Watching Film with One's Body [Review of: M. Coëgnarts (2019) Film as Embodied Art: Bodily Meaning in the Cinema of Stanley Kubrick; V. Gallese, M. Guerra (2019) The Empathic Screen: Cinema and Neuroscience]

Film viewers make sense of films first of all at a pre-cognitive level, triggered by their bodily responses. The key notion here is movement – the movements of screen-characters; the movements simulated by the viewers who watch and hear these characters; and the camera movements that mediate between the two. This essay review evaluates two monographs: Maarten Coëgnarts’ Embodied Cinema (2019), which expands conceptual metaphor theory to account for film’s unique affordances for communicating embodied meaning; and Vittorio Gallese and Michele Guerra’s The Empathic Screen (2019), which buttresses embodied simulation by film viewers experimentally by demonstrating the workings of “mirror neurons.” The review ends with proposals for how the findings in the two books under review tie in with other developments in charting gene-culture co-evolution.