Abstract
Film viewers make sense of films first of all at a precognitive level, triggered by their bodily responses. The key notion here is movement: the movements of screen characters, the movements simulated by the viewers who perceive these characters, and the camera movements that mediate between the two. This review essay evaluates two monographs: Maarten Coëgnarts’ Embodied Cinema (2019), which expands conceptual metaphor theory to account for film’s unique affordances to communicate embodied meaning; and Vittorio Gallese's 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 by discussing how these two books tie in with other developments in the study of gene-culture coevolution.
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