Shaping Films from the Inside Out: Embodied Mental Schemas in Filmmaking and Viewing

This article aims to highlight the role of embodied mental representations or embodied schemas in both perception and filmmaking/viewing by foregrounding three premises: (1) perception is inferential and relies on prior embodied schemas; (2) filmmakers (authors) do not merely reproduce reality but equally impose body-based schemas onto the parts of a film in order to convey meanings; and (3) these schemas, as presented by the formal design of the work, may enrich the viewers’ experience by allowing them a privileged look into the embodied creative-thinking processes of filmmakers. It will be argued that viewers are prompted to peek into these processes because the representational embodied concepts, as cued by the films, are grounded in shared sensory-motor capacities that scaffold all abstract thinking and reasoning.