fuelled a substantial and ongoing body of research at the crossroads of cognitive science and film studies. Two influential theories of embodiment that have received considerable attention among film scholars are: Conceptual Metaphor Theory (originated in the field of cognitive linguistics) and Embodied Simulation Theory (originated in the field of neuroscience). Despite their intimate relationship, both theories have been rarely addressed together in the context of film studies. This article takes on the challenge of combining both perspectives into a unified embodied model for understanding conceptual meaning in cinema. The study is driven by two key assumptions, namely: (1) that meaning in film is metaphorically mapped within our sensory-motor system and (2) that embodied simulation processes in the brain allow for the viewer to infer this meaning from the evidence provided by the film. To clarify both assumptions, the article will present a discussion of the theme of embodiment at three levels of analysis: the conceptual level (how is meaning embodied in the human mind?), the formal level (how is this meaning structured in the visual mode of expression?) and the receptive level (how is the viewer able to infer this meaning on the basis of the evidence provided by the form?). The grounding problem of fictional subjectivity in cinema (that is, how are viewers able to attribute mental states to fictional characters in films?) will be used to test the validity of both claims.