4.1Figuration and Illocution: Figurativity and the Film Code

Semiotic film theory displays a fairly broad understanding of metaphor and metonymy. In order to explain meaning constitution in film, Christian Metz, as one of the prominent representatives of film semiotics, has “sought to locate the process of understanding not at the level of the image, but at the level of the syntactic structure of a film text.” (Kappelhoff and Greifenstein 2016, 185) In order to get to the heart of this structure, he draws on key notions and assumptions of structuralism, in particular Roman Jakobson’s bipartite model of language (see Metz [1975] 1982, 174–182). In asking for what makes communication behavior and linguistic and non-linguistic messages meaningful, Jakobson ([1956] 1990) refers to Saussure’s two axes of paradigm and syntagm. However, he himself deals with them in terms of the two fundamental operations of sign formation and their combination to larger units: selection and combination. While the selection of signs refers to interchangeable units that are associated through the principle of similarity, the combination of signs involves the successive and/or simultaneous connection of elements that are associated through the principle of contiguity (Jakobson 1990, 119–120; cf. Mittelberg 2010, 121). Jakobson relates these different modes of association, similarity and contiguity, to metaphor and metonymy:

The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. (Jakobson 1990, 129)

In saying so, Jakobson makes clear that he conceives of metaphor and metonymy not only as rhetorical devices, but most of all as two poles between which meaning emerges. According to him, however, “[t]he alternative predominance of one or the other of these two processes is by no means confined to verbal art. The same oscillation occurs in sign systems other than language” (Jakobson 1990, 130).

This is what Metz aims to address. In his work The Imaginary Signifier (1982), he follows Jakobson’s focus on metaphor and metonymy of all figures “because […] they are felt to exemplify more clearly than the others the ‘pure’ principles of similarity and contiguity respectively – that is, precisely those involved in the paradigm/syntagm distinction” (Metz 1982, 176). Like Jakobson, Metz is not concerned with “localised metaphors or metonymies that could be isolated” but rather with “metaphorical and metonymic operations” (Metz 1982, 151). For him, they are the fundamental figurative processes of signification in film, which is why “[…] producing an immediate list of the principal cinematic figures is not part of my aim” (Metz 1982, 172). Pursuing a psychoanalytic approach, he relates metaphor and metonymy to Freud’s categories of ‘condensation’ and ‘displacement’ in order to explain how film projects the unconscious. This idea was already expressed by Jakobson himself (1990, 132) and was further developed by Lacan’s ([1957] 1995) thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language. In the metaphorical formula of ‘one thing in terms of another’, condensation is at work as one significant is superimposed onto the other (Pagel 1989, 47–50, cf. Metz 1982, 235–244). Although meaning is thereby hidden and repressed, it nevertheless remains in its absence latently present: this is a moment of contact between primary and secondary processes (Pagel 1989, 47–50). On the other hand, the metonymical combination of elements along the signifying chain is displacement as it allows for saying something other than what is apparently at one’s disposal (Metz 1982, 266–273). It is only in the constant movement from one signifier to another that meaning emerges instead of being present at a particular point in the chain (Lacan [1966] 1977, 153ff).

While Metz in the wake of Jakobson’s theory still conceives of metaphor and metonymy as being equal and not super- or subordinated to each other, other semiotic approaches exclude metonymy from further examination in favor of metaphor. Thereby, in some cases even metaphor loses its single status and is categorically mixed with other figures of similarity. Jacques Gerstenkorn (1995), for instance, deals with metaphor only in the context of a ‘metaphorical field’ which encompasses operations being unified by the principle of creating resemblance. According to this view, Gerstenkorn (1995, 18, 86) subsumes different forms of analogy under the term metaphor, e.g., syllepsis, plays of echo, various kinds of comparison of actually incongruent things, entire films or film parables. Broadening the concept of metaphor in film to such an extent levels its specificity and turns it into a rather vague matter that is hardly distinguishable.

A counterapproach of the other extreme is Jean Mitry who argues that metaphor in film actually could not exist. As it was based on substitution, it would be impossible to occur in the case of concrete objects presented in a film: “In language, genuine or lexicalised metaphors only exist because words deal with concepts. Images deal with objects, however, with concrete facts which cannot take each other’s place, but can only undergo a change of meaning.” (Mitry 2000, 197) According to Mitry, metaphor is only to be found as a cognitive product on the part of the spectator.

Film does not establish its significations with metaphors. It builds them by contrasting facts and actions in juxtapositions, created most often in editing and whose connotations always have to be deciphered. The metaphor is not presented; it only exists as such (its meaning) in the mind of the audience. (Mitry 2000, 197)

In these remarks, what is noticeable is the mention of the audience in the context of figurative meaning-making in film. The so far presented semiotically driven approaches have predominantly focused on how film signifies. In the wake of such a view, they consider figurativity as a structural element of film itself and thus implicitly suggest that meaning is constituted on film’s own terms. This is to say that metaphor and metonymy are primarily located on the level of the filmic ‘text’ and of audiovisual representation respectively. At this point, Mitry brings in the spectator as an important factor involved in this process. Through his formulation of ‘deciphering’, however, a perspective on figurative meaning-making in film shows up that strongly focuses on the intention of the producer.51 This aspect is a core argument of rhetorical accounts of figurativity in film that are subsequently introduced.

In contrast to the broad understanding of metaphor and metonymy put forward by the previous semiotic approaches, rhetorically-oriented conceptions focus on concrete instantiations, i.e., single figures. Roy Clifton’s treatise The Figure in Film (1983), for instance, discusses metaphor, simile, metonymy, antithesis, etc. in different films in terms of rhetorical devices that are intentionally used and implemented by a filmmaker. When discussing metaphor in particular, he conceives of the vehicle as a director’s comment, referred to as gloss, on the tenor, which is referred to as image (Clifton 1983, 87). By the notion of image, Clifton links metaphor (and also metonymy) in film explicitly to the level of audiovisual representation. The audience plays a role for figurative meaning-making in that it has the task to “complete the metaphor” (Clifton 1983, 87), i.e., to detect the director’s gloss on the image. The marking of the figure is for Clifton both an indicator for its intentional implementation in film and an argument for its recognition by the viewer: “I merely assume that […] a director has deliberately assembled what we see in the frame […].” (Clifton 1983, 101) Accordingly, “the viewers must make the metaphor: they are given cement and gravel, but they must mix the concrete” (Clifton 1983, 87).

