The project aims at developing an interdisciplinary theory of expressive movements as well as a methodology that allows for their reconstruction. It brings together a linguistic take on reconstructing the dynamics of attention and affect through the use of multimodal metaphors in talk (Müller) with a film-analytic model of expressive movements and 'sensory pictures' (Empfindungsbilder) (Kappelhoff).

As far as multimodally expressed metaphors (speech and gesture) in spoken discourse are concerned, we propose that they imply a dynamic activation and construction of cognitive and affective experience and that they constitute specific forms of mundane expressive movements. Regarding the orchestration of multimodal metaphors in film (orchestration of space, image, sound), we assume that they organize a specific form of cinematographic expressive movement, which play a core role in the recipients' dynamically structured orientation of affect.

The project carries out a comparative empirical study of metaphorically organized expressive movements in face-to-face communication, in news and sport reports, in German TV series, in contemporary German Cinema and in Classical Hollywood Cinema (Hitchcock, Film noir). The analysis of forms of multimodal metaphoric orchestration of expressive movements, as well as their distribution over the different types of audiovisually recorded data, serve as point of anchorage for both: the development of a methodology and a theory of expressive movements – a theory which transcends the concept of affect as a symptomatic expression of inner states.