Cinematic Metaphor

Experience – Affectivity – Temporality

Cornelia Müller, Hermann Kappelhoff, Sarah Greifenstein, Dorothea Horst, Thomas Scherer, Christina Schmitt

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783110579789
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework's application to media and multimodality analysis.

Part I: Setting the Stage for Cinematic Metaphor

Introduction

Nothing is so obvious as the fact that large parts of our everyday communication are structured through the use of audiovisual images. At the same time, nothing is as taken for granted as the fact that we all understand them. The power of audiovisual images is frequently so emphasized – and indeed countless examples could be named which prove their power. And yet we still have a highly underdeveloped idea of what this power actually consists in. What is it, for instance, that distinguishes communicating with audiovisual images from other, primarily language-based, forms? Can audiovisual images be described in terms of communication at all? And what might be lost when we consider social interaction structured by audiovisual images as ‘communication’? What is the specific media-character of audiovisual images?

Despite a long history in film theory, these questions are hardly recognized by current scholars of multimodal metaphor and cognitive approaches to film and audiovision more generally. We thus face a kind of absence in current theory and research on metaphor in audiovisual media. Part I of the book considers some of the consequences of this neglect, while at the same time developing a theoretical framework that not only accounts for the specific media-character of audiovisual images but takes it as starting point for a theory of metaphors in audiovisual media.

As a rule, audiovisual images, in their obvious comprehensibility, get assigned to a representational regime that assumes, on the one hand, a model of representational pictoriality and, on the other, a primarily verbal model of human communication. The turn to “visual culture [Bildwissenschaft]” has largely been carried out without taking moving images of audiovisual media – and the theoretical tradition related to them – into account (Mitchell 2008, 2009). Moving images are all too frequently understood in terms of ‘an image’, that is, as a discrete, iconic representation; and if they then become the object of theoretical reflection after all, this is done with reference to linguistic forms of expression and their corresponding theoretical concepts, such as code, text theory, or narrative. Furthermore, a methodology which would allow a description of how audiovisual images structure viewers’ thinking when watching a film, and that relates such a description to affect, movement and action, is largely still lacking, notwithstanding the fact that a casual reading of the history of film theory (from Sergej Eisenstein to Gilles Deleuze) suggests the development of a poetology of film that conceives of audiovisual movement-­images as specific mode of ­experience.

If more and more research from the field of conceptual metaphor theory has turned to audiovisual images in recent years, this has occurred not only in response to the enormous significance that audiovisual media have for political, social, economic, scientific, religious, and pedagogical spheres of communication. The orientation of conceptual metaphor theory to the multimodality of forms of human expression emphasizes its constitutive hypothesis, namely that metaphorical concepts are fundamental cognitive schemas from which linguistic metaphors are derived and which, as a consequence, are considered as being prior to language. Indeed, both in view of gestural and audiovisual modes of expression, processes of metaphorical meaning emergence can be shown that are not formulated linguistically (Cienki and Müller 2008a, Forceville and Urios-Aparisi 2009). Research on gestures has demonstrated that conceptual metaphor theory addresses embodied processes of meaning-making which are primarily structured by physical interaction, interaffective involvement, and synchronization of gestural movements as behavioral expression (see Chapters 4 and 5 for a critical discussion of CMT’s notion of embodiment; see alsoHorst et al. 2014, Kappelhoff and Müller 2011, Müller and Schmitt 2015).

Clearly, conceptual metaphor theory, including a variety of its internal strands, only captures one specific area within contemporary metaphor research. In fact, the field, including theory and application is broad and diverse, and includes highly controversial positions (Gibbs 2008, Hampe 2017, Haverkamp 1983, 2007b, Müller et al. 2013, 2014, Ortony 1993).

However, very broadly speaking, we can distinguish two profoundly distinct positions: on the one hand, (neuro-)cognitive research on cognitive concepts and schemas, which assumes a biological grounding of human thinking; on the other, philosophical anthropology, which conceives of history as cultural history and as history of thought. Philosophical anthropology pursues the study of historical development of forms of thought, including abstract concepts of human thinking and media. In very simplified terms, we can say that there are two key approaches to metaphor that are, however, diametrically opposed with regard to their epistemological and their academic goals. While both claim to study the forms of human thinking, their respective understanding of ‘what thinking is’ is sharply opposed: philosophical anthropology conceives of thinking as historically reconstructable (cultural), cognitive neuroscience considers thinking as processing of universal neurocognitive schemata.

