In their pioneering monograph Lakoff and Johnson (L&J) state that “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing [= target domain] in terms of another [= source domain]” (1980: 5). They thereby show that a metaphor is not just a nice trope to spice up a speech or aestheticize a poem; it is no less than a cornerstone of human cognition. They demonstrate that human beings can only handle abstract and complex phenomena by systematically metaphorizing them in terms of concrete, better understood phenomena. Phenomena that are perceptible (= seen, heard, felt, tasted, smelled) fulfill the role of “better understood phenomena,” and thus typically function as source domains to help structure and give a perspective on abstract and/or complex target domains. Moreover, L&J’s work reveals that a relatively small number of source domains are used over and over again to conceptualize a wide variety of target domains. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) was born.

An often cited example is ARGUMENT IS WAR, as surfacing in expressions such as “you disagree with me? OK, shoot!,” “there was no defense against his persuasive attacks,” and “I surrender to your reasoning. In CMT, it has become customary to present the underlying, conceptual level of a metaphor using a small-capital [TARGET] A IS [SOURCE] B formula. But since what matters is which actions and events are suggested by a metaphor, A-ING IS B-ING would actually be more appropriate.

CMT typically studies verbal manifestations of metaphorical thinking. In the 1990s, scholars in visual communication and film began to take seriously the central claim of CMT: if we think metaphorically, this should transpire not just in language, but also in non-verbal and multimodal media, such as film. Of course, the medium is the message (McLuhan), so applying CMT to moving images required finetuning its insights to the possibilities and constraints of this medium. For one thing, although film has structure, it has no grammar or vocabulary in the linguistic sense, so the metaphorical “IS” must in a film be realized by different means than in verbal texts.

Since “movement” is a quintessential feature of film, it is not surprising that the metaphor whose technical formulation is ACHIEVING A GOAL IS SELF-PROPELLED MOTION TOWARD A DESTINATION was arguably the first conceptual metaphor to be studied in film (e.g., Forceville & Jeulink 2011) – and is particularly productive in the “road movie.” Road movies depict a literal journey, but deploy that journey metaphorically to thematize a quest, say, resolving a problem, realizing an ambition, or coming to terms with a trauma (Figure 1/ video).

No less crucial for the medium film is that it requires light – for the simple reason that without it the viewer can see nothing. The concept LIGHT, too, is often used metaphorically: GOOD IS LIGHT while BAD IS DARK (Forceville & Renckens 2013). Top-down orientations in film also frequently function both literally and metaphorically: GOOD IS UP and BAD IS DOWN (Winter 2014; Stommels 2025).

Important contributions to showing how conceptual metaphors can be created by cinematic techniques have been made by Maarten Coëgnarts and Maria Ortíz. Coëgnarts (2019) demonstrates how the fact that what a character in a film (and the viewer of that film) knows is conveyed by what is physically IN the film frame, giving rise to, say, KNOWLEDGE IS CONTENTS OF FILM FRAME. Ortiz (2011, 2023) shows how film angles, mise-en-scène, framing, and editing enable metaphors such as ALIENATION/LACK OF INTIMACY IS DISTANCE. Insightful collections on metaphor in film are Coëgnarts and Kravanja (2015) and Fahlenbrach (2016). Almost all of this work focuses on fiction films.

Metaphors are extremely powerful instruments to present standpoints on specific things, themes, and ideas (= target domains) by the choice of source domain. Metaphors therefore inevitably “frame” their targets in ways that have ethical and ideological dimensions. It is thus important to also study how metaphors can help structure arguments and perspectives in commercials (e.g., Forceville 2008), documentaries (e.g., Forceville 2011) and instruction films (e.g., Gebraad & Forceville 2024).

Discussions about how to identify and interpret metaphors in film are still in full swing (see Forceville 2024). Up till now, the main focus has moreover been on the metaphorical potential of the visual track of the medium, whereas sound and music (and language, of course) can also be used to signal a metaphorical target or source domain, or cue mappable features, making for multimodal metaphors. A promising research question is furthermore whether there are systematic correlations between certain film genres and specific metaphors (e.g., Eggertsson & Forceville 2009, Forceville forthc.).

