After Eileen Rositzka’s book, Cinematic Corpographies, the English Cinepoetics book series has expanded by multiple titles this fall. Our work on the first research focus, Metaphor - Film Images, Cinematic Thinking, and Cognition, inspired three of the series’ new publications.

Cornelia Müller and Hermann Kappelhoff’s two-volume publication sheds light on the concept of ‘cinematic metaphor.’ Building on phenomenological positions on embodied perception, Müller and Kappelhoff explore this concept in Cinematic Metaphor. Experience – Affectivity – Temporality with multiple examples of American and German cinema, TV news extracts or even Tango lessons. In doing so, they elaborate a critique of cognitivistic theories on film and metaphor while establishing a more dynamic approach that focuses on the viewer’s affect and the temporality inherent in the medium.

The second volume on ‘cinematic metaphor’, co-edited by Sarah Greifenstein, Dorothea Horst, Thomas Scherer, and Christina Schmitt, invites related fields of study to further define this concept. Cinematic Metaphor in Perspective. Reflections on a Transdisciplinary Framework assembles manifold positions by fellows and associated researchers of Cinepoetics, each an expert in their field. The volume contains contributions by Lynne Cameron and Alan Cienki (applied and cognitive linguistics), Kathrin Fahlenbrach and Michael Wedel (media studies and media history), Anne Eusterschulte (philosophy) and Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. (psychology).

Dorothea Horst’s comprehensive study Meaning Making and Political Campaign Advertising focuses on German and Polish election campaigns between 2009 and 2011 from a perspective that combines cognitive-linguistic research with film aesthetics. In detailed analytical studies, she overcomes the supposed separation between rational (verbal) discourse and embodied cognition that is still proclaimed to a great extent in research on metaphor and metonymy.

Also, two additional volumes have been added to the German Cinepoetics book series this fall: With Kognition und Reflexion. Zur Theorie filmischen Denkens, Hermann Kappelhoff presents a seminal study on the discourse of audiovisual movement images. Since seeing, hearing, and feeling are a question of media use, one has to analyze them as cultural practices to understand how spectators use their subjective reality of perception as part of a commonly shared world. Kappelhoff focuses on the thinking of cinematic images that introduces new differences and modalities to this reality.

Moreover, Cinepoetics explores the cinema of the year 1968 in an encompassing anthology, co-edited by Christine Lötscher and Daniel Illger. As a point of culmination for heterogeneous cultural, social, and political phenomena, this year offers an interesting opportunity for applying the research perspective of Cinepoetics. Contributions to Filmische Seitenblicke. Cinepoetische Exkursionen ins Kino von 1968 include texts by our directors, Hermann Kappelhoff and Michael Wedel, and 19 further essays by researchers, fellows or close colleagues of Cinepoetics.