Books by Hermann Kappelhoff

The Cinepoetics book series aims at a theoretical and analytical reconceptualization of the discursivity of audiovisual images. The focus is not on the circulation of media representations but on the modes of this circulation: How do audiovisual images as figurations of media experience relate to other audiovisual images? What does it mean to describe different modes of audiovisual experience and recursivity as forms of cinematic thinking? From this perspective, the series' volumes provide analyses of the aesthetic dimension, historical function and cultural significance of their subjects, making the poetic logic of audiovisual images accessible to an interdisciplinary audience.

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 wara 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 community.

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 rhetoric established by conceptual metaphor theory. Subscribing to a phenomenological concept of embodiment, a shared vantage point for metaphorical meaning-making in film-viewing and face-to-face interaction is developed. The book offers a critique of cognitive film and metaphor theories and a theory of cinematic metaphor as performative action of meaning-making, grounded in the dynamics of viewers' embodied experiences with a film. Fine-grained case studies ranging from Hollywood to German feature film and TV news, from tango lesson to electoral campaign commercial, illustrate the framework's application to media and multimodality analysis.