Projections Volume 14, Issue 2, Summer 2020: 26–47 © Berghahn Books doi: 10:3167/proj.2020.140203 ISSN 1934-9688 (Print), ISSN 1934-9696 (Online) How Motion Shapes Thought in Cinema The Embodied Film Style of Éric Rohmer Maarten Coëgnarts Abstract: This article provides an embodied study of the film style of the French filmmaker Éric Rohmer. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, I first show how dynamic patterns of containment shape human thinking about relationships, a concept central to Rohmer’s cinema. Second, I consider the question of how film might elicit this spatial thinking through the use of such cinematic devices as mobile framing and fixed-frame movement. Third, using Rohmer’s Comedies and Proverbs series as a case study, I demonstrate how the filmmaker applies these devices—and with them the spatial think- ing they initiate—systemically to shape the relationships of his films visually. Lastly, I use the results of this analysis to provide discussion and suggestions for future research. Keywords: camera movement, embodied cognition, film style, image schemas, metaphor, visual meaning Embodied cognition is one of the foremost areas of research in cognitive sci- ence today (Shapiro 2014). Central to this premise is the idea that the mind is embedded in the body. People’s subjective and felt experiences with the physical and cultural world provide part of the fundamental basis of human cognition (e.g., Gibbs 2005; Lakoff and Johnson 1999). As the blurb of Barbara Tversky’s new book tells us, “movement, not language, is the foundation of thought” (Tversky 2019). This turn to second-generation cognitive science has led various film scholars to expand our traditional notions of film aesthetics and film spectatorship (e.g., Coëgnarts and Kravanja 2015; Gallese and Guerra 2019; Grodal 2009; Fahlenbrach 2016; Fingerhut and Heimann 2017; Hven 2017; and Kiss and Willemsen 2017). One specific point of concern has been the ex- tent to which film style is embodied. From the creative side, there are those who draw heavily on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s (1980, 1999) theory of embodied metaphors to redefine the meaning-making processes in film,