What is it about?
The paper presents, discusses, and categorizes examples from work by the students in my 2024-2025 MA research seminar "Metaphor and Film" in the Media Studies department of University of Amsterdam. These examples come from two genres: commercials and feature films: The paper contains a substantial number of screenshots and many links to the commercials and film scenes discussed. The titles of the paper’s paragraphs are: 1 Introduction; 2 Examples of hybrid metaphor, pictorial simile, and contextual metaphor in film; 3 Monomodal and multimodal metaphor; 4 Orientational and structural metaphor in film; 5 “Metaphor in absentia,” allegory; 6 Must or can we construe a metaphor?; 7 The pervasiveness of the JOURNEY metaphor; 8 Avenues for further research. For the full paper, see https://journals.umcs.pl/lsmll/issue/view/899 or the "Read" link below. #film; #metaphorinfilm #visualmetaphor #multimodalmetaphor #metaphortheory
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Why is it important?
While there are now several competing models for identifying and interpreting metaphor in film (including my own), what is called for now is many case studies. Given that cinematic metaphor is still a young branch of both metaphor studies and film studies, the robustness of the models must be tested by confronting them with specific instances of (supposedly) filmic metaphor.
Perspectives
This is surely academia functioning at its best: a scholar who is an expert on a specific topic, field, or theory gives a seminar about it; the students learn the basics of the topic, field, or theory; they write an assignment/essay/thesis in which they apply the learned insights to new discourses and data; the scholar who was in charge of the seminar gains new insights; and the result in this case even leads to a publication that enriches the academic discipline. In short, this process reflects the ideal cross-fertilization between the two core tasks of academia: teaching and research.
Dr Charles Forceville
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Metaphor in Film: Examples and Insights from Students’ Work, Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature, December 2025, Wydawnictwo Uniwersyteu Marii Curi-Sklodowskiej w Lublinie,
DOI: 10.17951/lsmll.2025.49.4.35-51.
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