Metaphor meets narrative

Abstract

Prevalent cognitive readings of narrative in film have generally described it as a causal-logical re-organization of audiovisually represented agents, actions and spaces that is achieved through mental processing. Suggesting that such a perspective fundamentally disregards the media mode of perception that distinguishes film-viewing from other media experiences, the chapter proposes an alternative view. It presents an analysis of a TV news feature in order to demonstrate that metaphor and film share a coupling of two distinct realms of experience that provides the grounds for a fictional world and a narrative to emerge. The chapter concludes with an understanding of narrative as a dynamic embodied process of “narrativizing” instead of a product being reconstructed from given representations.