From these considerations, a hierarchical structure arises: as figurative meaning-making is primary linked to a director or producer of a film,52 the viewer is first and foremost assigned a passive role as a recipient of meaning. This becomes particularly evident in Klaus Kanzog’s (2001) remarks: he equates film with speech and defines it as a “visual speech act” (Kanzog 2001, 15) that addresses the viewer for the purpose of persuasive effects. Due to this rhetorical focus, the film’s objective and meaningful existence is taken for granted beyond its situated experience by a spectator. In line with this, Kanzog refers to signification in film as meaning identification [Bedeutungsfindung] (Kanzog 2001, 14) and understanding on the part of the addressed recipient. As a result, he focuses exclusively on the level of audiovisual representation. This becomes particularly evident in his quotation of Hermann Barth who argues that in filmic discourse, verbal and iconic sign complexes are subject to rhetorical speech which is why the analysis should focus on what is conveyed and how it is represented (cf. Barth 1990, 16).

In this respect, i.e., concerning the manner of representation, Kanzog introduces metaphor and metonymy as elements of style elocution that shall shape the viewer’s perception. As becomes apparent, his understanding of figurativity in film is clearly informed by speech act theory, especially when he writes that all images first of all have to be detected in their original meaning and only then are recognized according to their contextual situatedness (Kanzog 2001, 112). In saying so, Kanzog follows Searle’s (1993) conception of a false, non-literal use of language in the case of figurative meaning resulting in a discrepancy that has to be decoded by an addressee in a meaningful way. As there is no lexicon for film, Kanzog argues that montage or camera work could establish figurative meaning by putting together two different objects. In order to be recognized and understood by the viewer, these combinations have to stand out as a particular mode of perception through camera work, editing, and montage (Kanzog 2001, 114f.).

This rather static and intentionally informed conception of audiovisual figurativity reappears in other rhetorical approaches to film, such as Gesche Joost’s (2008), where it is elaborated with respect to the persuasion of the viewer. Joost aims at applying general rhetoric to film and outlining the respective film-specific communication techniques of an audiovisual rhetoric. As a result, her approach entails a clear focus on the production side and its intended effects on the viewer in terms of a tripartite communication process playing out between the rhetor, the medium, and the addressee (Joost 2008, 31). Metaphor and metonymy play a double role in Joost’s approach: on the one hand, they are broadly defined as meaning-making operations (in Jakobson’s sense) and reinforce her claim that film is fundamentally rhetorical, i.e., with regard to its structure (Joost 2008, 54–55). On the other hand, they are considered rhetorical figures in film, deliberately used by the filmic rhetor,53 that evoke an intended effect on the spectator. As such, metaphor and metonymy belong to a secondary system of argumentative and aesthetic patterns that the rhetor disposes of for successful communication (Jost 2008, 148–149).54

Joost’s approach encapsulates the set of problems of all semiotic and rhetorical approaches to audiovisual figurativity that have been introduced in this chapter. Their focus on film’s syntactic structure and the producer’s intention as core parts of meaning constitution and affective resonances basically leaves the viewer out of the meaning-making process. Understood in a broad sense as basic figurative processes of meaning constitution in film, the conception of metaphor and metonymy is extended so much that it lacks media specificity. In the narrow sense, on the other hand, metaphor and metonymy are considered static elements of a catalog or cultural canon of forms. As a result, the temporal, attentional, and affective dynamics of figurativity do not come into view, which is also due to the fact that it is located on the level of audiovisual representation. It is precisely the static conception and the attribution to audiovisual representation that recur as characteristic features of approaches informed by linguistic and cognitive theories of figurativity which are subject of the following section.

4.2Artistry and Cognitive Principle: Figurativity and Message Deciphering

In contrast to a broad and structural understanding, film- and media-theoretical approaches to be discussed below point to endeavors to justify audiovisual figurativity in the narrow sense and as a concept on its own. While insisting on the difference between its manifestation in audiovisual media and in language, many authors nevertheless draw on pertinent linguistic or cognitive theories of metaphor and metonymy in order to claim their audiovisual specificity. In the following, some selected exponents of this mentality will be introduced and outlined. Regardless of their respective theoretical orientation, all of the following share some recurrent central assumptions:

Taken all together, figurative meaning is considered to be contained in audiovisual images in an objective form and is thus existentially independent of its perception by the viewers. This strong focus on form is due to the fact that the approaches to be discussed in the following still cling to the idea of metaphor and metonymy becoming manifest in words which is transferred to audiovisual images.

In his work Metaphor and Film (1990), Trevor Whittock tries to undertake a comprehensive theoretical discussion of what he calls ‘cinematic metaphor’. The definition he gives at the beginning of his book already reveals the objective understanding outlined above: “Metaphor is usually defined as the presentation of one idea in terms of another, belonging to a different category, so that either our understanding of the first idea is transformed, or so that from the fusion of the two ideas a new one is created.” (Whittock 1990, 5) Apart from the generalizing claim (“our understanding”) that Whittock expresses at that point, what is remarkable is the notion of category. Obviously fed by the language-based idea of a lexicon of fixed significants and significates, it suggests a correspondence of audiovisual representation and ‘reality’, thereby disregarding both the level of use as against the systems level and the mediatization process in audiovisual media settings.

