ABSTRACT
Film music taps into audience members’ personal associations, embedding subtextual commentary that elicits uniquely individualized readings of scenes and entire films. This chapter delves into the network of musical, (con)textual, and personal associations that shape interpretations of film scenes. It highlights how the cultural baggage carried by the music or the explicit/implicit clues in lyrics contribute to understanding a film. Drawing from cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics, this chapter adopts Fauconnier & Turner’s Conceptual Blending model to explore the cognitive processes underlying the projection of meanings between music and other cinematic dimensions, unveiling the cinematic mechanisms that provide the subtextual depth that prompts hermeneutic readings.
