Figures of Film Metaphor, Metonymy, and Repetition 1

L’Atalante. Revista de estudios cinematográficos. nº 35. Cine inmersivo. Dispositivos, relatos y mundos virtuales. Coodinado por Àngel Quintana, Daniel Pérez Pamies y Teresa Sorolla Romero., 2023

Desde su nacimiento, el medio cinematográfico ha demostrado tener un lenguaje propio que ha cambiado mediante el desarrollo de nuevas técnicas y corrientes artísticas. Está, por eso, en constante evolución, tanto en el ritmo narrativo como en el propio significado de las imágenes. Bajo esta perspectiva, el presente artículo pretende vislumbrar las principales diferencias entre los modos de representación, partiendo de la clásica distinción entre cine narrativo y no narrativo, para subrayar los elementos compartidos por algunos fenómenos audiovisuales que suspenden la narración. Así, se analiza el modelo hermético-metafórico, desarrollado por Sánchez-Biosca para describir el modelo expresionista-caligarista, relacionándolo con el considerado cine de atracciones, término acuñado por Tom Gunning. Teniendo en cuenta que se trata de fenómenos diferentes en forma y contexto, se observan algunas confluencias entre ellos, llegando a la conclusión de que los planos hermético-metafóricos pueden confluir con la atracción en la experiencia estética, donde el shock causado por un nuevo efecto técnico y especial coincide con el que provoca un elemento visual y estilístico, como pueden ser las referencias continuas a la pintura o la muestra de decorados siniestros. Since its inception, cinema has clearly had a language of its own, which has changed with the development of new technologies and artistic movements. It is thus a medium in constant evolution, both in terms of its narrative pacing and the meaning inherent in its images. From this perspective, this article attempts to identify the main differences between cinematic modes of representation, beginning with the classical distinction between narrative and non-narrative cinema, to highlight the elements shared by certain filmmaking techniques involving the suspension of the narration. Specifically, an analysis is offered of the hermetic-metaphorical mode developed by Sánchez-Biosca to describe the Expressionist-Caligarist mode, relating it to the concept of the cinema of attractions proposed by Tom Gunning. While taking into account that these concepts are different in form and context, the analysis reveals certain points of convergence between them, suggesting a potential commonality between hermetic-metaphorical shot compositions and the cinema of attractions in terms of the aesthetic experience they provide, where the shock caused by a new technological special effect is similar to that caused by a visual stylistic element, such as repeated references to famous paintings or the use of eerie set designs.

The city has a strong memory and it never forget its own experience. The past, the present and the future of the city can be read through its streets, buildings, sounds, myths, rhythms and stories. More importantly, if the city is portrayed through a camera, it becomes as fictional and designable as films. At this stage, there is no difference between watching a film and seeing a city. Also, cinema itself turns into a paradigm that belongs to the city. The parallelism between the city and film is like an inevitable destiny, so much so that they constitute and develop each other. Accordingly, those who attempt to understand the notion of the city should consult with films and vice versa; hence, this paper deals with the question of how the city is cinematized, and this question involves another question: how does the cinematic imagination fictionalize itself in the city?

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.

Today’s world map is being constantly retraced as many cultures are dispersed or are being displaced or transferred from one region to another. This new experience of populations’ movement, increased by globalisation, has become one of the most significant and traumatic occurrences of the 21st century. This is undoubtedly the era of refugees, people in motion, and mass migration. More and more people seem to be crossing borders and turning their experiences into a powerful legacy of resistance, endurance, and self-knowledge. And the media are witnessing this phenomenon. New impressions and views are formed with the rising and falling of barriers, walls and customs. New geographies and languages are imposed on an entire set of ancient cultures and nations. Many artists are transforming the trauma of displacement into a major renewal of thought and reflection on contemporary society. How should one approach cinema‘s realities and subjectivities in light of these new frontiers? Filmmakers are favouring artistic proposals and film productions with cross-national perspectives and themes that converge and bring together people and audiences from different cultural backgrounds and numerous ethnic origins. Not only do such films narrate and translate an exilic experience, they also conceptualize an intercultural process that needs to communicate globally to a varied multicultural audience. As a global commodity, how will cinema reunite or embody all those subjectivities and realities? Thus, these productions also require a procedure of self- translation in order to express a multiplicity of languages, aesthetics, and memorial-spaces.

