Seeing yourself in the past: The role of situational (dis)continuity and conceptual metaphor in the understanding of complex cases of character perception

Abstract

This article examines the role of situational (dis)continuity and conceptual metaphor in the cinematic construal of complex cases of character perception. It claims that filmed events of the script "a character S seeing something O" can impede the continuity of real-life perception by eliciting discontinuity along two situational dimensions-the temporal dimension (i.e., one cannot directly see events in the past or the future), and the entity dimension (i.e., one cannot see oneself in the act of looking). The article concludes with a case study of Christopher Smith's Triangle (2009) as an example of contemporary complex narrative cinema.