A Perspective on Visual Metaphor in Documentary Film

Abstract This study explores more aspects of visual metaphor. In the beginning, we wanted to show how linguistic metaphor created a link to visual metaphor. Then, for a better understanding, we talked about the composition of image, the visual rhetoric effects on audience and about the cinema language and its characteristics. We consider that visual metaphor can be analysed in visual products by decoding, to understand the author’s intention, but new meanings can also be created by the audience. In the examples we gave, we identified creative, plastic and ideological metaphors that showed a strong impact through their construction. Visual metaphor is a trope with great possibilities of expression and meaning, in new cinematic forms.