Creating Islands in Film: The Interplay of Location, Mind and Cinema

This article is a comparative study on the representation of islands in cinema and how film viewers make sense of islandscapes by activating cognitive processes and previous knowledge about islands and cinema. I focus on Bergman’s Summer with Monika (1952) and L. Wertmüller’s Swept Away (1974) in order to identify those cognitive processes in films from two different cinematic traditions and times. The concept of island is a domain that includes knowledge about islands, human experiences of islands and dynamic cognitive structures (see Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In this article I integrate those elements to a more comprehensive view of meaning making in cinema that includes several layers. At a cognitive level, image schematic representations can evoke standard metaphors such as island is container or island is support, but additional meanings such as island is paradise and freedom is islandscape emerge. At a discursive level, islands are often situated in the space of the Other versus the Self generally located in the mainland, and this ideological construct is related to a central tenet in the Western worldview: the opposition Nature/Human. Although these films dramatize possible biocentric alternative views such as reinhabitation (Snyder 2013), the dominant anthropocentric worldview is still favored.