At another point, however, Whittock explicitly mentions it when justifying metaphor’s existence in film: “Metaphor is encapsulated within the very film image itself” as a “clash between the object filmed and the manner of its filming” (Whittock 1990, 29, 35). In order to pre-empt the reproach of levelling metaphor’s specificity as against other reasoning processes through such a broad definition, Whittock adds as sine qua non that metaphor has to “involve some transformation”, i.e., the seeing as of the tenor in terms of the vehicle55 (Whittock 1990, 5, 126). By saying so, he suggests a dynamic understanding of metaphorical meaning-making as a process based on a triadic structure: the emergence of a mediating third entity on the basis of perceiving and conceiving one thing in terms of another.56

Metaphor, as “both […] an operation of thought and […] an artistic occurrence” (Whittock 1990, 129), still remains first and foremost tied to the filmmaker. Having translated his own cognitive seeing as into an “appropriate [film] image”, he is the decisive factor for a receiver’s successful interpretation of the metaphor by “[choosing] whether to accentuate the metaphor or to keep it discreet” (Whittock 1990, 29, 42). Due to such a complete focus on the producer and the psychological understanding of the process Whittock’s conception of cinematic metaphor persists in the language-based (literary) idea of figurativity as intentional “artistic creativity” (Whittock 1990, 3). Coming up with ten “formulas”, an overview of the varieties of cinematic metaphor, he moreover subsumes different figures of analogy under the label of metaphor, among others metonymy, synecdoche, or juxtaposition (Whittock 1990, 49–69). In doing so, he blurs metaphor’s – and likewise metonymy’s – particularity.

Noël Carroll’s ([1994] 2001, 1996) reflections on film metaphor – he makes no mention of metonymy at all – display similar assumptions. Justifying its occurrence in film, he implicitly refers to the manifestation of metaphorical meaning in audiovisual images and the process of deciphering and identification by a spectator as put forward by Whittock: “[T]here are some visual images that function in the same way that verbal metaphors do and whose point is identified by a viewer in roughly the same way that the point of a verbal metaphor is identified by a reader or a listener” (Carroll 2001, 347; emphasis mine). Carroll even goes a step further and subordinates film metaphor to visual metaphor, arguing that both of them bring together two elements that in reality are physically incompatible. In this light, he looks to find a visual equivalent for the “grammatical devices” (Carroll 1996, 812) that create identity between the two elements in verbal metaphor. This visual counterpart of ‘A IS B’ in film is “homospatiality”, i.e., the visual fusion of disparate elements “in one, spatially bounded, homogeneous entity” (Carroll 2001, 354). Carroll’s primary focus on the visual manifestation ignores the inherent movement and temporality of audiovisual images57 and thereby reduces metaphor in film to a spatially bound, static device that he claims to be “a central case – if not the most central case – of film metaphor” (Carroll 1996, 809).

Like Whittock, he conceives of metaphor in film from the perspective of an intentionally acting producer, the filmmaker. In order to be recognized and comprehended, metaphor’s two disparate elements have to be visually perceptible and the filmmaker has to make them salient in order to draw the spectator’s attention to them (Carroll 1996, 814). The correct consideration of the filmmaker’s intentions concerning the meaning of the metaphor is, according to Carroll, primarily fed by the viewer’s comparison between filmic context and reality: perceiving a semantic contradiction between the two necessarily precedes the context-bound, non-literal meaning. In that regard, Carroll’s conception is reminiscent of Searle’s (1979) pragmatic metaphor theory. This reference to pragmatics is reinforced by the set of felicity conditions – originally established by Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) for speech acts in general – that Carroll (1996, 815–817) develops for matching filmmakers’ and viewers’ assumptions in respect to metaphorical meaning in film. Viewed in this light, the process disappears behind a list of conditions whose cognitive reality and entire processing contrasts with Carroll’s claim of a recognition “simply by looking, rather than […] some process of reading, decoding or the like” (Carroll 1996, 814).

While Whittock’s and Carroll’s approaches to – primarily – metaphor are still strongly informed by classical linguistic conceptions and theories of figurativity, most recent film-theoretical accounts address it especially in the light of the embodied cognition theory. Starting from the question of how meaningful content beyond the spoken word is conveyed in film, they are especially interested in – again primarily – metaphor’s property to express abstract and complex meaning on the basis of embodied experience. It is, among others, strategies of medial emotionalizing that these approaches seek to explain and for that refer to cognitive theories of figurativity. The tenet of conceptual metaphor theory serves as their key reference: human thought and action is fundamentally structured by conceptual metaphors and metonymies that make abstract things – such as emotions – understandable in terms of concrete images and experiences (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999, Lakoff and Turner 1989, Kövecses 2000). The following approaches rely on audiovisual manifestations of such conceptual structures in order to explain processes of nonverbal meaning-making and emotionalizing in film.

By her concept of audiovisual metaphor (2005, 2008, 2010, 2016) Kathrin Fahlenbrach intends to account for the activation of feelings on the part of viewers watching a film. She conceives of metaphorical meaning-making as an intermediate process that cognitively fuses impressions from perception, thought, bodily experiences, and feelings evoked by the film to a coherent meaning (Fahlenbrach 2010, 69). According to her, film techniques, such as camera, sound, or montage, stage conceptual metaphors by audiovisually activating associative schemes and stimulus-response patterns that underlie these conceptual metaphors (Fahlenbrach 2007, 332, 339). They are recognized by the spectators instinctively and activate on an unconscious level the respective (cultural) metaphorical meaning pattern with its inherent “bodily and cognitive associations” (Fahlenbrach 2008, 86). As such, Fahlenbrach argues that the famous staircase scene from Stanley Kubrick’s the shining (UK/USA 1980) instantiates the emotion metaphor of FEAR IS AN OPPONENT IN A STRUGGLE58: while Wendy, stammering and screaming in a high-pitched voice, backs away from Jack, he, yelling at her aggressively, quietly and insistently propels her through the room and upstairs (Fahlenbrach 2008, 94). Fahlenbrach furthermore brings in the constant camera shifts between point-of-view shots of Jack’s face, expressing total insanity, and Wendy’s face, expressing mortal fear, in order to substantiate the consistent audiovisual manifestation of the underlying conceptual metaphor. This contrasting audio- and visual juxtaposition of Jack and Wendy through audiovisual techniques is suggested to give the pre-symbolic conceptual metaphor a perceptible gestalt that elicits all its associative schemata, stimulus-response patterns, and symbolic meanings. As a result, the corresponding deeply rooted conceptual metaphor is activated immediately on the part of the viewers and can therefore take its full cognitive, perceptual, and emotional effect on them (Fahlenbrach 2010, 281).

