Online Construction of Multimodal Metaphors In Murnau’s Movie Faust (1926)

ABSTRACT

This study explores multimodal metaphors and metonymies in Faust, a German Expressionist silent fiction movie by Murnau (1926). The article combines principles of psychocinematics, an interdisciplinary scientific field of enquiry, with the multimodal metaphor and expressive movement model, which looks into the temporal dynamics of metaphoric meaning-making by movie watchers. It is shown that interrelating both film-analytic approaches provides a deeper and more comprehensive insight into how figurative thought influences psycho-cognitive processes in the moviegoer’s mind as they dynamically unfold in their cinematic contexts. Evidence is provided that Kappelhoff and co-workers’ proposal can be complemented and enriched by psychocinematics findings on the allocation of visual attention and eye fixation, motion and image frame sensing, and mental activity underlying emotional and diagetic experiences.

Funding

This study was carried out within the framework of the research projects FF2014-52740-P (Cognitive and Neurological bases for Terminology-Enhanced Translation (CONTENT) and FFI2014-51899-R (Combinatory Lexis in Medicine: Cognition, Text and Context). Both projects are funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.

Notes

¹ A full English-language version of the film is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Flnxq2HMOqA

² See Brunick et al. (2013) for the rest of LLFs documented by PC.

³ The fourth horseman of the Apocalypse is Conquest, depicted as a rider holding a bow and arrow on a white horse. We can only speculate on the motivation for his absence in the scene. One hypothesis is that including the four horsemen in the frame would have required a significantly wider shot, which would have reduced the tension-increasing effect of a close-up shot of these characters. In addition, a wider shot would prevent the viewer from distinguishing physical details central to recognizing the identity of each horseman on the screen. Conquest might have been eliminated since he is less directly related to misery and fatality than Famine, Death, and War.

⁴ See Mounce (1998) for a detailed review and commentaries of this book.

⁵ For practical purposes, I am referring to motion as a subtype of movement that entails moving through space. Accordingly, one may be moving in place with no implication of motion (e.g., when shivering out of cold or moving one’s head to a song). By the same token, stationariness should be understood here based on the dictionary sense “remaining in place,” which is compatible with moving in place (see examples above), but incompatible with motion.

Additional information

Funding

This study was carried out within the framework of the research projects FF2014-52740-P (Cognitive and Neurological bases for Terminology-Enhanced Translation (CONTENT) and FFI2014-51899-R (Combinatory Lexis in Medicine: Cognition, Text and Context). Both projects are funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness.