Audio-visual metaphors of the financial crisis: meaning making and the flow of experience

Abstract

This paper advocates a perspective on metaphors in audio-visual media that conceives of these as processes of meaning making, i.e., as dynamic embodied conceptualizations, constitutively bound to the flow of experience. This involves experience in a double sense: as immediate affection through an audio-visually orchestrated form of movement experience and as sensory-motor experiences of metaphoric source domains. Drawing on an interdisciplinary (linguistic and film analysis) method, this study presents an analysis of a German political TV report on winners and losers of the financial crisis. The goal of this case study is twofold: to reconstruct the complexity of metaphoric meaning making in audio-visual media and to illustrate a theoretical claim: that metaphors in audio-visual compositions emerge dynamically from sensory and affective experiences.

Keywords

• audio-visual metaphor
• cinematic expressive movement
• dynamics of metaphor
• meaning making
• metaphor and experience
• metaphoric theme
• emergence of metaphor