With her cognitive model, Fahlenbrach adopts central assumptions and thus also problematic aspects of CMT: she prioritizes the conceptual systems level against the level of actual use. The embodied meaning she is alluding to thereby amounts to cognitively stored experiences (in contrast to Johnson’s “felt qualities of meaning” [2007, 17]). This priority of the conceptual system makes metaphor a symbolic instantiation of superordinate cognitive deep structures. Following CMT, Fahlenbrach looks for these manifestations as reifications on the level of audiovisually represented bodies and spaces. Due to her top-down perspective, her subjects of interest are ‘common’ and often used conceptual metaphors in film as well as ‘typical’ patterns of their audiovisual manifestation (Fahlenbrach 2010, 43). This necessarily entails that the identified audiovisual metaphors remain as broad formulations that are rather abstract with regard to their meaning for the film and the viewer.

The viewer as an agent is not the main area of interest for Fahlenbrach’s idea of metaphorical meaning-making. She develops her argument on the basis of unconsciously effective meaning structures and associative networks that film producers use intentionally to evoke particular emotions and to trigger a particular understanding of things or characters in the film. Maarten Coëgnarts and Peter Kravanja (2012, 2014, 2015) put forward a similar line of argument when they align themselves with David Bordwell’s (2008) theoretical concept of the poetics of cinema and his key issue of “how […] filmmakers use the aesthetic dynamics of the film medium to achieve particular effects on spectators” (Coëgnarts and Kravanja 2012, 2). Based on this unilateral directedness of meaning-making in film, metaphor for them is a fixed and representational object that the filmmaker can intentionally apply in order to convey an abstract meaning of issues and actions to the spectator.

Coëgnarts and Kravanja (2012, 2014) draw on Lakoff and Johnson’s postulate that people systematically conceptualize abstract domains by means of mappings from concrete, bodily-based domains and therefore take up the idea of image schemas in order to transfer them to film. According to them, metaphorical meaning-making in film is grounded in recurrent basic schemata about which people have sensory-motor experiences and bodily knowledge. This knowledge in turn is extended to higher-order, disembodied categories that lack concrete features in order to understand them. For instance, in Michelangelo Antonini’s film the passenger (IT/FR/ES 1975), Coëgnarts and Kravanja (2012) identify the PASSAGE OF TIME IS MOTION IN SPACE metaphor as a solution to the problem of innovatively conveying a flashback to the spectator. According to them, Antonini uses a lateral movement of the camera59 for activating the SOURCE-PATH-GOAL schema that underlies the conceptual metaphor of TIME IS MOTION IN SPACE. Due to this deeply entrenched concrete meaning structure,60 they argue, the spectator is enabled to make full sense of the respective scene when the protagonist switches his identity. This meaning-making process is caused by the filmmaker and his intention: he aimed at conveying and representing the passage of time in this way (i.e., as motion in space) and thereby shapes the spectator’s understanding of time in a particular manner.

All approaches that have been introduced in this section are informed by linguistic or cognitive theories of figurativity, giving rise to minor nuances in their respective conception. While Whittock focuses on artistic creativity and Carroll stresses figurativity as a pragmatic proposal of some way of seeing, both Fahlenbrach and Coëgnarts and Kravanja highlight its cognitive basis as a central and universal principle that makes felicity conditions redundant. Notwithstanding this, all of them share the idea of audiovisual figurative meaning becoming manifest and reified on the level of audiovisual representation. This constricted perspective makes a static meaningful entity the typical case and disregards film’s inherent temporal, attentional, and affective dynamics. In contrast, the following section addresses approaches looking at figurativity in the context of temporality, movement, perception, and experience in the medium of film.

4.3Intellectual Shock and Affective Fusion: Figurativity and Viewers’ Participation

Even though the approaches to be discussed in this section rarely mention metonymy and instead focus on metaphor, they nevertheless apply to both of them as they deal with the principle of bringing two kinds of things together in a situated context. In doing so, they take primarily a view that focuses on the qualitative experience of temporally unfolding movement. In contrast to static and fixed entities of figurative meaning that were put at the heart of the afore-outlined approaches, the following conceptions shift the focus to meaning-making in the media-specific experience of temporally unfolding audiovisual compositions. Starting from the basic question of how a movement sensation in film emerges from successively running images, provides a remarkable and fruitful springboard as it applies to both film in general and figurativity in particular.

In his essay A Dialectic Approach to Film Form, the Soviet film director and theorist Sergej Eisenstein ([1929] 1951a, 45) puts forward a “dynamic philosophy of things: Being – as a constant evolution from the interaction of two contradictory opposites. Synthesis – arising from the opposition between thesis and antithesis”. Just as “[i]n nature we never see anything isolated, but everything in connection with something else […]”,61 Eisenstein argues, the sensation of movement in cinema does not result from perceiving two immobile images next to each other, but on top of one another (Eisenstein 1951a, 45, 49). In saying so, he suggests that meaning in film is not ex ante entailed in cinematic representation, but that it emerges from the formal composition of the film through montage. The process of meaning-making thus arises from the viewer’s experience of the two images’ mutual relatedness in terms of movement: instead of following each other separately, they dynamically superimpose onto one another in the process of film-viewing.

