ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an account of audiovisual metaphors in movies, which helps to explain how complex cultural and narrative meanings are associated with bodily based audiovisual Gestalts. Grounded on conceptual metaphor theory, it shows how sound design gives narrative meanings spatial Gestalts. The chapter provides four in-depth case studies that demonstrate the metaphorical creation of sonic spaces in film drama and their embodied dimension in narrative discourses. It focuses on some general aspects of embodied meanings in filmic spaces that are generated in the interaction of moving pictures and sounds. The chapter also outlines the composition of filmic spaces basically recurs on mental principles of spatial perception that imply innate, Gestalt-based meanings. A relevant topic in social drama that is recurrently displayed by generating metaphoric audiovisual spaces refers to identity crisis, caused by biographical traumata and psychological crisis, displayed in social drama and in psycho-drama.