The two approaches mark opposed endpoints on a range of contemporary positions to metaphor. One side is occupied by Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory, which continues to dominate the discourse of/on metaphor in linguistics and cognitive sciences more generally. Notably, this theoretical position defines itself explicitly by a radical break with the rhetorical and poetological tradition of human forms of expression (Lakoff and Johnson 1980a, b). On the other side, we have Hans Blumenberg’s metaphorology (Blumenberg 1981, 1987 [1981]), which has significantly influenced the discourse on metaphor within philosophy, and continues to do so (Buch and Weidner 2014, Gehring 2009a, Haverkamp 1983, 1998, 2007a, b, Kopperschmidt 2000, Kroß and Zill 2011). Blumenberg’s philosophical perspective on metaphor links back to the tradition of rhetoric and poetology and his work on metaphor aims to grasp the rhetorical dimension of linguistic utterances in their epistemic relevance: we understand the world relative to its media- and symbolic instruments of representation. In relation to our account of cinematic metaphor, these two perspectives appear as indispensable as they are incompatible. For one thing, conceptual metaphor theory brings a model of bodily experience into play that makes it possible to describe processes of understanding in their relation to concrete sensory experiences of perception and action. This ‘embodied’ perspective addresses directly what constitutes the process of understanding audiovisual images and what characterizes audiovisual images as a specific media-mode of experience: the concrete experience of a perceptual sensation of film-viewing and -hearing which grounds all processes of film understanding (cf. Section 1.3) Blumenberg’s metaphorology, on the other hand, promises access to the cultural history of human thought, which is precisely the history of development and change of symbolic forms in which human thinking sediments: its media, its artefacts and its languages. Blumenberg’s philosophical rhetoric provides access to an understanding of reality, which is always a shared reality of a cultural community. Each theory of audiovisual images that claims to grasp film images themselves as a genuine form of human thinking and that aims at reconstructing the function of film-images for the modeling of cultural horizons of meanings is to be situated within such a historical perspective.

Starting from a cultural-historical film studies perspective thus implies – this is our basic thesis – that every question on metaphors and metaphorical concepts in audiovisual images is inseparably linked to the question of the historicity of media modes of experience, that is, their cultural-historical positioning. Against this backdrop, there can be no understanding of the processes of meaning-making of audiovisual images which ignores the fundamental historicity of cultural processes of meaning-making. Already a systematic analysis that simply aims at describing the interaction between viewers and audiovisual images as a process of meaning-making from a linguistic perspective, e.g., to pursue the dynamics of verbalizing audiovisual images, will have to take into consideration the historical dimension of its media form of experience. Why this is so will be considered more carefully over the course of our argument.

At this point, it appears necessary to also determine the specific interest that drives media theory, and specifically film theory towards engaging with current discussions in metaphor theory. What can media studies learn from metaphor research? And vice versa, how can the extensive research on metaphors in images of audiovisual media profit from the theory of cinematic images? Is it possible at all to relate these very different concepts of metaphor outlined above with one another? Or, do they perhaps have nothing more in common than naming a phenomenon that is subsequently defined as theoretical object in completely different and even incompatible ways? In order to provide an answer to these questions, initially we would like to discuss conceptual metaphor theory analysis of audiovisual images as well as cognitive theories of film understanding. We do this because what they have in common is the neglect of the historicity of audiovisual images as a mode of experience, whereas for us the historicity of the mode of human experience is a constitutive axiom of any kind of meaning-making.

1 Cinematic Metaphor as Poiesis: The Movement-Image as Starting Point

This chapter offers a critique of how audiovisual metaphors are analyzed within conceptual metaphor theory and cognitive media studies. Some of the fundamental criticisms are illustrated with an analysis of the short film DEATH AND THE MOTHER (Ruth Lingford, UK 1997) suggesting an alternative proposal to the idea of a cognitive instantiation of conceptual metaphors in audiovisual images: the grounding of metaphor in the viewer’s engaging with films as movement-images. Since this involves a model of film-viewing that is profoundly different from common cognitive models of film reception, we then offer a critical review of cognitive theories of film understanding before introducing our alternative model: cinematic metaphor as emergent from the poiesis of film-viewing.

1.1 A Critique of Cognitive Analyses of Metaphors in Film

In conceptual metaphor theory and in cognitive film studies, the historical-cultural dimension of human thinking only contributes incidentally to analyses of visual representations. By explaining the meaning of visual representations through recourse to a physiological level of universal hard-wired cognitive structures (Johnson 2007, Lakoff and Johnson 1980b, 1999, Lakoff 2008), the concrete situatedness of meaning is turned into something secondary. From such a perspective, all historical and cultural formations of metaphorical thinking are ascribed to basic schemas of human cognition – and rather paradoxically are explained by them at the same time (for discussions of the circularity of CMT, see, e.g., Cienki and Müller 2008b, Gibbs 1998, Müller 2008a, b). In contrast, for us, the situatedness of meaning-making is essential, as is the character of the medium in which this happens. For our framework of cinematic metaphor, the historicity of audiovisual images as a human mode of experience is constitutive and affects every aspect of meaning-making. This cultural-historical dimension of metaphoricity in audiovisual media is irreducible – and correspondingly can in no way be circumvented by appealing to general principles of human ­thinking. We can maintain, however, that models of cognitive processes are instructive about the physiological or psychological bases of mental activities – but not about the concrete, historically situated sense-making interactions in each ­specific case.

The historicity of metaphorical meaning-making

The historicity of metaphorical meaning-making relates to two traditions, poetics and rhetoric, that contemporary metaphor theory has cast aside. Charles Forceville, one of the leading figures in applying conceptual metaphor theory to audiovisual media analysis, highlights the break with these ­traditions:

From [Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory] on, metaphor was no longer one of a series of tropes that could enhance or embellish the aesthetic meaning of a poem or the persuasive power of speeches (as had been its primary claim to fame since Aristotelian times), but one of the conceptual tools for human beings to make sense of the world. (Forceville 2016, 17)

Forceville positions conceptual metaphor theory as the origin of theorizing metaphor as a...