This makes implicit reference to the establishing of a triadic structure in figurative meaning-making, i.e., seeing one kind of thing as another with “two concepts or domains […] activated in parallel” (Müller 2008a, 26). Like Eisenstein has done in regard to the sensation of movement from two images,62 Müller clearly distinguishes the triadic process of seeing as from a unilateral transfer of meaning. In this respect, there appear clear correspondences in the dynamic and processual understanding of meaning-making between Eisenstein’s montage theory and the dynamic approach to audiovisual figurative meaning-making put forward here.

Eisenstein’s remarks on montage furthermore already hint at – albeit in regard to the temporality of audiovisual images – the rejection of an exclusive focusing on the level of audiovisual representation:

The movement within these building-block shots, and the consequent length of the component pieces, was then considered as rhythm. A completely false concept! This would mean the defining of a given object solely in relation to the nature of its external course. (Eisenstein 1951a, 48)

He employs this line of thought explicitly on audiovisual figurativity in his essay Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today ([1944] 1951b). Informed by his strong focus on the dialectic principle of dynamics, Eisenstein orients his entire theoretical thinking on montage to conflict. For him, it is only the “collision of independent shots – shots even opposite to one another” (Eisenstein 1951a, 49) that makes for the emergence of new meaning. This is the essence of Eisenstein’s theory of intellectual montage, and it also shapes his understanding of figurative meaning-making in film.63 In his discussion of David W. Griffith’s parallel montage, Eisenstein criticizes him for having misunderstood “that the region of metaphorical and imagist writing appears in the sphere of montage juxtaposition, not of representational montage pieces” (Eisenstein 1951b, 241). In Eisenstein’s eyes, Griffith is at fault for having translated the metaphor in “an isolated picture” and not in “the structure, nor […] the harmonic recurrence of montage expressiveness” (Eisenstein 1951b, 241).

Clearly dissociating metaphor from the level of audiovisual representation,64 Eisenstein’s account likewise contrasts with various recent (cognitively-informed) approaches of audiovisual metaphor and metonymy, e.g., Forceville (2017), Fahlenbrach (2016), or Coëgnarts and Kravanja (2014). Instead of a pre-established meaningful entity, he considers figurative meaning-making as an emergent process that is based on the spectator’s experience of audiovisual compositions in the process of film-viewing. This dynamic account and the consideration of media specificity make him compatible with the dynamic view on metaphor as proposed by Müller (2008a, 2011). With metaphor’s formal restriction to the “juxtaposition of shots” as making for “an arrangement of a new qualitative element, a new image, a new understanding” (Eisenstein 1951b, 245), he however disregards the multiple forms and patterns of audiovisual figurativity to play out.

In respect of the relevance of Eisenstein’s montage theory for the conception of audiovisual figurativity as put forward in this book, it is important to note that his thoughts on intellectual montage are a further development of his montage of attractions (or expressive montage; see Eisenstein [1924] 1982). In this regard, he has primarily emphasized the attentional and emotional impact of the “juxtaposition of facts” on the viewers. This emotional effectiveness of the movement of collision is informed by theater: Eisenstein conceives of the expressive movements of actors at the theatre and of expressive movements of the montage of attractions in film as equal because both address the audience affectively. As such, they are both expression and affective experience at the same time: “[T]his montage of movements as a whole also produces […] the visual effect of the emotion supposedly experienced.” (Eisenstein 1982, 19) The “new image” and “new understanding” (Eisenstein 1951b, 245) resulting from the juxtaposition of shots can thus be conceived of as being grounded in its affective expressivity.

It is this conflation of experiencing and understanding that the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze elaborates on in the chapter “Thought and Cinema” of his book The Time-Image ([1985] 2008) in relation to meaning-making in film and metaphor. Drawing on Eisenstein’s dialectic account, he outlines the two already mentioned aspects in greater detail as two moments of the interaction (or ‘circuit’ in Deleuze’s terms) between the audiovisual movement-image and the viewer.65 “According to Eisenstein, the first moment goes from the image to thought, from the percept to the concept.” (Deleuze 2008, 152) The perceptual experience of distinct images or components within the image that manifests itself as a shock has an intellectual effect; it forces the spirit to think. The process unfolds from the “I FEEL” to the “cinematographic I THINK: the whole as subject” (Deleuze 2008, 153). This first moment is what Eisenstein has referred to as new image or new understanding – the intellectual, or cognitive process. The second moment concerns the inverse direction of the first one: “[It] goes from the concept to the affect, or […] returns from thought to the image” in order to re-provide the intellectual process with an “affective charge” (Deleuze 2008, 154). Deleuze underlines that both moments are inextricably linked with each other and that both are of equal rank:

The organic has as correlate the pathetic. The highest form of consciousness in the work of art has as correlate the deepest form of the subconscious, following a ‘double process’ or two coexisting moments. In this second moment, we no longer go form the movement-image to the clear thinking of the whole that it expresses; we go from a thinking of the whole which is presupposed and obscure to the agitated, mixed-up images which express it. (Deleuze 2008, 154)

This second moment that Deleuze has also referred to as an “internal monologue, a drunken monologue working through figures, metonymies, synecdoches, metaphors […]” (2008, 154), indicates the affective impact of montage expressiveness as outlined by Eisenstein. In a third step, Deleuze brings together the two mentioned moments in the context of discussing metaphor. Firstly dissociating himself from a language-informed understanding of the cinematic image and pointing out its nature as a movement-image,66 he argues the case for cinema’s capacity for metaphor. For him, this capacity is not constituted through the technical superimposition of two distinct images, but through their affective fusion due to shared harmonics (Deleuze 2008, 155). Apart from this form, cinema is however also able to give rise to metaphors in the image and without montage. At this point, Deleuze again refers back to Eisenstein and his ideas on affective composition, and differentiates between extrinsic and intrinsic67 metaphors (Deleuze 2008, 156).