Ergonomics for Design and Innovation: Humanizing Work and Work Environment: Proceedings of HWWE 2021: 391 (Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems), 2021

Filmmakers often face creative challenges in transforming textual narratives into cinematic language. One such challenge is adaptation from a rich literary medium like a play to a film-a medium that relies less on verbal expositions and more on visual cues. In this regard, cinematographic techniques like Unity, Balance, Contrast, Colour etc. in composition and staging help with the encoding of the narrative and the subtext into the medium along with a metaphoric interpretation of the text. Rudolph Arnheim's seminal work, 'Art and Visual Perception' (1974), laid the foundation for bridging the gap between principles of visual design and gestalt psychology. Taking from Arnheim's work, linguist Mark Johnson, in his 'The Body in the Mind', expanded on the metaphoric implications of embodied image schemata by using everyday experiences. In this paper, we analyze how the principles of visual perception are presented in director Kirsten Sheridan's film 'Disco Pigs'(2001). Referencing the work of Arnheim on visual perception and Johnson's theories of Conceptual Metaphors and the image schemata, the paper highlights Sheridan's cinematic approach in bringing depth to the story telling by allowing layers of subtext and emotion in the moving frame. The paper will illustrate the Balance Schema, through a visual analysis of the film compositions and the story/theme.

Journal of Asian Architecture and Building Engineering, 2007

This paper investigates relations between cinema, architecture, and the city of Tokyo. First, it discusses the role of cinematography as a medium for reading a city. Movies are considered as a mobile cartography that can be used to travel through the city. Second, it discusses the architectural relationship between memory and Tokyo, and the roles played both by the presence and absence of ruins in the works of architects Isozaki and Rossi. Third, it discusses a film catalogue that represents the most important moments of Tokyo's 20th century architectural history. After a screening of almost one hundred movies related to Japanese society, forty were chosen because they related directly to Tokyo. They were classified as representative of some important moments of Tokyo's 20 th century urban history. Finally, this paper argues that in defining a cinematic history of Tokyo, some constants emerged: the architecture of Japan's capital city, as seen through movies, is a realm of mutations in a perpetual state of change.

2019

This chapter aims to discuss the notion of conceptual metaphor in relation to the visual manifestation level of films. The first part takes on the challenge of addressing a theoretical issue that is inherent to this level and that at first sight seems to impede a metaphorical analysis of film, namely the problem of iconicity. After having addressed this problem, the second part discusses how metaphor can be analyzed in film. Since conceptual metaphor can be conceived of as consisting of a relationship between image-schematic driven source domains and abstract target domains, this part is divided into three subparts. The first subpart shows how image schemas may be instantiated in visual images by means of the application of a variety of film stylistic means (e.g., camera movement, editing). The second subpart stresses the importance of metonymy in representing target domains in film. The third and last subpart makes their connection by illustrating, through a case-study taken from Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974), how stylistically motivated image schemas maybe be mapped onto the inferential logic of metonymically represented target domains.

This paper investigates the contemporary turn to cinephilia as an object of theoretical analysis and historiographical investigation through the essay films by José Luis Guerin and Isaki Lacuesta. In particular, I focus on Innisfree (José Luis Guerin 1990), Tren de sombras (Train of Shadows, José Luis Guerin 1997), Las variaciones Marker (The Marker Variations, Isaki Lacuesta 2008) and La noche que no acaba (All the Night Long, Isaki Lacuesta 2010). This work recovers and restages “cinephilic moments” through the evocation of particular films, film-makers and stars. By looking at the formal strategies in the above essay films – especially the play with the disappearance of their original referents – I contend that the cinephilic moment generates a richly generative framework to reflect on the medium itself and its potential for cultural appropriation in the context of a renewed experimental strand in Spanish film production.

«Cinéma & Cie», 13 (20), Spring 2013, 97-108

This article aims at considering the world cinema "perspective" in contemporary film studies as an approach that adopts a cartographical rhetoric and a worldist aesthetics. This reveals a nostalgia for the geographical discourse, which has many implications and can be even considered reactionary. Indeed, being the effect of a sort of osmosis between "cartographic cinema" and "cartography of cinema," world cinema promotes a worldview that is allegorical of the old modernist cinematic mission of making the whole world visible. By reinserting geography in contemporary film studies and in the filmic texts today, it is compensative of new anxieties about film referentiality and the difficult mappability of informal film distribution. On a broader level, a symptomatic reading of world cinema shows how its geographical/geopolitical gaze tries to overcome a crisis of authority and of representation, and the "crisis of the cartographic reason."