Maarten Coëgnarts

With the Past in Front of the Character: Evidence for Spatial-Temporal Metaphors in Cinema

Cognitive research on Ego-Reference-Point models of time in English traditionally shows that “FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO” and “PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO.” Recently, however, this view has been challenged by other results, showing that there exists a major static model of time wherein “FUTURE IS IN BACK OF EGO” and “PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO.” However, evidence for both conceptual systems comes predominantly from linguistic and gestural forms of expression. For instance, convincing empirical evidence coming from the manifestation mode of cinema is still lacking. This article attempts to fill this gap by bringing the discussion of temporal metaphors to the foreground of character subjectivity in film. Using concise case-studies taken from various films, this study provides evidence that a majority of flashback scenes seem to base their conceptions of time on a static Ego-Reference-Point model in which the past appears to be in front of the character’s eyes on screen.

Perceiving emotional causality in film: a conceptual and formal analysis

Abstract This article investigates the conceptual and formal ways in which the cinematic mode of expression prompts the viewer to perceive emotional causality in film, namely the percept that the viewer sees that the character’s perception of an outer event is the cause of an emotional state in the character. The structure of our paper is twofold. The first section is theoretical and centres around the answerability of four main questions: What is emotional causality? How do we conceptualise it? How do we perceive it? And how do we perceive it in the filmic form? Explanations will be mainly drawn from three different intellectual disciplines: cognitive linguistics, experimental psychology and the philosophy of mind. The second section is practical and aims to show how the proposed theoretical model can be applied by considering its use for the analysis of what has been described by many as the prototypical genre of intense emotions, namely the melodrama genre. Using a scene from Douglas Sirk’s All that Heaven Allows as an example, we show how film, through its formal articulation of various conceptual mechanisms, stimulates the viewer to infer a causal relationship between (1) the character’s visual experience and (2) the character’s emotional state.