Regardless of its form, what remains the same and of importance in both cases is: “[T]he composition does not simply express the way in which the character experiences himself, but also expresses the way in which the author and the viewer judge him” (Deleuze 2008, 156). It is this conflation of intellectual and affective processes that leads Deleuze to the insight that metaphor “integrates thought into the image” (Deleuze 2008, 156). In this way, the circuit between the film and the spectator is fully established:

The complete circuit thus includes the sensory shock which raises us from the images to conscious thought, then the thinking in figures which takes us back to the images and gives us an affective shock again. Making the two coexist, joining the highest degree of consciousness to the deepest level of unconsciousness: this is the dialectical automaton. (Deleuze 2008, 156)

Metaphor thus represents or inheres the “identity of concept and image”, i.e., “[t]he concept is in itself in the image, and the image is for itself in the concept” (Deleuze 2008, 156). Deleuze relates this principle of bundling affective experience and meaning-making in metaphor also to film in general, as art of the masses: it “posits the unity of nature and man, of the individual and the mass” (Deleuze 2008, 157).

Two aspects in Eisenstein’s and Deleuze’s theoretical thoughts on metaphor in film are of key importance for the dynamic approach to audiovisual figurativity put forward in this book: the media specificity and – strongly linked to it – their take on the affective dimension. By their dissociation of the level of representation and of equating the cinematic image with a verbal utterance, Eisenstein and Deleuze focus on audiovisual images as movement-images that induce an immediate experience of movement. In doing so, an aspect comes up for the subject matter of audiovisual figurativity that is still highly underrepresented, not only in cognitive-linguistic approaches, but also in film-theoretical accounts. Though Eisenstein and Deleuze refer their remarks to metaphor in particular, they can be conceived of as likewise being applicable to metonymy. In their understanding, figurativity as a fixed product of a translation to audiovisual representation is abandoned and gains processual nature as a becoming that is nowhere contained objectively but occurs and unfolds in the circuit between viewer and film. In this respect, Eisenstein and Deleuze account for the temporal dynamics of audiovisual figurativity (and audiovisual movement-images in general).

Their dynamic perspective involves conceiving of the perceptual experience of audiovisual images as an affecting process that takes place on the part of the spectator in the process of film-viewing, and they relate this affective dimension to metaphor. Among other things, Deleuze underlines that he considers affective and cognitive processes to be at work in metaphor in equal measure. Thereby, he is consistent with Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980) definition of an interplay of “experiencing and understanding” that cognitive metaphor theories often modified in terms of prioritizing understanding towards experiencing. Moreover, Eisenstein and Deleuze put forward a very specific take on affectivity that arises from the concrete experience of audiovisual movement-images and on the part of the viewer. Such a conception contrasts with the idea of cognitively stored disembodied emotional schemata as held especially by cognitive theories of metaphor and metonymy and is rather in line with Johnson’s embodied account of “felt qualities of meaning” (2007, 17). As such, Eisenstein’s and Deleuze’s ideas provide the interface for film-theoretical perspectives (on figurativity) that focus on the aspect of meaning-making through embodied affective experience and will be the subject of the following section.

4.4Double Vision and Cinematic Expressivity: Figurativity and Embodied Experience

The interplay of affective and cognitive processes in audiovisual figurativity brought up by Eisenstein and explicitly emphasized by Deleuze is based on the conception of audiovisual images as movement-images that – in their temporal unfolding in the process of film-viewing – are realized as subjective bodily sensations on the part of the viewers. In this regard, the aspect of affectivity in audiovisual images and its role for the emergence of meaning come into play from a film-theoretical perspective. The question regarding the link between affective and meaning-making processes provides an interface for audiovisual figurativity in particular and meaning construction in audiovisual media in general:

If metaphor links two different realms of experience, then the processes of forming metaphors should open up a way to access the processes of fictionalization as arrangements of film experiences, which spectators concretely traverse in the process of seeing and hearing. (Kappelhoff and Greifenstein 2016, 184)

The approaches that are to be introduced and discussed in the following are consistent with the dynamic approach to audiovisual figurativity proposed in this book in that they conceive of meaning to emerge through the interplay of various expressive modalities, unfolding as a temporal process whose expressive qualities are perceived and embodied. Even though these approaches may not always refer explicitly to figurativity itself, they nevertheless apply to it by their idea of a strong intertwining of sensuousness and meaningfulness, experiencing and understanding.

The starting point is the stronger orientation of film and media studies towards research regarding emotion and embodied cognition over the last years. The central question is, among others, which kind of interrelation exists between the affective impact of audiovisual media and the representations or contents emerging in the process of viewing. What thereby comes into view is an actively involved spectator who constructs meaning on the spot, i.e., in the very encounter with audiovisual images. Cognitively informed approaches link such a ‘poiesis of film-viewing’ (Müller and Kappelhoff 2018) first and foremost to universal schemata of everyday perception, neuronal operation processes, and causal-logical conjunctions in terms of stimulus-response patterns (Kappelhoff and Greifenstein, 185–186). In contrast, embodiment and immersion approaches suggest a physiological sensation of audiovisual images that becomes manifest as viewers’ concrete bodily experience and thereby only gives rise to meaningfully arranged audiovisual representations.

The cinema and media theorist Vivian Sobchack (1990, 1992, 2004) advocates such an embodied approach to meaning-making in audiovisual media. She, too, highlights the dynamics of the audiovisual image that Eisenstein (1982) has touched upon in his montage theory and that Deleuze (2008) elaborates on with his notion of the movement-image. Clearly distinguishing the difference between the mechanic conditions for the emergence of a movement impression from the integral dynamic experience of cinematic movement, she stresses: “The always presently inscribing and intentionally mobile cinema […] can never only objectively or transcendentally Be for us – because it is also always subjectively and existentially Becoming before us.” (Sobchack 1990, 24) In order to clarify this process of constant becoming that unfolds between viewers and film, Sobchack makes extensive reference to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception ([1945] 1962). When she refers to the process of film-viewing as the “dialectics of double vision” (Sobchack 1990), she is adopting his idea of the bodily here-and-now situatedness within the world and transfers it to cinema. Merleau-Ponty’s conception turns explicitly against a solipsistic, logical, and disembodied idea of meaning-making. Instead he proceeds from the assumption that human beings are always related to their environment in a bodily manner and that therefore making (literally) sense of the world precedes higher-order cognition and logic.

