Based on the premise that a society’s sense of commonality depends upon media practices, this study examines how Hollywood responded to the crisis of democracy during the Second World War by creating a new genre - the war　film. Developing an affective theory of genre cinema, the study’s focus on the sense of commonality offers a new characterization of the relationship between politics and poetics. It shows how the diverse ramifications of genre poetics can be explored as a network of experiental modalities that make history graspable as a continuous process of delineating the limits of...

Metaphors in audiovisual media receive increasing attention from film and communication studies as well as from linguistics and multimodal metaphor research. The specific media character of film, and thus of cinematic metaphor, remains, however, largely ignored. Audiovisual images are all too frequently understood as iconic representations and material carriers of information. Cinematic Metaphor proposes an alternative: starting from film images as affective experience of movement-images, it replaces the cognitive idea of viewers as information-processing machines, and heals the break with...