The focus on the systematically metaphorical nature of our thinking initiated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980) should not make us forget that cinematic metaphors, as those in language, can also be creative (Black 1979). Estelle Bolon analyzes the metaphor BUSINESSMEN EATING HARIBO CANDY ARE CHILDREN, in a commercial (Figure 2/ Video) and Madison Marone discusses a court scene in the film Chicago (Rob Marshall 2002) (Chicago - Tap Dancing Around The Witness) featuring the metaphor INTERROGATING A WITNESS IN COURT IS TAP-DANCING.(Forceville forthc.; see also Forceville 1999, 2016; Coëgnarts & Kravanja 2012).

Research on metaphors in moving images is still in its early stages, and offers a treasure trove of scholarly opportunities and challenges.

References

Black, Max (1979). More about metaphor. In: Andrew Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought (19-43). Cambridge University Press.

Coëgnarts, Maarten, & Peter Kravanja (2012). From thought to modality: A theoretical framework for analysing structural-conceptual metaphor and image metaphor in film. Image [&] Narrative 13(1): 96-113

Coëgnarts, Maarten & Peter Kravanja, eds, (2015). Embodied Cognition and Cinema (17-40).Leuven University Press.

Coëgnarts, Maarten (2019). Film as Embodied Art: Bodily Meaning in the Cinema of Stanley Kubrick. Academic Studies Press.

Eggertsson, Gunnar Theodór, and Charles Forceville (2009). Multimodal expressions of the human victim is animal metaphor in horror films. In: Charles Forceville and Eduardo Urios-Aparisi (eds), Multimodal Metaphor (429-449). Mouton de Gruyter.

Fahlenbrach, Kathrin, ed. (2016), Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games. Routledge.

Forceville, Charles (1999). The metaphor COLIN IS A CHILD in Ian McEwan's, Harold Pinter's, and Paul Schrader's The Comfort of Strangers. Metaphor and Symbol 14: 179-198.

Forceville, Charles (2008). Pictorial and multimodal metaphor in commercials. In: Edward F. McQuarrie and Barbara J. Phillips (eds), Go Figure! New Directions in Advertising Rhetoric(272-310). ME Sharpe.

Forceville, Charles (2011). The Source-Path-Goal schema in Agnès Varda’s Les Glaneurs et la Glaneuse and Deux Ans Après. In: Monika Fludernik (ed.), Beyond Cognitive Metaphor Theory: Perspectives on Literary Metaphor (281-297). Routledge.

Forceville, Charles (2016). Visual and multimodal metaphor in film: Charting the field. In: Kathrin Fahlenbrach (ed.), Embodied Metaphors in Film, Television, and Video Games (17-32). Routledge.

Forceville, Charles (2024). Identifying and interpreting visual and multimodal metaphor in commercials and feature films. Metaphor and Symbol 39(1): 40-54.

Forceville, Charles (forthc. 2025). Metaphor in film: Examples and insights from students’ work. Lublin Studies in Modern Languages and Literature 49 (4).

Forceville, Charles, and Marloes Jeulink (2011). “The flesh and blood of embodied understanding”: The source-path-goal schema in animation film. Pragmatics & Cognition19(1): 37-59. 

Forceville, Charles, and Thijs Renckens (2013). The GOOD IS LIGHT and BAD IS DARK metaphors in feature films. Metaphor and the Social Word 3(2): 160-179.

Gebraad, Nina, and Charles Forceville (2024). Facing cancer: metaphors in medical animation films. Visual Communication Journal. AoP 6-5-2024 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14703572241229061

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. University of Chicago Press.

Ortíz, Maria J. (2011). Primary metaphors and monomodal visual metaphors. Journal of Pragmatics 43: 1568-1580.

Ortíz, Maria J. (2023). Embodied cinematography in Mr. Robot. Baltic Screen Media Review 11: 85-105.

Stommels, Eveline (2025). Verticality: Orientational conceptual metaphors in film. Unpublished MA Thesis. Dept. of Media Studies, Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Winter, Bodo (2014). Horror movies and the cognitive ecology of primary metaphors. Metaphor and Symbol 29: 151-170.