Applied to the process of film-viewing, this means that the spectator’s perceptual experience is related to and intimately linked to cinematic movement, i.e., the temporal unfolding of audiovisual images. That is to say, in the moment of watching a film the spectator is not considered a passively receiving subject, separated from the film object. Instead, Sobchack attributes a body both to film68 and to the spectator and defines the process of film-viewing as their intersubjective and intercorporeal encounter from which meaning emerges. According to her, film articulates a specific view and sense of the world that becomes bodily real for the viewer as if it were his or her own experience69:

We can see the visible and objective body of another who is looking at the world or ourselves, and understand that objective body as also a body-subject – whose sight is as intentional and meaningful as our own. What is so unique about the cinema’s “viewing view,” however, is that it presents and represents the activity of vision not merely as it is objectively seen by us, but also as it is introceptively lived by another. (Sobchack 1990, 25)

It is this dialectics of film experience that Sobchack is alluding to when she writes: “Watching a film, we can see the seeing as well as the seen, hear the hearing as well as the heard, and feel the movements as well as see the moved.” (1992, 10) This dialectics that she has above formulated characteristically as conflation of seeing and understanding provides a parallel to figurative meaning-making70: in the sensation of a world “as immediate experience mediated by an ‘other’” (Sobchack 1992, 10), in cinema’s foreign view that is experienced as if it were one’s own, resides the essence of metaphor described by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 5) as seeing something as if it were something else (cf. Kappelhoff and Greifenstein 2016, 188). Note that Sobchack’s conception of embodied experience differs fundamentally from the cognitive understanding of embodiment as pre-existing mentally stored perceptual schemata and experiential patterns. The concrete bodily conflation of two distinct sensations that Sobchack is referring to is the emergent outcome of a dynamic process of double vision, no schema that is being processed as a result of recognition and cognitive understanding. That is to say, Sobchack puts experiencing first, i.e., before understanding, as did Merleau-Ponty. Such a grounding of meaning-making in bodily experience is in accord with Müller’s (2008a, 2011) dynamic view on metaphor and the dynamic approach to audiovisual figurativity proposed in this book.

Other exponents of a dynamic and embodied account of meaning-making in film (e.g., Barker 2009, Marks 2000, Voss 2011) follow Sobchack’s line of argument and extend it theoretically and analytically. In this light, Hermann Kappelhoff’s (2004) concept of expressive movement is of particular relevance as it addresses the embodied perception and intersubjectivity of cinematic movement in greater detail. Starting from a cultural historical perspective, he has extensively examined and developed it for the theoretical and analytical description of film experience. In brief, he traces expressive movement back to the melodrama of the late eigthteenth century, to classical film-theoretical accounts (Balázs [1924] 2010, Eisenstein 1982, Münsterberg [1916] 2002), to psychological, linguistic, and anthropological theories, and to concepts from philosophical aesthetics and the theory of arts (e.g., Bühler 1933, Plessner [1941] 1970, Simmel 1995). According to Kappelhoff, what all of these share is the idea of the close interrelation of movement perception and affective experience. As he suggests, aesthetic and acting theories of the eigthteenth century have initially attributed this interplay to the actors and their expressive bodily behavior: through facial expression, gesture, and body movements of the actors on the stage spectators were considered to be moved affectively (Kappelhoff 2004, 63–83; see also Greifenstein and Kappelhoff 2014). Hence, this affective quality does not inhere in the characters or in the plot presented on stage but in the becoming visible of sentiments, moods, and atmospheres in the movements of the actors. By the rational aesthetic construction and performance of actors’ movements along with the visualization of affect in the act of perception, the audience becomes bodily addressed and reacts with real tears (Kappelhoff 2004, 63–83).

As Kappelhoff demonstrates, classical film theory later on applies the concept of expressive movement also to the aesthetic composition of film scenes. Compared to the human being in everyday life, Hugo Münsterberg underlines that film has extensive possibilities of emotionalizing beyond the body: “While the human individual […] has hardly any other means than the bodily expressions to show his emotions and moods”, film disposes of the “additional expression of the feeling through the medium of the surrounding scene, through background and setting, through lines and forms and movements” (Münsterberg 2002, 102, 103). As a result, expressive movement encompasses not only “dynamics of obvious movement (e.g., movement of actors and objects on screen, camera movement)” but also “more complex forms of transformation (e.g., lighting, rhythmic arrangements of shot lengths, acoustics)” (Bakels 2014, 2052). Both are conceived of as aesthetic means that “aim at shaping the feelings of a heterogeneous and anonymous audience” (Bakels 2014, 2051).

On that extensive historical basis, Kappelhoff (2004) makes the process of embodied experience in film-viewing that Sobchack refers to theoretically and analytically graspable and useable through the concept of cinematic expressive movement. Through his conception of the perceptual experience as a dimension of cinematographic or cinematic movement that unfolds temporally he takes an aspect into account to which Sobchack has been paying little attention: time. She indeed has underlined the dynamics of cinematic movement as being inherent to the medium of film, but does not follow up on this idea with regard to the aspect of time. However, it is through and within the temporal unfolding that cinematic expressive movement and the affective experience of viewers take shape. Drawing on Bela Balázs, who already in 1924 had pointed to the link between affective experience and the experience of the temporal structure of the cinematic image, Kappelhoff explains: “Only in the film image, do the movements […] become the entirety of an expressive movement” which in turn “refers to the time in which the transformations of the cinematic image structure the unfolding perceptive sensations on the part of the spectator” (Kappelhoff and Müller 2011, 136).

