ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that meaning in films is often created by metaphorical allusions using the leitmotif technique. There is a long tradition of employing leitmotifs in film music in order to support and anticipate meaning on a subliminal level as well as mirroring the changes and developments of the characters and their relationship to each other. Apart from film music supporting visual images, visual techniques may also support perceptions of musical structure. Composers of film music, such as Howard Shore in The Lord of the Rings, typically employed this technique in order to achieve identification with the main characters and ideas and to establish a sense of embodied meaning. Embodied approaches, on the contrary, lay stress on the mediation processes of our bodies in perceptual processes that are seen as interactions between the body and the environment. Traditional cognitivist concepts postulated a sensory response mechanism, in which auditory events are presented in one mind as if people had no bodies.
