Wahrnehmen, fhlen, 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.