Although in Kappelhoff’s (2004) concept of cinematic expressive movement there is no explicit mention of figurative meaning-making, it nevertheless displays fundamental points of contact. It does not conceive of the audiovisual image as a represented world of objects but first and foremost as a medial staging and structuring of a specific perceptual experience. That is to say, it considers embodied affective experience as the basis for the emergence of meaning in film. It thus shows clear references to Deleuze’s and Eisenstein’s dynamic understanding of figurativity in film and its inherent interplay of affective and cognitive processes. At the same time, the dynamic and embodied conception of meaning-making corresponds to cognitive-linguistic dynamic views on metaphor as proposed by Müller (2008a, 2008b, 2011, Müller and Tag 2010) and Cameron (2007, 2010, 2011). With its strong focus on embodied experience as the basis for meaning constitution, the concept of cinematic expressive movement conveys what Lakoff and Johnson (1980) have defined as the essence of metaphor: experiencing and understanding one thing literally in the sense of something else.

In this regard, the embodied film-theoretical approaches that have been discussed in this section align with the conception of multimodal figurativity as it was previously developed (see Chapters 1 and 3). The developed relevance of the temporal dynamics, processual emergence, and embodied grounding of figurative meaning-making finds a fruitful correspondence in the concept of cinematic expressive movement (Kappelhoff 2004) in order to be applied to the analysis of audiovisual figurativity. As a result, the process of the audiovisual activation and making present of metaphorical and metonymical experiential realms in its temporal unfolding is conceived of as inhering affective qualities that are bodily experienced by viewers. This combined way of thinking seems especially interesting with regard to political campaign commercials as with their short-term and persuasive character, they aim at the highest possible degree of intelligibility, appeal, and addressability.

4.5Conclusion

The systematic overview of film-theoretical perspectives on figurativity has shown that the impact of media-specific properties on figurativity as postulated by Charles Forceville (2009a) is – similar to cognitive linguistics – only marginally taken into consideration in film and media studies. The audiovisual image is considered either language-like as an utterance or picture-like as a sequence of static images from which figurativity can be objectively extracted in terms of single elements. Film appears no better than a communication tool of a filmmaker in order to convey particular ways of seeing and thinking or effects to the recipient. For this purpose, figurativity seems to be an appropriate stylistic device that – if properly implemented by the filmmaker, and correctly recognized and deciphered by the spectator – can have an extensive intellectual and affective impact. Hence, also from a film-theoretical perspective, metaphor and metonymy remain static meaningful entities in a filmmaker’s hands. That way, dynamic aspects of figurative meaning-making are not considered in the first place: neither its temporal and multimodal unfolding, nor the involvement of the viewer and his or her situatedness in the context of film experience are taken into account.

In semiotic and rhetorical accounts, metaphor and metonymy are conceived of as general principles of figuration in film (Metz 1982, Mitry 2000) or as rhetorical devices serving a film’s elocution (Clifton 1983, Kanzog 2001) whereby they are extended in such a way or associated with other stylistic devices that they lose their specificity. As such, they appear as stylistic elements of persuasive communication at the filmmaker’s disposal in order to convey his own perspective or particular idea of an issue to the spectators. As a result, figurativity in audiovisual media is recurrently located on the level of representation; a conception that persists in approaches based on cognitive and linguistic theories of metaphor and metonymy (such as Carroll 1996, 2011, Coëgnarts and Kravanja 2012, 2014, Fahlenbrach 2010, 2016). Respective accounts rather disregard metonymy and focus mainly on audiovisually contained metaphor, which they consider either as an intentional artistic occurrence of a filmmaking sender or as an audiovisual instantiation of universal cognitive schemata. Thereby, figurativity serves as a fixed message of a producer in a unilateral communication process, in which the passive role of the spectator consists in decoding a pre-existent meaning contained in audiovisual images.

A crucial change in perspective was found in classical film theory, in particular in Eisenstein’s theory of montage (1982) and in Deleuze’s (2008) philosophical and image-theoretical reflections on the movement-image. Both conceptions of figurativity exceed mere audiovisual representation and focus especially on the temporal dynamics of the cinematic image, which they relate to the spectator’s experience. As such, figurative meaning-making is considered a process that arises from the experience of two images’ mutual relatedness in terms of movement instead of being objectively contained in the audiovisual image. In this experience of the figurative “juxtaposition of facts” (Eisenstein 1951b), affective and cognitive processes intertwine, and figurative meaning emerges through the concrete perceptual experience in the circuit between spectator and film.

Phenomenologically-informed approaches (e.g., Barker 2009, Sobchack 1992, 2004) have elaborated this aspect in greater detail, however not explicitly in relation to figurativity. In the experience of audiovisual movement-images they consider cinematic expression, perception, and affective experience as being interrelated and therein the basis for viewers’ meaning-making. The idea of making present and developing a sense of something foreign through one’s own body (i.e., as if it were one’s own) in the act of perceptual experience is a bridge leading to figurative meaning-making. The concept of cinematic expressive movement (Kappelhoff 2004; see also Kappelhoff and Bakels 2011) makes this process of the embodiment of meaning graspable as a movement dimension that orchestrates the perception of spectators.

By bringing together multimodal figurativity and audiovisual compositions through this film-analytical approach and the cognitive-linguistic dynamic view of multimodal metaphor (Müller 2008a, 2008b; Müller and Tag 2010), the activation and concretization of metaphorical and metonymical experiential realms becomes reconstructable in its affective grounding and processual emergence. The theoretical and practical implications of such a transdisciplinary approach (Kappelhoff and Müller 2011, Müller and Kappelhoff 2018, Scherer, Greifenstein, and Kappelhoff 2014) will be developed in greater detail in the following chapter.