On the Embodiment of Binary Oppositions in Cinema: The Containment Schema in John Ford's Westerns

摘要

This paper analyses how abstract binary oppositions such as civilisation vs. wilderness or the community vs. the individual are communicated visually in some of John Ford’s Westerns. Borrowing insights from image schema research, we claim that these abstract concepts and themes are given form in individual films by way of the metaphorical expansion of spatial schemas, and in particular through the containment schema. This schema, which will be analysed as a dynamic pattern of our sensory-motor experience, is considered to be an universal spatialised structure for expressing higher order oppositional thinking. Using Westerns of John Ford as an example we make the case that the containment schema plays a constructive role in the development of conceptual relations in the Western genre.